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Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to speak about the so-called SAVE America Act, which I think probably would be better described as the ``Steal the Next Election Act'' because of the purpose that this bill has to throw the election and to throw political influence in America to the Republicans.

You can imagine why they would want to engage in special weapons and tactics to try to win the 2026 election when you see the political disaster that they are enmeshed in: the mess that the Trump administration has made of the economy, the stench of corruption pervading the administration, a war that is running up gasoline prices and has no end in sight and no evident plan. Wherever you look, you see a party in complete disarray with Americans angry, frustrated, and befuddled by the nonsense, and an election coming.

So, of course, they want to change things at the ballot box.

Now, where would you go to test that proposition, that the purpose of this bill is to throw elections to the Republicans? Who might have a view on this that we should listen to?

Oh, right. The President of the United States, the one who has caused the Republicans the political catastrophe that they have looming from the disastrous second term that he has inflicted on this country.

``Republicans have to win this one,'' he said. Get this bill passed is what he is talking about. ``Republicans have to win this one. We'll never lose a race for 50 years.'' That is how much the President thinks this bill will tank American elections in favor of him and his billionaire donors who already have way too much influence in our politics.

He is talking about us here, Democrats, ``we know.'' ``They know if we get this''--if Republicans get this bill--``they probably won't win an election for 50 years, maybe longer.''

This is the President of the United States, the head of the Republican Party, the person most responsible for the mess that Americans are rejecting, and he is being pretty candid about what the purpose of this bill is; it is to throw the election. It is to politically interfere with the coming election so that the Republican Party, and, more importantly, the billionaire backers who are pulling the strings and giving it its direction don't lose, don't see split government, don't see compromise, don't see Congress in the people's hands again.

``Republicans have to win this one,'' he said. ``We'll never lose a race for 50 years.'' And this isn't about political influence with comments like that, from the head of the Republican Party?

You may think he is thinking about some dim and distant future perhaps, that this effort on the floor of the Senate right now to throw the election to the Republican Party isn't immediate.

Whoops. There he goes. ``It will guarantee the midterms.'' The guy says the quiet part out loud. I will give him that.

He tells Republicans: You are going to win the midterms at levels that you can't even believe. How would you win the midterms at levels that you can't even believe? Well, you probably can't believe that you would win the midterms based on current polling as Americans reject the wars, the spending, the waste, the corruption, the cost increases. You can't even believe it, unless you get this bill--unless you are going to get this bill--and then you are going to win every election for a long time.

It is a conceded point by the head of the Republican Party--Donald Trump--the one who has caused this year of disaster, this year of change and disaster--that the whole purpose of the exercise we are going through is to lock in Republican control--more wars, higher costs, worse corruption--by making elections unwinnable for Democrats for 50 years by guaranteeing Republicans the midterms.

So let's not pretend there is some high-and-mighty, civic-minded motivation for this. That is just a screen. Behind the screen, Trump can't help himself. He admitted what this is all about: It will guarantee the midterms. You are going to win the midterms at levels that you can't even believe, and you are going to win every election for a long time.

We'll never lose a race [for] 50 years.

We will ``never lose a race [for] 50 years.''

We will have so fixed voting in this country--not enough with the gerrymandering, not enough with the dark money--we now have to fix elections so that Republicans will never lose a race for 50 years. He has admitted it. He has admitted it.

And how do they do that? Well, until recently, Director of Homeland Security former Secretary Noem said: We just want to make sure that the ``right people'' are voting. The ``right people.'' Gee, who might that be?

And so this whole scheme gets cooked up, marketed falsely as some civic safe voting proposition, when what it really is, is a scheme to influence elections so that the creepy billionaires behind the Republican Party can continue to control the decisions that get made in this town. That is what this is about, plain and simple.

My friends will say: Oh, this is just a voter ID bill. Everybody loves voter ID. You will hear 80-20 more than you can imagine.

Oh, voter ID. Just voter ID. People should have to bring their ID when they vote.

Well, we did that in Rhode Island. It was a bit of a pain. You can imagine an individual person--let's say an 80-year-old woman--widow-- living alone, living in, say, a senior high rise in Providence or in Pawtucket. She is not traveling. If she had a passport, it has lapsed. She is not driving. She hasn't had a car in 5 years. Her community is largely in that high rise and people who come to help and help bring her groceries. She has a Social Security card because she is on Social Security, but the Social Security card isn't a photo ID.

So when you bring in voter ID, you have now dumped on that lady a new hassle. She has been voting her whole life. She has been voting for 60- plus years, and now suddenly they have a problem with her voting--even when she comes downstairs to the voting machines that get set up in the senior center lobby to make it easier for seniors to vote, and everybody in the building knows her; but no ID, no vote.

So, in Rhode Island, we went through the hassle of helping people who needed an ID--who for perfectly legitimate reasons didn't have one--get an ID. It was unnecessary. We had essentially zero voter fraud, but we did it and we put in the work and it worked out fine.

So let's not pretend this is just a voter ID law. This points its attack at voter registration. If you move, you have to reregister to vote. If you are young and are registering to vote for the first time, that is where you run into the obstacles designed to prevent certain people--people who aren't the ``right people''--from being able to vote. That is where you run into the problem.

And worse than that, they are trying to take the voter information that we entrust to our secretary of state and to our elections board. They are trying to get the private information of voters in our voter rolls and put it into a national website controlled by, oh, the Department of Homeland Security, the ones who are running ICE around in neighborhoods, the one who ran their agents through the Rhode Island courthouse and threatened a judge with smashing his car windows when he tried to vouch for his high school intern whom the ICE agents wrongly thought was a 30-year-old person they were looking for. We are going to trust the entire country's worth of voter information to that operation?

Look at what just happened in Fulton County. In Fulton County, a Trump U.S. attorney from Missouri sent the FBI in Georgia into the election headquarters to seize all of the voter data that they had. I have separately explained what a completely fouled-up operation that was and how the way in which they did that search warrant left enormous holes for any defendant, who was later charged based on evidence obtained in that search warrant, to run a truck through that prosecution.

They violated really basic rules that prosecutors follow--prosecution 101--rookie, dumb errors. And that leads to only one of two conclusions: One is they are idiots. They are incompetent. They have no idea what they are doing. And there is some sense around that because the local U.S. attorney in Georgia wanted no part of this mess. It was being directed by Washington through Missouri into Georgia. The FBI special agent in charge in Georgia didn't seem to like it much. He got run out of his job--presumably for objecting to this nonsense.

But there is a worse theory than that this was a completely incompetent screw up of a search warrant execution, and that is: They didn't mind leaving all these holes for a future defendant--somebody charged on the basis of that evidence--to exploit. They didn't mind opening these unnecessary vulnerabilities in a case for a defendant who might later be charged to exploit because they never thought there would be a defendant.

The point wasn't to do a criminal prosecution or even a criminal investigation; the point was to use the search warrant process falsely in order to get their hands on a massive amount of voter data in a swing State. That is being litigated right now, and we will find out.

But that is the kind of effort by this administration to use the Federal Government to seize private voter data. That would be exactly consistent with why we need to worry about DHS, which only wants the ``right people'' to vote, getting a massive amount of personal voter data.

In Rhode Island, our Secretary of State is fighting that right now because he understands that Rhode Islanders want their voter data to be private, to be safe, and not to be part of some massive political election interference operation run using ICE, using the FBI, using DHS, and using this voter information to hand out to political operatives, to make sure that a weaponized Federal Government is not used to try to throw the election.

It is no small thing to have the Department of Homeland Security want data on every voting American. In recent years, Republican heads would have exploded about that idea. It used to be a party that cared about voter privacy; that in the contest between an individual and the government, tried to take the side of the individual. But now that their billionaires control the government--flip. Now they are on the side of the government, and they want your data.

It is so bad that it seems they have even had one of their little ``Musk rats''--the ``doggy boys''--running around in government. Remember that operation when Musk was the President's close adviser, and there were DOGE people? Turns out, there may even have been your Social Security data taken. We will find out more about that.

So this is no small thing. And if you want to know what the motive is, just ask the people who are running this. We just want to make sure the ``right people'' vote. ``We'll never lose a race [for] 50 years'' if you pass this bill. ``It will guarantee the midterms.'' You are going to win the midterms at levels you can't even believe and you are going to ``win every election for a long time.''

That is putting the fix in. That is using the power of government to put the fix in to fix the elections, to choose who runs the government. That is about as un-American as it gets.

So why is it that they are so afraid about the midterms? What is it that makes them have to put in place mechanisms--from voter ID to registration restrictions to data control--that will give them the tools to guarantee the midterms? Why not run on the record? Because the record stinks--that is why--and voters know it.

This is where President Trump's approval rating has gone. He is down 15 percent. He is down more than 25 percent since when he came in. That is a crash in confidence. And I believe this ended before this Iran-- what did he call it?--``excursion'' that has driven up gas prices by about a dollar a gallon already, with no end in sight.

So they are looking at an election disaster, and for a really good reason. Here are Trump's job approval ratings. His disapprovals have been going up and up and up to nearly 60. His approval has been going down and down and down to below 40. There is a more than 20-point swing between his disapproval and his approval. That is a politically lethal place to be. That is a signal that you have made such a mess of your unified control of government that voters want something different, want something new, want a change, are sick of the nonsense. And when you are looking at that and you are looking just a few months down at November--man, time to make sure you change the law so that we can make sure the right people--the right people--are voting.

Let's take a look at a few examples of why it is that Trump's disapproval is more than 20 points above his approval. Why is it that they are in such trouble politically? Why is it that these approval ratings have dropped 15 points and 25 from before net zero? This is a real problem.

And we are not the only ones looking at this data. The billionaires who run the Republican Party these days--the billionaires who tell Trump what to do and boss him around and give him big gifts and super deals for his family and his cronies and his friends--they are watching it too. They have never had it so good right now. They can basically secretly, quietly run the U.S. Government through the Republican Party. What a deal. Poor men wannabe rich. Rich men wanna be King. And they get to be King from the shadows, with dark money and influence and a Republican Party that hops to their tune. So they are not happy either.

That is why they need emergency measures that will guarantee the midterms. That is what we are involved in today--trying to make sure elections are fair, trying to make sure everybody has a shot to vote, trying to make sure--for real--this is an election that reflects what the American people get to choose.

Why are these numbers so terrible for Trump and Republicans? Because things aren't so great for the American people right now. The annual cost of residential electricity is up in almost every State in the last year. In some cases, it is up a lot--$278, $210, $123, $159, $171 up in Maine. People understand that their electric bills are going up, and if they are paying attention--if they are paying attention--they understand that their electricity bills are going up because Trump and his administration are deliberately pushing clean energy away from the grid. They are deliberately keeping cheap, clean energy off the grid so that, for any given level of demand, the grid has to go where if it doesn't have the cheap, clean energy? It has to go to the polluting fossil fuel plants.

Those plants set the grid price when they are called up, and when they set the grid price, they are more expensive than clean energy, so everybody's costs go up. All that excess money--the billions of dollars that get sucked out of consumers' pockets, out of ratepayers' pockets when they have to pay the higher prices of fossil fuel compared to the lower prices of clean energy--that whole delta of billions of dollars flows where? Right to Trump's billionaire fossil fuel donors, to the ones that he went to in Mar-a-Lago and said: Give me a billion dollars, and I will give you everything you want. I need your money to win this race.

And what did they do? They coughed up hundreds of millions of dollars. Did they get to the billion? We don't know because so much of the money is so dark. But we know they got hundreds of millions to Trump. Now he is paying them back by stopping and slowing down clean energy, which would lower costs for people, and instead he drives the cost up. That is why so much of this is happening.

I will give you an example. The Trump administration has messed around twice with the offshore wind farm off of Rhode Island called Revolution Wind. Out of the clear, blue sky, for no cause, they dropped a stop work order on the project, stopping it dead when it was about 80-plus percent complete. Well, that caused them a little problem because the Trump administration had been in court defending that very project against fossil fuel front groups who were suing it to slow down its arrival on the grid.

So the lawyers--the regular, normal Federal lawyers who were in there defending this, defending their permit--suddenly had to pull a 180 about the same project, in the same courtroom, and suddenly say ``Oh, no. That project we have been defending until this minute is suddenly now all bad'' because of this ridiculous stop work order.

Well, the judge didn't take long to throw out that stop work order because it was illegal and even preposterous, and the Trump administration then let the appeal period expire. So there is no longer a time to appeal it. So it is like: OK, that is done. Back to work, everybody.

Sure enough, they went back to work. What happened 30 days later, 2 days before Christmas, without notice? Men and women going out to work on these projects were told: Nope. New stop work order. Sorry about your Christmas. Not sure when you will ever come back to work. Too bad you were relying on all those nice wages. You are done now.

Well, fortunately for the project, that second stop work order crashed and burned in court just as badly as the first illegal stop work order had.

My point is they went to enormous, illegal effort to slow down that project. Why? Because, by contract, Revolution Wind is going to bring 9-cent kilowatt hours to our Rhode Island grid. Nine-cent kilowatt hours is what they sell for by contract. And how much does it cost on our grid, on average? Eighteen cents. Revolution Wind was going to bring 350,000 homes' worth of low-cost, 9-cent clean power onto our grid, so they wanted to stop it because then, without that clean, inexpensive power, the grid would have to go up, up, up what they call the generation stack, calling up more and more different units to burn gas and oil and make electricity. And all that extra money gets moved from customers' pockets to Trump's big donors, his big fossil fuel donors. It is a scheme. It is on purpose.

These people may not know it yet, but by November, I hope they will learn that the reason their electric rates went up was on purpose--on purpose--so that Trump and his cronies could pay off his big fossil fuel donors with all that extra revenue from their delay and their blocking of cheaper, cleaner energy--in the billions. In the billions.

Of course, it is not just electricity where people know that they have an administration that is not looking out for them but is looking out for the big corporations, the big polluters, the big donors. You probably can't read this, so I will read it.

``My cost of living has increased'': 80 to 16.

``My grocery costs have gone up'': 79 to 17.

``My utility costs like electricity have gone up'': 69 to 22.

These are huge numbers that match the dissatisfaction I showed already with where Trump is--more than 20 points in the hole with voters and going the wrong way, approval rating collapsing before the whole Iran mess has kicked into voters' budgets. It is a real mess.

Our electricity prices, look where they are going--up, up, up, up, up, for the exact reason I said: because the Trump administration is blocking clean, cheap energy to force the grid to have to spend more and more money on Trump's big fossil fuel donors.

When a really big clean energy plant comes onto the grid, the grid moves to it because it is the cheapest. They pull the cheapest power first to meet demand. So when a big wind farm comes on, when a big solar array comes on, that means there is a fossil fuel plant somewhere at the top of that generation stack that doesn't get to run anymore, and the owners of that fossil fuel plant don't get paid for running it, and the fossil fuel dealers who fuel that plant don't get paid. So they have a vested interest in blocking clean energy, and they are doing it because basically they have infiltrated and occupy the Trump administration.

Just look at the appointees and look at the behavior, and all of it drives costs up. Electricity prices are surging in the United States, and what people are going to understand by November is that those electric prices are surging on purpose. Ratepayers are being dragooned into a scheme to pay back Trump's big donors with their money.

Costs of housing: up, 69 to 21.

Healthcare costs: up, 61 to 26.

Medicaid has been cut. People already know that. Half of the Americans already understand that Medicaid has been cut even though the cuts were postponed until after the election. Wait until they actually land in people's pocketbooks.

Social Security and Medicare have been cut: 42 to 40.

That is where all that is.

But check all of these: cost of living, grocery, utility, housing, healthcare--60 to 80 versus 26 to 16.

The American people know what is going on, they know what is being done to them, and they know who has done it.

So that is why they have just got to make sure only the right people are voting.

We did some work on another big cost area for Americans when I was the chairman of the Budget Committee.

One of the biggest expenditures that a family has is home insurance on their home. It is very expensive, and it is going dramatically up. In some cases, not only are the premiums going dramatically up, but the insurance companies are finding that they can't insure the property any longer; it is too risky.

So the poor owner gets a notice of nonrenewal--that is what it is called. You have been a loyal customer for 15, 20 years, you have made your premium payments on time every time, and the company sends a letter to you in the mail, comes through your mailslot: Sorry. Sorry. We can't insure you any longer. You are going have to find a new insurance company.

This creates a huge hassle in the life of that family, which almost always ends up with a more expensive policy or one with a lot less coverage.

This is happening all over the country, and it is happening because of climate risk. It is happening because along our coasts, the rising sea levels, the warmer oceans, the worse storms, the bigger hurricanes that come ashore are making it impossible for insurers to provide insurance to homeowners.

It is also happening out West, although out West, it is not coastal storms and flooding that are making people's homes uninsurable; it is wildfire.

Whether it is wildfire or whether it is coastal flooding, the cascade is the same; the dominoes that fall are the same.

First is you have the climate risk. And why do we have the climate risk? We have the climate risk because the fossil industry, which is now running the Trump administration, has spent billions of dollars and decades in Congress making sure we let them pollute for free. And they have won. They have succeeded. It is still free to pollute carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. We have never put a price on carbon emissions.

Nothing else is free to pollute. Nothing should be free to pollute. You don't get to dump chemicals in a river and get away with it just because the river carries it away.

So this homeowners insurance problem is a massive, massive cost problem for homeowners across the country.

Here in Florida--you can see how acute the problem is down in Florida. In Florida, I think we are at $14,000 average homeowners insurance for a standard $400,000 policy, and it is predicted, depending on the county you are in, to double, triple, or quadruple.

What does it do to the value of your home when a $14,000 home insurance cost doubles or triples? What if you now have a $40,000 instead of a $14,000 annual carrying cost to own your home? Its value crashes.

That is the cascade. You go from climate risk; to uninsurability; to, oops, now I can't get a mortgage on this property because if you can't insure a property, no one will issue a mortgage on it, to its value crashing, to a recession.

Those warnings are all over the place--and not from Save The Whales, not from the League of Conservation Voters, not from the Sierra Club, but from the former risk manager of Goldman Sachs, from the former head of the Bank of England, from the international Financial Stability Board, from the former Chief Economist of Freddie Mac. The warnings are legion.

Here is another cost that families are more and more dealing with. This is the rate of nonrenewal increase, where the insurance company says: Sorry, your property is now uninsurable--at least by our standards.

Here are nonrenewal rates by State. Again, you see the coastal States hit pretty hard, but there is also wildfire coming in.

This was the work of my Budget Committee. Then some other groups followed up and did some more detailed work.

This is where home insurance premiums are changing. They are already up. What this did was to look forward, not to say ``OK, they are up; they have doubled in the last few years'' but ``Where are they going to go? Where do we predict they will go?'' The prediction here is that insurance premiums are going to climb as much as 300 percent in the 30- year period of a mortgage holder buying right now.

What does he have to look forward to? Well, if you are down here and you are already paying 14,000 bucks a year--it is even more in Miami--and it is going to go up 300 percent, it is going to quadruple, these are people who have a real cost problem now, and they have a real cost problem coming, and behind that comes a real home values problem.

If you are a Palm Beach billionaire and you want to swap mansions, that is fine. You can do that. You don't even need a mortgage; you just pay with cash. But if you are living north of Tampa in a development and you bought your house with a mortgage and you want to sell it, the person you want to sell it to is going to need a mortgage. If your property is now unmortgageable because it is uninsurable, there goes your market of buyers.

We talked to people in Florida when we did this investigation who literally cannot sell their home at any price. It is not fancy enough for a billionaire, and it is not mortgageable and insurable for a normal person. They are just stuck. They are just stuck.

Here, what the map shows is where they expect to see changes in home value, again, in the next 30 years, in the period of a mortgage entered into at the time, and they are looking at changes in value, dropped 20, 40, 60, 80, and even 100 percent--a total wipeout of home value--based on that home insurance, mortgage, property values cascade because we won't take care of the climate danger that everybody in their right mind knows exists.

The fossil fuel industry has a big reckoning coming from that mess, and they do not want to be responsive to voters. They want the White House and the House and the Senate controlled by a party that they control. They want this election to keep Republicans in power so that they are not held to account for the fraudulent climate denial, for the dark money corruption, and for the looming catastrophe in home insurance rates. And the way they do that is making sure with this bill that ``we just make sure only the right people are voting.'' So the stakes are very high right now.

I will close, because I think I have the floor only for another few minutes, by talking just briefly about Kansas. Why would a Rhode Islander want to talk about Kansas? I will tell you why. Because they tried this in Kansas. They had a similar law in Kansas, and it went to court, and the court threw it out as unconstitutional. The SAVE America Act resembles a law in Kansas that was decided to be unconstitutional.

There are some other interesting things the court found. Across 19 years, the proponents of that law could only show 67 noncitizens registering to vote or even attempting to register to vote. Over 19 years, 67 people.

If you look just at the Presidential elections in that period, Kansans voted in this number: 5.5 million votes cast. So those 67 people are 0.0012 percent of voters.

For the pretext of trying to deal with those 67 attempts, the effect was to keep 31,000 legitimate Kansas voters from voting--31,000 kept from voting to solve a problem of 67 that didn't even exist because most of them were only attempts.

So this is a solution to a nonproblem. The solution that it provides is to the problem of Trump and Republicans having made such a hash of things that they are now in a 20-plus point hole.

So the billionaires who run the Republican Party and, through the Republican Party, run this body, run the House, run the Oval Office, make all the decisions for their own benefit--this is their clawing hand coming out of what seems like election disaster ahead to try to just grab back the power they are losing because their Republican Party has made such a hash of things. That is what this bill is. It is the dead zombie hand of the billionaires who are seeing the exact same approval rating as Trump taking the Republicans into a crash of an election and trying to solve that problem by guaranteeing the midterms by making sure that just the right people vote.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. No.

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