Official Congressional Record
Mr. President, imagine your shock if, while on your way to the theater, let’s say--I don’t know--maybe you are going to the opera. You are planning to pick up your tickets at will call. You arrive at will call at the appointed moment and say: Yes, I am Senator Pete Ricketts. I am here to pick up my opera tickets. They gave them to somebody else. If you found out that the theater was handing out tickets at will call without any form of ID, you would probably be a little disappointed--you or any other American, any other human in that circumstance--realizing that it is important to find out whether you are who you claim to be before you are given something, something where your identity matters. The same could be said of a whole bunch of other human transactions, ordinary human interactions involving day-to-day transactions that any of us could be expected to engage in multiple times every single week. One day, maybe it is theater or opera tickets. Maybe the next day, it is withdrawing money from a bank. You show up, and money is gone from your account because your bank stopped requiring people to show ID. They can come along and claim to be someone they are not and take someone’s money that is not theirs. The mere fact that we have a lot of people that are allowed to vote doesn’t diminish the seriousness of not requiring people to prove that they are, in fact, who they claim to be when they show up to exercise that important right. Some people, when denying that there is any need for us to act here, will throw up things and say: Well, that is fine for the bank or for theater tickets or for the pharmacy. But this is an important constitutional right. It is a fundamental right. My response to that is: Yes, exactly--and that is exactly why we need it. The fact that it involves a protected, fundamental constitutional right is a reason why we need to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. That is exactly what the SAVE America Act does. It is exactly what it would do. When I set out, about 3 years ago, to write this bill, along with my partner in the House, Congressman Chip Roy from Texas, that was our mantra: Let’s make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. Never, at the time, could we have predicted how much attention this would get, and never, at the time, could we have predicted the absurdity of the arguments that would be raised against this because, if you are careful--if you listen carefully--what you will find is that there is not a legitimate argument against the Senate passing the SAVE America Act--no, not even one. The arguments that you will hear against it, over and over and over again, are based entirely on contrivance, on pretext, on false statements and false assumptions. Look, at the end of the day, the SAVE America Act is about reestablishing, restoring trust in U.S. elections. That trust needs to be restored, especially in light of the facts that we have discovered just over the last few days. As of just Friday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that there are 278,000--that is over a quarter of a million--noncitizens registered to vote in U.S. elections in just four States alone. This doesn’t count all of them. This is 278,000 noncitizen votes, just in the States of California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada Now, that is a problem. When you add to that the other States that have refused to cooperate, that have made it very difficult for us to ascertain how many noncitizen votes they might have registered in their States--they are not cooperating. That is one of many problems that we face here. Fortunately, this is a problem that Congress can solve. It is a problem that it can solve and, therefore, must solve. Among those who make an argument against this, sometimes, you will hear the argument--one that I find especially galling and especially disingenuous--that, ``oh, this somehow tramples on the authority of the States,’’ which some mistakenly refer to as States’ rights. I don’t call them States’ rights. States don’t have rights. They have authority. A right is a privilege against the exercise of authority. It is the inverse polar opposite of a right; therefore, I don’t call it States’ rights. It is State authority. This, Mr. President, emphatically does not trample on State authority. How do we know that? Well, because the Constitution delineates the relative responsibilities of the States and the Federal Government. And in one particularly poignant and relevant provision-- article I, section 4--the elections clause of that provision states that Congress may, at any time, by law, make or alter what we will loosely describe as laws establishing the time, place, and manner in which Federal elections will take place, except as to places of choosing Senators. So we have the authority to do this under the Constitution, not as to State races but as to Federal races, principally U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate races. We have that authority; article I, section 4 gives that to us. Moreover, if those who mistakenly argue that this somehow tramples on State sovereign authority, if there were any doubt about that, which there is not because article I, section 4 puts that issue to bed quite nicely. But if there were, then the entire predicate of existing law, making the SAVE America Act necessary in the first place, would also be invalid. Every time I hear this argument made, I wish, like anything, that those same people making this argument would acknowledge that if the SAVE America Act is somehow unconstitutional, so, too, is the National Voter Registration Act. The National Voter Registration Act enacted by Congress in 1993 created a system whereby people can vote at a DMV in their home State. Now, when somebody goes into a DMV to register to vote in that State, all they have to do is check a box saying: Yes, I am applying for a driver’s license, but I would like, simultaneously, to register to vote with this application. After all, you have got some of the same features there. You have got to prove your identity. You have got to establish your residency, what your address is. And so it made a certain amount of sense to provide this option for American voters to go and register at a DMV. The problem is that that is all you have to do, is check a box saying: I would like to register to vote. And then at the end of it, you sign your name in a conclusory statement to the effect that I am entitled to vote; I am a U.S. citizen, and I am not prohibited, for one reason or another, from voting, and so I am allowed to do it. But that is all the verification that is allowed. And in a move that, I believe, is incompatible with the text and original understanding of the statutory language, the Supreme Court-- about 20 years after the NVRA was passed, the Supreme Court of the United States interpreted the NVRA, mistakenly but nonetheless conclusively, as prohibiting the States from doing anything to verify the citizenship of someone registering to vote at a DMV using an NVRA- supplied form. Now, the Supreme Court was wrong. Justice Alito explained in his dissent in that case--Inter Tribal Counsel v. Arizona why that was wrong. Nonetheless, it remains the conclusive interpretation of the NVRA, and it is why the SAVE America Act is necessary because what we have got now, Mr. President, we have got an estimated 30 million-plus noncitizens residing in the United States. We have got a system of laws under the NVRA that makes it really easy to go into a DMV and fill out some forms, check a box and sign your name and say I want to register to vote. That is how we got 278,000 registered voters who are noncitizens just in those four States alone: California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada, to say nothing of the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of others in other States who may have done the same thing. It is phenomenally easy to cheat. It is stunningly easy to register to vote as a noncitizen, in some cases, without really realizing what you are doing, much less that you are committing a very serious felony offense by doing that. So that is the whole reason why the SAVE America Act is necessary, is because of the NVRA and, specifically, the Supreme Court’s butchered interpretation of it prohibiting the States, even where they have actual doubts, from asking someone to verify their citizenship at the time they register to vote. So, if the SAVE America Act is unconstitutional, then so, too, is the NVRA, in which case, we don’t need it--at least not nearly to the same degree as we do. But, of course, neither the NVRA nor the SAVE America Act is unconstitutional; they are both squarely within the authority provided to the U.S. Congress under article I, section 4 of the Constitution. So, as a result of all this, it is clear that Congress can fix this problem. We have the authority to do it. So what is the holdup? Well, it certainly isn’t the American voter because the American voter, by a margin of like 3 out of 4 or 4 out of 5, depending which poll you look at, believes that it is important that people who show up to vote ought to have to prove who they are. And they ought to, at the time they register to vote, have to establish their citizenship and, thus, their eligibility to vote in the first place. We are talking about 75 to 80--some as high as 85 percent, depending on which poll that you look at. Those are Democrat voters and Republican voters alike, all agreeing that this is a problem, and it is a problem that Congress can and should fix. So what is the holdup? Well, it is hard to say what the holdup is? But I can summarize it this way: It is Senate Democrats. The SAVE America Act is popular literally everywhere in the United States of America, except in this Chamber and except among Democrats in this Chamber. Everywhere else it is a no-brainer. Everywhere else it is popular. It is only here that they don’t want to pass it. Why? Why don’t they want to pass it? Well, one could argue that if you benefit from the status quo, you don’t want any change to that status quo, especially if you benefit from it in a way that is likely to go away if you change the status quo. These are all fancy ways, Mr. President--nice ways--of saying: Perhaps some of those who are opposed to it might be afraid of what happens if they are not allowed to rely on noncitizen votes, even though Federal law flatly prohibits noncitizen voting in U.S. elections. That is not a good reason to oppose this. It may be a reason, but it is not a good reason. It is not a valid reason. It is not a legal, moral, ethical, or constitutional reason. It is just a reason, but that is about where the reason stops because every other of their arguments cannot withstand scrutiny. For example, a number of them will say things like the following: If we pass the SAVE America Act into law, there will be anarchy, there will be lawlessness, dogs and cats living together in the streets, Book of Revelations stuff, apocalyptic nightmares unfolding everywhere. And they back this up by arguing, quite absurdly, that women and minorities will be unable to vote--oh, and also rural Americans and also young Americans and also older Americans because, at any given moment, these same people who are opposing the SAVE America Act--the 47 people in this Chamber, more or less--those are the same people who may stand to benefit if we don’t pass it because the status quo benefits them. And they should not be able to benefit from this by not passing something. The effect is that if this were to pass, this wouldn’t disenfranchise anyone. Why? Well, because the kind of proof that we require--proof of citizenship and proof of identity--it is based on the same sort of document that every American has to provide routinely in the most mundane, routine encounters. Let’s break them up into two pieces. Remember, there are two pieces of the SAVE America Act. Part 1 deals with establishing citizenship. Part 2 deals with voter ID. Let’s deal first with the proof of citizenship. When you show up to register to vote, if this were to pass into law today--which it should pass today. It is that popular with the American people, and it is that lacking in any legitimate argument against it. If it were to pass into law today, then your existing voter registration would remain valid indefinitely. Nothing about that would change. It would only be that the next time you have to register to vote-- because you have moved or something like that--then you would have to show up, and you would have to provide some type of proof as to U.S. citizenship. The law would allow you to do this using the same exact documentation that every single American has to supply every single time he or she starts a new job as a new employee with a new employer. You fill out an I-9 form, as every man, woman, and child in America has to do every time they start a new job as a new employee. You have got to fill that out, and you have got to provide proof of citizenship, and you do that either by showing a U.S. passport evidencing citizenship or, alternatively, an original copy of your birth certificate, coupled with a couple of other documents, including I think a Social Security card and/or a government-issued photo ID. Those who argue against it argue, among other things, well, this will disenfranchise women because--at least married women who have changed their name after getting married, taking on their husband’s last name, this would disenfranchise them because they won’t be able to vote. By that logic, that would suggest that married women who have changed their name after getting married, which, I think, the last time I checked is most women in America, would also be unable to work. They would be unable to get a job. They would be unable lawfully to start a new job as a new employee for a new employer ever if their parents didn’t have the clairvoyance to be able to guess, at the time of their birth, what their husband’s--their future husband’s last name would be 20 or 30 years in advance. Of course, this is absurd. This doesn’t exist. This is an entirely contrived concern. And moreover, in this and every other area where this kind of argument comes up, the people making the argument ignore the text accompanying lines--beginning on page 12 of the House-passed SAVE America Act, line 20 and the text that follows from it, makes clear that even if you can’t find any of your own documentation, whether it is because you never had it to begin with or your dog ate it or your crazy Aunt Madge raided the stash of family documents and burned it--I don’t know. For whatever reason, if you don’t have, never had, can’t find your proof of citizenship, the SAVE America Act has you covered. You turn to that text accompanying line 20, starting on page 12 of the SAVE America Act as passed by the House of Representatives and it makes clear, even if you can’t find any of that documentation, you can by a personal attestation write down the basic facts supporting or giving rise to your citizenship, and the burden then shifts to the State registering you to vote to confirm or refute your assertion as to citizenship: I was born on such and such a date in this American city to parents A and B. They are both citizens, so I was a citizen also. Or if you are a naturalized citizen, not a natural-born citizen, you would state the terms and conditions, the date or date range when you were naturalized, and the basis that you used to become a U.S. citizen; and the burden would then shift to the State to confirm or refute your characterization. So those arguments reveal that people who are arguing against this, in addition to already being very wrong that this somehow tramples on State sovereign authority, that this somehow amounts to an improper or unconstitutional Federal takeover of election law, which has long been the more or less semi-exclusive domain of the States, that that doesn’t hold up; neither does the ``you are going to disenfranchise all married women who have taken on their husband’s name,’’ that doesn’t fly either. There are other arguments about how it disenfranchises this or that racial group or urban Americans, rural Americans, old Americans, young Americans. They all fall for similarly self-evident reasons because at the end of the day, this law really does make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. All right. So we have covered that step 1--step 1 of the citizenship verification part. Future voter registrations, when you show up to register newly to vote, you would have to provide proof of citizenship using the same documentation that you use every time you ever start a new job. And if you don’t have that, you can do it just through a personal attestation, which you swear on a simple affidavit, outlining the facts and circumstances that make you a citizen, shifting the burden to the State. SAVE America also gives authority to Federal officials to require the States--many of which are refusing to cooperate right now--to share their voter registration files so they can routinely help them scrub those voter registration files, to remove people who were illegally added as voters because, again, Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. That leads to the next line of argument frequently used by those who want to hinder the SAVE America Act’s path toward victory. They make these stunning--astounding--claims that we don’t need it. We don’t need it. Why? Well, because it is already illegal to vote. This has to be one of the dumbest arguments I have ever heard, and I have been here 15\1/2\ years in the U.S. Senate. I have heard some dumb arguments. This might well be the dumbest one that I have ever heard-- not just against this bill but against any bill--that because X is already illegal, we don’t need any law making sure that the law making action X illegal is, in fact, enforceable. That is the dumbest argument ever. It is like saying: We don’t need traffic police to enforce the law because it is already illegal to go too fast or to run a stop sign. If you leave in place no mechanism, no means by which those laws can be enforced, then those laws quickly become dead letter. I will get more into that in a moment as to the enforceability point. But the fact that we have got an existing law that makes it illegal is a reason to pass the SAVE America Act; it is not a reason not to pass the SAVE America Act. Look, for a long time, Americans have been told a number of lies. Among other things, they have been told that, you know, noncitizens don’t vote in U.S. elections because they can’t. We know that is not true. We have got documented instances where some have voted. We have now got documented instances where 278,000 people, who are not citizens, registered to vote in just these four States: California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada--to say nothing of the tens or hundreds of thousands of others in other States who may be similarly situated. But for years, Americans have been told to stop asking questions about all kinds of things. Trust the system, we were told. Trust the experts. Trust the machines. Trust the machine itself. If you expressed concern about election security, at least between the years of--I don’t know--2020 through 2026, you were told that you had no credibility, and you were dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. The reason I frame the date range as I did is that if you were saying this back in 2016 or 2017, you weren’t dismissed by the mainstream news media, by the radical left news establishment in this country. You weren’t dismissed as that. Why? Well, because that is what Democrats were arguing and the mainstream news media is, of course, the communication apparatus of the Democratic National Committee. So the dates matter. If you questioned the vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems, you were told that there were none and that you were an evil person for suggesting that a voting machine could ever be abused. If you worried about foreign interference in elections, you were accused of undermining democracy itself--ignoring, of course, the fact that we are not a democracy; we are a constitutional republic. Yes, the difference matters. I won’t elaborate as to why now, but it does. Many of the same government Agencies that have spent years insisting that there is nothing to worry about, they quietly produced intelligence at the exact same time they were denying that there was any problem. They were quietly producing intelligence saying exactly the opposite. According to newly declassified assessments released by the White House, our own intelligence community has concluded that Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and even nonstate actors possessed the capability to compromise American election infrastructure. These assessments specifically identified voter registration databases, electronic pollbooks, and election websites as the most vulnerable targets. According to the White House, Communist China acquired approximately 220 million American voter registration files, including names, addresses, phone numbers, political affiliations. This, of course, is enough information for them to be able to build detailed profiles of nearly every American voter and--while building profiles--figuring out what might sway those who are swayable, who they might be able to sway and how they might be able to do it. The intelligence reportedly says Beijing created an entire unit dedicated to exploiting that data. Now, look, if China hacked the personnel files of the Pentagon, this Chamber would be in an uproar. We would hear of little else. If China stole the banking information of 220 million Americans, Congress would cancel its recess. It would do nothing until it had solved the problem. But, somehow, we are expected to just shrug our shoulders and do nothing when they target the American voter, when they target that which is most uniquely, sacredly given to American citizens. The exclusive right to vote, as an American citizen, is the quintessential ingredient. It is the telltale sign. It is the ``without which, not,’’ the ``sine qua non’’ of the American citizenship experience. And we are supposed to just ignore it because they targeted the American voter? No, sir, not on my watch. We are not going to just ignore that. We cannot. Consistent with our oath to uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution--which every one of us has taken the same oath in this Chamber--we can’t simply ignore it. Now the White House has released intelligence describing how the Maduro regime in Venezuela allegedly developed methods to manipulate electronic vote totals in ways that are designed to carry out the job, while simultaneously evading detection, even after an audit. The point is that hostile governments are actively developing ways to do precisely that. Responsible governments prepare for threats before they become catastrophes. They don’t just wait until after they happen and say: Oh, shoot, sorry--especially when it is something as important as maintaining the integrity--real and perceived--of our voting systems. All you have to have is one truly botched election, and it could be very difficult to unscramble that egg, to put that genie back in the bottle. Sorry to throw too many metaphors in there at once, but the point is that you can’t undo what happens when somebody uses their own technological sophistication to take advantage of vulnerabilities-- known vulnerabilities--in our election security system. So a responsible government does not wait until after that happens. Some of these same documents that have been released by the White House also described a photo registration investigation in Michigan. According to FBI records, canvassers admitted to signing other people’s names to register to vote, to submitting registrations for people who didn’t exist, to receiving gift cards based on how many applications for voter registration they produced. Now the FBI believed crimes had occurred; yet the investigation sat. It sat and it sat and then it sat some more. And the American people deserve an answer. According to the Department of Homeland Security, approximately 278,000 noncitizens were identified on the voter rolls in just those 4 States that I mentioned--in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada--4 States, not 50. We don’t even know how many others there are in other States because a whole bunch of States--mostly blue ones-- utterly refused to share their records. Even knowing that this is a problem--especially knowing that it is a problem--what does that say about those States and about those election officials who refused to share information with those elements within our government that are there to do one job, which is just to make sure that we don’t have illegal voting occurring? What does that say about them? What does that say about the need for the SAVE America Act? Now, given what we have learned from President Trump and from the Department of Homeland Security--just in the last few days--we must pass the SAVE America Act. If you were on the fence on it before, that is one thing. I don’t know how anybody could even be on the fence about it after learning that information shared by President Trump and by the Department of Homeland Security late last week. Meanwhile, opponents to this legislation are doubling down, and they keep repeating the same lie: Noncitizen voting is illegal, so we don’t need this. Exactly. Now robbery is illegal. We still lock the bank, and we still hire a night watchman. Identity theft is already illegal. Yeah, well, we still verify identities. Fraud is illegal. We still investigate fraud. And we have all kinds of laws and all kinds of law enforcement personnel assigned to do things to make it more difficult for people to defraud their fellow citizens. No serious person believes that declaring something illegal in and of itself eliminates the need to enforce the law--especially whereas here the law itself is written, it has been interpreted by the courts conclusively in a way that makes it impossible to enforce. The SAVE America Act closes that gap. It makes it possible to enforce the law. It requires proof of citizenship to register to vote in Federal elections. The reason this bears mention is because States do have the power--I don’t know why any State would want to do this. States do have it within their discretion to allow noncitizens to vote. There are a small handful of local jurisdictions that have done that. I cannot for the life of me fathom why that would be a good idea any more than any corporation would see fit to have nonshareholders vote in shareholder elections, nondirectors vote on a matter considered for a vote in a board of directors. You don’t do that. Citizenship has to mean something, and citizenship means, first and foremost, that you have got the right to participate in this body politic in our system of government in the United States, and you can’t have that stripped away from you. Well, there are many ways that it could be stripped away from you. One of the most common, pedestrian, and overlooked ways in which you can have that stripped is by having your vote offset, by having it nullified, neutralized. In other words, if you vote and if at the same time somebody down the street from you is voting, who is not supposed to vote, that person has diluted your vote. That person has cheapened what it means to you to be a citizen. And they may have completely offset, neutralized, and nullified your vote. That is not acceptable. It requires proof of citizenship to register to vote in Federal elections. And then we get to step 2 of it. Step 2 of the SAVE America Act is just about the voter ID. After you verified citizenship with a new voter registration, after you have had the coordination process occurring between Federal officials--the Department of Homeland Security who run the SAVE database and the States--then you get to the step 2 of the SAVE America Act where you just require people, the day they vote, to show up and provide a valid photo ID in order to prove that they are who they say they are. This is nothing radical. This is nothing extraordinary. This is nothing that millions of Americans don’t already do every single day to board an airplane, to cash a check, enter a Federal building, pick up a prescription, go to the doctor, pick up tickets at will call, or do any of a whole host of other things. Many of us were at airports across America today. I boarded a plane this morning in Salt Lake City. When I boarded that plane, there were hundred--thousands, in fact--of people wanting to get on an airplane. Every one of them had to prove who they were. They had to prove their identity. Not one of them, while doing so, was saying: Gosh, I am being disenfranchised--while doing it. They understand that this is part of what we have to do, that there are times in life when you have got--where who you are matters and whether you are who you claim to be really matters. This is one of those moments. And, again, the American people overwhelmingly agreed because it is just common sense. Mr. President, 83 percent, according to one poll, support voter ID. That is among all registered voters. Among just Republicans, that number jumps as high as 95 percent. I don’t know who those remaining 5 percent were among Republicans who said they don’t think you ought to have to have that. My guess is that a significant percentage of them meant to answer the question the other way. And another significant percentage of those 5 percent are probably actually Democrats who just wrongly identified as Republicans for one reason or another. But this is still a minimum of 71 percent of Democrat voters who believe this is a good idea. The only people who find this controversial in any significant numbers are right here, Democrats in the U.S. Senate. So here is the question before the Senate: If hostile foreign governments are targeting our election systems, and they are; if China possesses hundreds of millions of American voter files, and it does; if the overwhelming majority of Americans support voter ID, and they do, then what exactly are we waiting for? What is it that is so critical, that is so essential, that is so timely, that is so time-sensitive that we are not debating this right now? Why don’t we pull this bill up right now and debate it and announce that we are going to debate it until it passes? If we were to do that, it would pass. It might take us a few days, it might take us a few weeks, but it would pass because the same animating desire, the smell of jet fumes, would eventually work its will, work its magic, and put our Members into a state of intoxication or sanity, regardless of how you might perceive it, where they would eventually negotiate this thing to the point that they could accept it because they know that with every passing day, when they filibuster this, this bill gets more popular and they get less popular. If you add to that the fact that they shouldn’t be able to go home until we are finished with this--none of us should. If we were truly doing our job here, then the 60-vote cloture standard wouldn’t be perceived as the insuperable obstacle that it has been described wrongly as being here today. For a very long time, this Chamber operated without so much as a cloture rule--even after the cloture rule was adopted in 1917 for the first time. Still, breaking a filibuster usually didn’t involve a cloture vote. Most of the time, it just meant the Senate would come in and say: OK. We are debating this bill until it passes. If you want to filibuster it, you are going to have to speak. If you stop speaking and nobody else shows up to speak against it, then we will call the question, and we will do so in a simple majority vote. It is only in the modern Senate that we have gotten our entire bearings wrong on what the filibuster is. Its whole purpose is to facilitate and prolong robust, meaningful debate--the modern filibuster, in which we look at it as a simple vote-counting exercise. Unless you can count to 60 on day one of a bill’s consideration, you consider it failed. It is not just that it doesn’t amplify it; it doesn’t further the purpose of the filibuster. It undermines its very purpose. Rather than protecting robust debate, that renders debate obsolete. Shame on us if we can’t see that. Shame on us if we don’t take the steps necessary to extricate ourselves from the sharp, clinging talons of the so-called zombie filibuster--the name I have assigned for the use of the 60-vote cloture standard as a de facto 60-vote passage standard, which it is not, which it was never meant to be, which, if it were, it would arguably run afoul of the Constitution because the Constitution makes clear--when you are setting a supermajority threshold as the minimum standard, it makes clear where that is. There are several instances--including when you are proposing a constitutional amendment, you are ratifying a treaty, trying to overcome a Presidential veto, for example--where a two-thirds supermajority is required. Otherwise, it is a simple majority. And that continues to be the case under the Senate rules today. It is just that we think of the 60-vote cloture standard as synonymous with the threshold needed to pass. It is not. The reason we talk about this, the reason I contrast what I call the real filibuster, the talking filibuster, against the zombie filibuster is that in the case of the zombie filibuster, nobody even has to work for it. The way it always worked before and after they first adopted the cloture standard for the first time in 1917--although it was set at a three-fourths supermajority back then--they would just continue to debate it. That is what we should do here. If you want to filibuster, you can. You may do so. But you should have to stand here and speak. And when nobody else shows up to speak against it, that is over, and you call the question on the bill, and you call it not at 60 votes, you call it at 51. That is what we ought to be doing. We should put this bill on the floor, and we should debate it until such time as it passes. Now, are there other options? Heck yeah, there are, and I support pretty much all of them. One option would be to attach it to a continuing resolution or a spending vehicle. Another would be to attach it, as the House of Representatives has done, to the National Defense Authorization Act. When we received the National Defense Authorization Act that was passed by the House of Representatives last week, the Senate refused to bring it up. They refused to bring up even the Senate committee- processed version. They refused to give what we call front-end cloture or cloture on the motion to proceed. See, this illustrates the problem I am pointing to. We are now into, what, our third, fourth instance of prominent pieces of legislation this year that have been unable to pass. Remember how the Department of Homeland Security was at least partially defunded for many months out of this fiscal year? The same thing happened there--we couldn’t get the 60 votes, so we kept punting it. What we should do every time that happens, just as it happened yesterday--or last week when we tried to get on the Defense Authorization Act--Democrats didn’t vote for it, so we couldn’t get the 60 votes on it. We should have continued trying to debate it and announced that we would stay on it until we could get the 60. But regardless, even if you don’t do that with a large bill like the National Defense Authorization Act, you should do it with a small, simple, overwhelmingly popular bill like the SAVE America Act. It would work. It would work. But we have to do the hard work to do it. All right. So we have talked about attaching it to a spending bill or a defense authorization bill or some other must-pass vehicle. Another option under consideration involves budget reconciliation. Budget reconciliation has the obvious advantage in that there is no cloture in the context of budget reconciliation, but it has to be budgetary, meaning it has to bring about changes to mandatory outlays or to revenues. Well, the SAVE America Act itself as a whole is properly perceived as a policy bill, not a budgetary one. There are features, there are elements of the SAVE America Act that are themselves arguably budgetary or at least could be made such in a budget reconciliation vehicle, and I look forward to working on that as well. One way or another, we have to get this done. The American people are asking us to act. The President has asked us to act. The only thing standing in the way of this bill passing is the Senate and specifically our slavish devotion to the zombie filibuster. But, really, our slavish devotion to the zombie filibuster is not about the zombie filibuster or any kind of filibuster at all; it is slavish devotion to the truncated, predictable, light-duty legislative workweek. It is that coupled with the cloture standard that has created the modern zombie filibuster mess in which our Democrat colleagues were able to keep the Department of Homeland Security at least partially defunded for months and months out of the year. Now they want to use the same trick to make sure that our elections are not secure. Shame on them. Shame on all of them. Shame on anyone who is trying to do that. For that matter, now that it has become abundantly clear that we have identified 278,000 noncitizen voter registrations just in those four States alone--California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York--I challenge those who are not yet on board with the SAVE America Act to come up with something else that will fix the problem because it is no longer an excuse--it is no longer acceptable to simply ignore it. We know too much now. We can’t ignore this problem. If you don’t like the way we have written this, tell us what your alternative is, but doing nothing is not an option. So, look, we have been told meanwhile that there simply isn’t enough time to debate SAVE America Act until it passes. Sorry. We would love to, but we can’t. I am sorry, this falls on deaf ears. This is absurd. To whatever degree we do not have time, it is because we are choosing not to give it the time that it needs, that it deserves, that it requires. And shame on all of us for betraying our oath to the Constitution and our own commitment to our own voters. We are expected to look out for them, to defend them, to respect them enough. We have to give a crap--just enough of a crap in order to tell our voters, to say: We are not going to allow your vote to be offset by someone who is voting illegally. That is the least we can do. After this week, under the current schedule, the House and the Senate won’t both simultaneously be back into session in the Capitol until-- wait for it--September 14. Mid-September. This is the last week, absent some change in the respective Chambers’ meeting schedules, the last legislative week until mid-September, which will take us to just--what is that?--6 weeks before the November election? That is unacceptable. We don’t have a lack of time; we have a lack of spine. Don’t ever confuse lack of time with lack of spine because they are two very different things. If we truly lack time, that would be one thing. We have time. We are just choosing not to use it. We are choosing to use it differently and, I would add, very poorly if we don’t take this up. Take it up now and stay on the bill until it darn well passes. The Senate should stay here tomorrow, this weekend, next week, through weekends and long-scheduled recesses--as long as it takes. If opponents want to block it, let them do it in public. If Democrats want to filibuster this bill, let them stand and speak like actual Senators actually filibustering because that is what filibustering is. If they don’t show up to do that, then we call the question, we call the vote, and we do so with a simple majority because that is what our rules allow us to do with votes when they don’t filibuster. But you can’t have the benefit of filibustering if you are not willing to filibuster. Let them, as they are filibustering, explain why they are insisting that proving citizenship is somehow unreasonable in elections that are reserved for U.S. citizens. Let them explain why showing voter ID is simply too much to ask even though Americans show that they are comfortable showing ID in countless everyday interactions. The American people are watching, and they should be. They know that this is not about Republicans. It is not about Democrats. This isn’t about the last election or the one before that. No, this one is about the next election and every election that comes after that. It is about the future. It is about whether the American people can stand and look at our election systems and have the confidence they need when they lawfully cast their ballots. They need to be able to stand with a degree of confidence that their ballot, their vote won’t be canceled by fraud, diluted by ineligible voting, or jeopardized by a system that Washington spent years insisting was beyond reasonable debate when, in fact, it was not. American elections belong to American citizens. The SAVE America Act would make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. We must pass the SAVE America Act. If we fail to do so, neither history nor today’s voters will smile upon us. I am now happy to turn the time over to my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from Ohio. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sheehy). The Senator from Ohio.
