Mike Lee

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. May I proceed? Thank you. Mr. President, another accusation, another argument that is being made here that is quite spurious and that just isn't accurate is that U.S. elections are already free and they are already fair and so we don't need to mess with them; that we shouldn't mess with them; that if we do anything to mess with them, that will upset that. Well, yes, look, Americans are promised free and fair elections. That means that the elections should be rid of any election fraud and any voter suppression because an election isn't free and it isn't fair if, in fact, we allow people who don't have the right to vote to vote, especially if we set in motion a sequence of events that will inevitably culminate in not just a few but ultimately thousands, then tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of noncitizens to vote in these elections. This is not hyperbole, with an estimated 30-plus million noncitizens in this country and with nearly every State freely issuing driver's licenses to noncitizens--19 States plus the District of Columbia issuing them to even known illegal aliens. And all you have to do is fill out the form and check the box and sign your name at the bottom. No problem. ``These aren't the droids you're looking for.'' I am just fine. You think nobody is going to do that? You think a lot of people aren't going to do that? Shame on all of us if you fall for that. That is absurd. The threat of noncitizen voting--the mere potential for it--violates these standards. Citizens should not have the force of their vote--the meaning of their vote--diluted, bastardized, adulterated by noncitizen participation. The SAVE America Act works to verify and protect the votes of American citizens. Now, here comes another one, an argument that is also really sophomoric--that is probably too polite, but I will use that term for the moment--that somehow the SAVE America Act will suppress voters generally but protect Republicans. That is offensive, and it falls under its own weight. Look, the SAVE America Act will protect the value of each citizen's vote. It is utterly agnostic. It cares not whether you are a Republican or Democrat, a member of the Giraffe Party or the yet-to-be-formed national party of people who are opposed to vote for Democrats and Republicans, the Green Party, the Purple Party, whatever party you want to belong to, or no party at all. It protects your vote. It is party- agnostic. It in no way, shape, or form controls the priorities that the voters bring to the ballot box or preferences one group of them over another and, instead, ensures the priorities developed into law by way of our elections accurately reflect the will of U.S. citizens and only U.S. citizens, because remember that concept of popular sovereignty that we have been talking about this entire time. In fact, the entire 250 years of the American Republic, we have been talking about popular sovereignty. It is the fundamental building block of Congress, on which all of our laws and our Constitution and our Declaration are built--the idea that the people are sovereigns. We have no King. We the people are the sovereigns. We the people collectively enjoy that right. Identifying what the franchise is and who has that right to vote is so fundamental to protecting the popular sovereignty. As the saying goes, if everyone is family, no one is. So too here--if everyone is a citizen or everyone has the same prerogatives as citizens, no one does. It ceases to be meaningful because it gets diluted past the breaking point. Here is another argument that is patently fraudulent. On its face, it fails. It is made with reckless disregard for the truth or knowledge of its falsity when it is made--that the SAVE America Act would somehow require every American now registered to vote to reregister. There is just not a scintilla of truth to this. I have never really known what a scintilla is. It is a very small thing. There is not even a particle of truth to this. It is not only guilty of being false; it is the very definition of false argument and should not be countenanced in this or any self-respecting legislative body. Nothing--nothing at all--in the SAVE America Act, no plausible interpretation of it, would require voters to reregister. At the end of the day, we can scan the horizon for as many straw-man arguments as we can fathom. I have yet to conceive of, much less hear articulated, any legitimate reason for anyone to oppose this bill, which in me raises a question--a question I don't like to ask myself: Why, for the love of all that is sacred and holy, all that is good in our constitutional Republic, why would somebody oppose this? What legitimate reason? Who benefits? Cui bono, as they would say in Latin. I don't know why, but it sounds more impressive when they say it in Latin. Who benefits from the status quo? Who benefits from allowing noncitizens to continue to register to vote? And yes, it does happen. Those on the other side of the aisle continue to insist that it does not. It does. More information comes out every day on it, and it is going to continue to come out in larger and larger numbers. I don't know whether it has anything to do with the fact that, so far, some of those--a whole lot of them--most of them that I have seen where they have dug in, looked at the voter registration files, looked at which way they have registered to vote--a lot of them happen to be registered Democrats. I hope that is not the reason, but it does make you wonder: Why are they so opposed to this? If the best they could come up with is it is already against the law, well, there are a whole bunch of things that if we use that same argument, that argument would collapse. Yes, it is also against existing law to sell alcohol to minors, and yet we have laws in place to make people identify themselves with documentation establishing who they are and that they meet the criteria necessary to purchase alcohol. We have countless other instances in Federal law, in State law, in daily citizen interaction in which we have to prove that we are who we say we are in order to access that which we want to access. We don't flinch. We don't question it because we understand, when we allow somebody else access to--I don't know--our bank account, our medical records, our flight logs, our airplanes in interstate travel, our Social Security benefits, our veteran's benefits, our Federal benefits, hunting licenses, fishing licenses, ballparks, the Emmys, the Grammys, the Super Bowl, or the Democratic National Convention, bad things happen when we allow just anyone to come in, even if they don't have the right to do the thing that they want to do in the moment. It is not only not wrong for us to insist on this proof; it would be morally irresponsible of us. It would be a reckless disregard for one of the most sacred principles underlying our constitutional Republic for us to ignore it. I will not ignore that, and I intend to continue to come back here, day after day, week after week, as long as it takes until this bill is passed into law. The American Republic, the oath to the Constitution, and those who have elected to us this office require nothing less.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, here we find ourselves today, a little over 24 hours after we began consideration of the SAVE America Act, having passed the motion to proceed to that measure yesterday afternoon. It is important to me. I think it is important to the American people, who overwhelmingly support this measure and the policy changes it would bring about when enacted into law, that we keep our running tally of the arguments being raised against it. The arguments for and against it are and properly should be monitored by the American people so that they can see what is going on. This does, after all, impact them, and it impacts them in a way that goes beyond the run-of-the-mill piece of legislation. Everything we do potentially affects the American people one way or another, some things more than others. A simple sense of the Senate resolution declaring ``National Sofa Care Week'' might impact them less than something like raising taxes, for example. This one is, in some ways, upstream from all of those because the SAVE America Act deals with something very fundamental. It deals with the way that the citizens are able to interact with and influence their own government. Really, it is the fundamental premise of the founding of our Nation and the creation of our Republic. In many respects, the Declaration of Independence, whose birthday we are about to celebrate this year--we are nearly 250 years since we became our own country, since we declared independence. In the Declaration of Independence, in addition to kicking off the creation of the greatest civilization that human history has ever recorded, it also set out a vision for the type of Nation we aspire to become and, in fact, have become. It established a few basic principles. In many respects, the Declaration of Independence, while not quoted as often, while not celebrated as much, and while it is maybe a step or two detached from the day-to-day operation of the government--in some respects, the Declaration of Independence is itself the picture that we look at when we assess who we are as a country. The Constitution is the frame--the structure that holds it in place, that sets the boundaries-- but the Declaration provides the picture. The Declaration acknowledges the existence of popular sovereignty. It acknowledges the natural fundamental rights that God and nature's God lay before us; that acknowledges the fundamental truths about who we are and what government is in relation to us; that we have these self- evident truths, these God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the understanding that government exists for the well-being of human beings and not the other way around; and that whenever government becomes destructive of those same ends--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for example--it is the right, it is the duty, it is the obligation to alter or abolish that government and to establish something that will secure their freedoms. Some 11 years after that document was penned, after several years, we won the war against what was then the world's last-standing great superpower in a conflict that could be analogized to David and Goliath. We were not Goliath. We were David--we were the underdog of underdogs-- and, somehow, we managed to win that war. We established a form of government, after winning that war, under the Articles of Confederation. Instinctively, intuitively, we adopted a form of national government that was weak, that was meek, that was mild--in part because we had just come off of an experience with our mother country where we saw that the risk of tyranny was greater at the national level than it was at the local level. Meanwhile, during our Colonial period prior to the Revolution, we had had a taste of local self-rule in a way that was somewhat different than local government had been prior to that time back in the mother country. Given how far we were removed geographically, physically, in miles from the mother country, that by itself offered a degree of independence from our London-based government, and we became accustomed to it. The amount of muscle flexed by the mother country would wax and wane over time depending on what was happening back in London, throughout the British Isles, and throughout the British Empire during periods where there were a lot of debts to pay off often from wars waged on multiple continents. There were times when our British overseers became more aggressive in the way they regulated us, in the way especially that they collected taxes from us, and they became more of a brooding omnipresence during those seasons. It was during one of those seasons in which the American people had decided that they had had enough and that it was time to break our ties with the mother country and become our own country. So years passed. We won the war against all odds, against all expectations. We set up the Articles of Confederation instinctively, reflexively, creating a fairly weak form of national government, but it was so weak that it couldn't perform the basic functions that we needed a national government to perform, and it was that set of circumstances that led the individuals who would write the Constitution to try to come together. They tried to come together in 1786 in Annapolis. They couldn't form a quorum, so they abandoned that project. They reconvened the following year in the late spring of 1787. By the time they formed a quorum in 1787, the heat of the season was upon them. It was unseasonably hot, and it was muggy as Philadelphia often is during that time of year. They labored through a process that was intense, that was itself a system that you might describe almost as flying a plane while building a plane. They came together initially, ostensibly, to amend the Articles of Confederation to correct some of these inadequacies--the inability of the national government to forestall the economic balkanization that had started to take place among the former Colonies--now States--and to deal with some of the defects of the Articles of Confederation. What came out from all of that was, of course, a completely new document; and it was a document that, I believe, was written by the hands of wise men raised up by Almighty God under that very purpose, but it preserved these basic tenets--the basic tenets of popular sovereignty, of natural rights that had been articulated so well in the Declaration of Independence--and it gave them substance; it gave them form. It put in place a structure that would be there to guarantee their endurance and to make them a reality. How is this relevant to the SAVE America Act? Well, it has everything to do with the SAVE America Act. In that Constitution--predicated on the Declaration of Independence-- we made clear that the people are, in fact, the sovereigns; that this is their government. It set up these three coordinate branches of government. One branch of government--the branch of government in which we operate--makes the laws. They understood this government from the outset to be the most powerful and the most dangerous because the other two operated, would operate, or were designed to operate in some ways ancillary to this one. They certainly understood that this was the most dangerous branch, and we know that because it is the branch of government most routinely subject to regular elections. Every Member of the House of Representatives is subject to reelection every 2 years, and a third of the Members of this body are, likewise, up for reelection every 2 years. So it is no accident--it is not a mere coincidence--that the Founding Fathers subjected us to the most regular elections because we are the most dangerous branch. We make the laws. The executive branch implements and executes and carries out those laws. The judicial branch resolves disputes over the meaning of the laws that we put in place where two or more parties can't agree as to what a particular provision of Federal law--whether it is statutory or constitutional-- might mean. For all of this to work, popular sovereignty has to be maintained, and that means a close, tight connection to the American people themselves. These elections matter. It is one of the reasons why, in article I of the Constitution--the part of the Constitution that sets up the legislative branch--it gives the Congress the power to establish rules with some significant limitations but rules nonetheless that would apply nationwide with respect to the election of Federal officials--of Members of the House of Representatives and Members of the Senate. Those rules would need to have nationwide application because they involved, distinctively, national lawmaking powers. That is why we have the power to operate here to begin with. If at any point the Federal Government generally or in particular at this particular branch of government becomes untethered from the will of the people--from the elections and the decisions made in those elections concerning those who serve in the Congress of the United States, whether in the House or in the Senate--we have a problem. To the extent that our elections for these Federal offices lose their legitimacy--actual or perceived or a combination of the two--we end up with problems because the government itself starts to lose its legitimacy. And it is not just that, well, it is one of the three branches that is in question in this part of the conversation. It is that this is the wellspring of everything else that happens within the U.S. Government. What happens in the executive branch and what happens in the judicial branch are in many respects downstream from what happens in this body, in this building, whose job it is to make laws. So that is where the SAVE America Act comes into play, but it comes into play after decades of Congress previously adopting laws, enacting laws, putting laws in place that somewhat altered the landscape for how elections or, at least, Federal elections are carried out. One of those pivotal moments that we have to keep in mind as we discuss the SAVE America Act is a law that was passed in 1993--a law that really without which we wouldn't be here today having this discussion. The law passed in 1993 to which I am referring to is the National Voter Registration Act--the NVRA, also known as the motor voter law. What it does is it allows people in the United States and in any State that participates in the NVRA process--nearly all the States do, with only a very small handful of holdouts. An overwhelming, super, supermajority of the American population lives in those States that participates in it. It allows people in those participating States, when they apply for a driver's license--it is something that was unheard of, something that wouldn't have existed because none of the technology existed for it at the time of the American founding but that, today, is more or less ubiquitous among the adult, voting age American population--a driver's license. So the NVRA allows people, when applying for a driver's license in an NVRA-participating State, to show up at a DMV, and as they are filling out their driver's license application, they may simultaneously register to vote. The reason Congress had authority to do that was because of our authority under article I of the Constitution to set up rules governing these Federal elections to which I refer. It was a fairly simple concept, and it has been successful in many ways in helping a lot of people register to vote. There is some natural appeal to it in that a lot of the same information that a person has to supply in order to apply for a driver's license is information similar to what one supplies when registering to vote. So there seems to be a nice symmetry for it, and it has resulted in a whole lot of people registering to vote. A few things have changed in our laws and in our society since that law was adopted some 33 years ago. One of the things that has changed is that we do have a lot more noncitizens residing in this country right now than we did then or perhaps at any time in American history. Some 30 million-plus noncitizens reside in the United States. Between 2021 and 2025 alone, some 10 to 15 million people entered our country unlawfully during the Biden administration. That was a very significant development--a development that came about as another trend was also developing--a trend in which, in nearly every State, you can now apply for and receive a driver's license even if you are not a citizen of the United States. In 19 of those States, plus the District of Columbia, you may apply for and receive a driver's license even if you are a known illegal immigrant--someone who is in this country unlawfully. In 19 States, plus the District of Columbia, you can apply for and receive a driver's license. Something else happened in the intervening time period. Twenty years after the NVRA was passed by Congress, the Supreme Court of the United States--the highest Court of the land that sits just across the street from us--decided a case, a case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. And in that case, the Supreme Court did something that I still find puzzling, that I still find wrong--something that made the SAVE America Act very, very necessary. So I want to talk about that case for a minute and how that relates to this law, and why the reference to that law is so important in refuting some of the arguments that are made against this bill, because one of the arguments that you hear is we don't need the SAVE America Act. We don't need it because Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting, and so it doesn't happen. Or if it does happen, it is exceedingly rare, so much so that it almost never happens--more than likely to get struck by lightning twice while standing in the same place than you are to see noncitizens voting, so the argument goes. And the argument goes: Therefore, this legislation is not necessary. Go on with your lives, citizens. Don't worry about this. ``These aren't the droids you're looking for.'' Whatever argument you want to make from it, that is kind of what they say. It doesn't wash. In fact, we can reach exactly the opposite conclusion of that. Let's get back to this decision made by the Supreme Court in 2013, Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. In that case, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that States are prohibited from requiring proof of citizenship from those registering to vote in Federal elections using an NVRA supplied form, which is the form available at DMV locations across all of America, at least in those participating States, which are nearly all of the States. Now, this holding is problematic, especially considering, in many places, you are dealing with States that, even if they have reason to believe they might be registering people who are not citizens of this country, they still can't ask for documentary proof or any evidence of citizenship because the Supreme Court concluded that this was preempted out, that it was taken off the table, made something beyond the authority of the States under this law. It becomes doubly problematic in light of the fact that it is a relatively recent trend or at least a trend that most people haven't been familiar with until fairly recently. There are some places throughout the country in which noncitizens are fully permitted to vote in certain non-Federal elections, more typically in the context of local elections in certain States, including California, Maryland, Vermont, and the District of Columbia. And so while explicitly permitting noncitizen voting in that context--while doing that--you are registering people to vote in those elections who are not eligible to vote in Federal elections. So that raises the question: What steps, if any, are they taking to separate out those ballots, those voter registrations for people who are known noncitizens of the United States, making them eligible to vote in some of these local elections in those jurisdictions like California, Maryland, DC, and in Vermont? What are they doing to make sure that those same voters in those voter registrations are not able to vote in Federal elections? So why not have those jurisdictions certify that those voting in State-run Federal elections are, in fact, U.S. citizens and that they have excluded all noncitizen voters registered in those jurisdictions from voting in any Federal election? Why not enter into cooperative agreements, for example, with the Federal Government, allowing the relevant Federal Agencies to verify citizenship of anyone registered to vote, at least for purposes of voting in a Federal election? But the Democrat-run governments in those jurisdictions refuse to do this. In fact, more than half the States have currently entered into memoranda of understanding with the Federal Government, with Federal Agencies allowing for this cooperation to take place. But these Democratic States refuse to enter into any such MOUs. So while Democrats argue Federal law prohibits noncitizen voting and insist that noncitizen voting is not just rare but exceedingly rare, so rare that we shouldn't even consider it cognizable in this Chamber, it remains unknown--and, in many instances, unknowable--how many illegal votes are being counted in Federal elections or how many illegal votes cast by noncitizens might be cast in any future Federal election, including the midterm congressional elections taking place this November. There is currently no mechanism to verify the citizenship status of those registered to vote, and that is what this legislation was designed to provide--to fill this gap left quite inadvisably and unnecessarily by the Supreme Court of the United States in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. Now, look, that interpretation of the NVRA was wrong. This Congress did not preempt out State authority to verify citizenship in the NVRA. It didn't speak to that; nor did it so preempt the field that one could look at it and reasonably conclude that that is what it did. The Supreme Court was wrong. Nonetheless, a majority of the Supreme Court did reach that conclusion, and it remains the conclusive authority on that. My former boss Justice Alito wrote a beautiful, masterful dissent, like so many others that he has issued. Nonetheless, this remains the holding of the Court, and it remains the law of the land to this very day, and that is why we are here. So Federal law prohibits noncitizen voting, yes, but a prohibition without a reliable verification process is an incomplete safeguard. In fact, it almost is at risk of becoming dead-letter law in much the same way it would be if--I don't know--other laws, for example, prohibiting the sale of alcohol to underage purchasers, if that too ran on the honor system, because, ultimately, that is how this NVRA form works. After this Supreme Court decision in 2013, all a person need do is go into a DMV, say, ``I want to apply for a driver's license,'' fill out the form, and here is what their proof of citizenship looks like. It consists of checking a box saying: Yes, I would like to register to vote, and then signing their name, certifying that, yes, I am eligible to vote. Nothing to see here, no worries. ``These aren't the droids you're looking for.'' Go on with your lives. That doesn't work, and it wouldn't work the same way if we borrow, by analogy, my point about underage drinking--if all you had to do is go into--I don't know--a 7-Eleven or a liquor store or wherever people buy alcohol these days and say: I am old enough to buy alcohol. The kid is maybe 12, doesn't have to shave, never even looked at a razor, and has got a high-pitched voice that hasn't even started to crack yet. All he has to do is check a box and sign his name. He is home free. It would then be almost impossible to detect, almost impossible to punish, in law. So you can have a law on the books, but if you leave no mechanism for the detection of violations or for any type of enforcement when a violation occurs, the law becomes more or less dead letter. That would be bad in any society that decides it is a bad idea to sell alcohol to children. It is not really heading in a good place. It doesn't lead to good policy outcomes. That would be bad. But I think it has got to be infinitely worse when that law deals not with just a general issue of public policy, as underage drinking does, but is at the very headwaters of all other Federal law because this determines the citizens' relationship with their national government. If they are no longer in charge of it but somebody else is going to be, you are allowing, in effect, and inviting foreign election interference in U.S. elections. That is a big problem. We have spent a lot of time, expended a lot effort in this body, talking about the risk of foreign election interference in U.S. elections. I can think of no greater risk of foreign election interference than that which is occasioned by the NVRA and the Supreme Court's interpretation of it and the circumstances we have now, in which almost every State issues driver's licenses to noncitizens--including close to half of them issuing freely even to known illegal aliens, when we have got 30 million-plus noncitizens living in this country, 10 or 15 million of whom entered in the country unlawfully in the 4-year period between 2021 and 2025 alone. This is a recipe for disaster, and we are kidding ourselves. We are lying to our constituents if we pretend otherwise. Look, the core issue is not whether the law against noncitizen voting exists. It does. It is whether there are consistent, enforceable mechanisms to confirm eligibility, because if there are not, this law is fake, and it can't protect us; it can't protect anybody. Pointing to an existing prohibition really misses the real issue: verification and enforcement. A law on the books is only as strong as the system used to enforce it. Federal law might prohibit noncitizen voting, but without reliable verification and cooperation between the States and the Federal Government and a reasonable mechanism by which the Federal Government may gain access to or insight into the voter registration files to verify, to confirm, as to whether or not compliance is taking place, then that prohibition is not going to be enforced--certainly, not meaningfully enforced, not consistently, not reliably. So much so that, over time, the legitimacy and the perception of legitimacy of those elections is going to be badly impaired, and that is precisely where things stand today. This decision in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona created this massive structural gap. States administer Federal elections, like they do all elections. We don't want, we don't need, we never had, we never will have wholesale Federal election authority. This is appropriately left to the States. But as has been the case since the dawn of the Republic, we are allowed to make rules in the form of laws that govern what happens specifically in the conduct of Federal elections, elections for Federal office. That decision left States administering Federal elections without consistent tools to verify citizenship at the time of registration or subsequently. And, meanwhile, you have got these jurisdictions I have referenced-- including California; Washington, DC; Maryland; and Vermont--permitting noncitizens to vote in certain local elections. Well, those policies are limited to non-Federal elections on their face because otherwise they would be trampling on Federal law. They make it even more important to maintain clear, verifiable distinctions between those voter rolls used for local elections versus those that are going to be used in Federal elections. That clear separation and that possibility of verification between voter rolls is important. In fact, it is of such tantamount importance that it warrants us having this discussion today and requires us, as it were, to pass this law. It morally compels us to do so. So this current system relies far too heavily on self-attestation, just a basic honor code. ``You are on your honor'' system--don't make it up--on fragmented State processes. Instead of this fragmented and insufficient process, States should be anxious to make full use of cooperative verification tools such as data-sharing agreements or memoranda of understanding with Federal Agencies to confirm citizenship status where legally permissible. That is what Utah has done. It is also what nearly every Republican- majority State in the whole country has done. And yet the Democrat States--the blue States--refuse defiantly. That should tell us something. And this is where the policy disagreement that is at the heart of this discussion becomes even clearer. While some States have pursued data-sharing arrangements and verification partnerships with Federal Agencies, others--led by Democrats--have refused to adopt these tools, defiantly so. This is cause for great alarm. Even if improper or fraudulent noncitizen voting is rare, the absence of uniform verification means that we cannot even measure it with any degree of confidence. And that, in turn, means we have no idea whether the problem is great or small, or as some implausibly suggested, nonexistent. And that uncertainty itself undermines trust, and that trust is at the core of any system of government that relies on self- rule. Certainly, any constitutional republic founded on democratic principles, like ours, cannot afford and must never experiment with anything that can detract from that. This legislation would close that gap by strengthening verification mechanisms, encouraging consistent cooperation, and ensuring that Federal election rules are backed by enforceable processes--not just assumptions, not just faith and hope that everything will turn out well because, after all, nobody is going to do anything bad. Well, we know through sad experience and through an understanding of the human condition that faith, hope, and trust without any verification are no adequate system for any form of government. We see it depicted everywhere, and we have heard it recited from great Presidents throughout history, including most recently Presidents like Ronald Reagan have talked about the need to trust but verify. We see it in architecture and the art of this building--constant reminders that we are to trust but verify. On the balustrade designed by Constantino Brumidi just one floor beneath us right outside of this Chamber, there is this great bronze depiction of a cherub, an angel. On one side of the angel, we see a snake; on the other side, we see a dove. To me, that has always conjured biblical images of Jesus' admonition to be wise as serpents but harmless as doves. We see it in Statuary Hall, the old House Chamber--Enrico Causici's classic sculpture called ``Liberty and the Eagle.'' You have this angel with her right arm outstretched, holding a scroll, which we presume to be the Constitution--maybe the Declaration; maybe both. I don't know. On one side of her, there is an eagle preparing to take flight. On the other side, there is a bundle of sticks--known in architectural and artistic terms as a fasces. It is the symbol of ``e pluribus unum,'' that we are stronger than the sum of our parts. Normally, the fasces is bound up by leather straps or ropes. This one is bound up with a snake. It is another of these conjured biblical images--wise as serpents, harmless as doves. It is something buried deep within our DNA as Americans. It is something that inheres in any constitutional republic like ours--trust but verify. Be wise as serpents but harmless as doves. In the Book of Matthew, some of this stuff can be found in the teachings of Jesus and within the same sequence of verses that tell us to beware of wolves in sheep's clothing--again, the importance of remembering to trust but verify. So the concern is not simply that noncitizen voting is or might be or might later become widespread but that the absence of uniform verification standards makes it difficult to impossible to measure, detect, or confidently rule out ineligible participation. Fraudulent votes--cast by voters who may or may not be nice people, may or may not be friendly to the United States, may or may not be agents of a foreign power but are not citizens and are thus prohibited from voting in our elections. In that context, the legislation is framed as a preventive measure strengthening verification, improving transparency, and increasing public confidence in Federal elections. Look, if States are going to administer Federal elections, which they do, and I hope they always will, they should meet, they must meet certain baseline standards for verifying voter eligibility--including cooperation with Federal data systems where appropriate. Even if noncitizen voting turns out to be rare, the current system makes it difficult or impossible to detect that with any degree of confidence. Even if it were rare today--a point that I am not willing to concede--we have no guarantee that it would remain rare for very long. Why would it remain so when it is so easy to carry out this form of illegal voting with virtually no chance of detection, apprehension, or penalty as a result? A law that strengthens verification and ensures consistent cooperation is not redundant; it is not unnecessary; it is not a nuisance. It is a necessary, indispensable step to make existing prohibitions enforceable and credible. So what else did they argue? Well, they have a whole bunch of arguments. One of the arguments that they make goes something like this. It relies on the fact that in 2023, the Brennan Center for Justice partnered with VoteRiders, the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland, and Public Wise to survey Americans about what identification they possess and what they know about voter ID laws in their State. They asked respondents whether they had documents that proved their citizenship--a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers, as the case may be--whether they had them and whether they had them readily available. Their research indicated that more than 9 percent of American citizens of voting age, or 21.3 million people, don't have proof of citizenship readily available. Now, they note that there could be many reasons for this--that documents might be in the home of another family member or in a safe deposit box. At least 3.8 million--or so they concluded--don't have these documents at all, often because they were lost, destroyed, or stolen. So on that basis, some are arguing that the SAVE America Act, if enacted, would somehow disenfranchise 20 million or so Americans. Well, let's see if we can disentangle this argument so we can respond to it. I have some questions. First, did the Brennan Center verify the citizenship of the respondents? What if only noncitizens responded to the survey? If that were the case, then certainly those folks wouldn't have access to those documents that prove citizenship because they wouldn't be citizens. Second, let's assume that they positively verified the citizenship of those surveyed. Even if that were the case and even if those surveyed did not have access to the documents noted in the survey, it would not change the reality that this legislation does not disenfranchise them or anyone who is a citizen or keep any citizen from registering to vote. The bill allows for use of more than just the documents noted in the survey, and importantly, it includes multiple fail-safe mechanisms to provide flexibility and to ensure that those who may not have their documents due to whatever mishap or misfortune they may have encountered--to make sure that they can still register to vote with the help of an affidavit submitted to an election official, an affidavit setting forth the basic facts surrounding their birth if they are natural-born citizens or surrounding their naturalization if they are naturalized citizens. So to the Brennan Center and to those organizations and individuals who have been peddling this false narrative of voter suppression and disenfranchisement--which, remember, is a really aggressive claim suggesting that 20, 21 million Americans will be disenfranchised if this becomes law--that is a lie. That is an absolute lie. It is just not true. To those peddling this lie, I strongly suggest--I implore you to check your cross tabs, verify your survey participants, do your homework, and more than anything, even if you don't spend any time with the survey at all or inspect the methodology, read the bill. If you just read the bill, you will see right there in black and white, in plain English, in the bill now before us that was recently passed by the House of Representatives that we proceeded to yesterday-- go to page 12, line 22. Right there in black and white, you will see this is so much easier than anyone is making it out to be. Those who are lying about the bill are ignoring this provision altogether because whether you are missing one document or you are missing all of them, either because your house burned down or your dog ate them or you never had them to begin with or you belong to some religious sect that doesn't allow you to keep such documents in the home--I don't know if such religious beliefs exist, but if they do, somebody might raise them. They can still get around this because all they have to do is, when they register to vote, swear on an affidavit setting forth the basic facts behind their citizenship, and the burden then shifts to the State election official to confirm or refute those basic assertions to which they have sworn under penalty of perjury are true, and they can carry it from there. You don't have to shell out a dime. You don't have to go back to grandma's house and dig through a mountain of documents in order to find the magic documents. Now, I will note here that there are other circumstances in which you have to prove who you are. There are other circumstances in which Americans routinely are required to not only show who they are with a photo ID but to prove their U.S. citizenship. Perhaps the most common of these can be found in the form known as the I-9. Any American who has ever worked as an employee has filled out an I-9. You cannot get a job and begin new employment as an employee without filling out the I-9. When you fill out the I-9, the I-9 is very, very prescriptive, and it is very strict. There are a few ways you can establish citizenship. One is through a U.S. passport establishing the fact of your citizenship. If you don't have a U.S. passport, as many people don't, you can supply a birth certificate and, with the birth certificate, a form of government- issued photo ID. In some instances, a social security card gets factored in. But it is very rigid. It is very prescriptive. It is very, very important for us to remember that this is far easier than anything in connection with the I-9 form. So if you have ever had a job, you have already had to prove your citizenship, if you are an American citizen, before starting that job, and you have had to do so under a set of standards far more exacting, far less forgiving, far less permissive than what we are dealing with right here. So this whole argument about 21 million people being disenfranchised--well, I mean, even 1 person being disenfranchised--it is a lie. You have to willfully, consciously disregard and lie about the existence of the text beginning on page 12, line 22 of this bill. Another argument that gets raised is that the right to vote is constitutionally protected as a right and it should not be restricted by requiring documentation. Now, this is an interesting argument. There are lots of constitutional protections that we have. Yes, we have multiple constitutional protections that deal in one way or another with the right to vote. Voting is important. The Constitution not only protects that, but it is built around your right to vote. But it doesn't mean, it can't mean, has never meant, and will never mean that the government can't take steps to make sure that people are voting lawfully and that they are entitled to vote. To suggest otherwise would make a mockery of all elections. The fact is that we have done everything we can to make this bill comply with our mantra: Let's make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. There are some in this body who are perfectly content with forgetting the second half of that equation altogether and saying anything that makes it anything other than easy to vote must be unconstitutional because it is a constitutionally protected right. It is hard to identify a single constitutional right that is not without some limitation dealing with, among other things, curtailing the risk of fraud, of manipulating a right to harm or injure others. There are plenty of other constitutionally protected rights where you have to comply with steps in order to exercise them. The Second Amendment, for example, protects your right to bear arms. Yet, if you want to buy a firearm from any federally licensed firearms dealer, you have to fill out a fairly onerous set of forms; you have to prove who you are; you have to establish under penalty of perjury that you are entitled to own a gun, that you don't fall under any of the prohibited categories under 18 U.S.C. section 922(g), either as a convicted felon, as somebody who has been declared by a court of competent jurisdiction to be mentally insane, as an alien illegally or unlawfully inside the United States, or any of the other categories of prohibited persons under 18 U.S.C. section 922(g). You have to submit this information with a government-issued photo ID, and then you have to wait--sometimes minutes, sometimes hours--in order for a background check to be completed. Is this a burden on your Second Amendment right to bear arms? Yes, but it doesn't make it unconstitutional--just like whatever incremental burden that you face in establishing that you are who you say you are and that you are entitled to vote in Federal elections doesn't undo your constitutional right to vote. And it doesn't make this unconstitutional that we are just making sure that we don't make a mockery of our own elections. (Mr. RICKETTS assumed the Chair.) So the fact that something is a constitutionally protected right doesn't mean that you have a right to do it in a completely uninhibited manner. I don't know anyone who believes that. I don't think I have ever heard anyone make that argument here in this Chamber--at least not seriously. And, in fact, making it easy to cheat directly undermines the very same right that these people purport to be espousing because it undermines the right of law-abiding Americans to cast their vote and to not have their vote diluted, offset, rendered meaningless by noncitizen voting. We just want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. We can and we must accomplish both. We can't skip over either one. Another argument is that the SAVE America Act somehow violates what they refer to as States' rights, which is a term I hate. It is a misnomer. States don't have rights; States have authority. Authority is the opposite of a right. A right is a privilege against authority, whether by a State, by the Federal sovereign, or otherwise. So States don't have rights. I don't like it. It conjures George Wallace images, and it is a complete misnomer. So let's refer to that as federalism, State sovereign authority, the relationship between the States and the Federal Government, whatever you want. Don't call it States' rights. But a lot of people are calling it that. And the people calling it that this week are the people opposed to this bill for completely ridiculous reasons that overlook the purpose of the bill, the text of the bill, and the constitutional structure in which we find it. Look, States work to protect individual rights, with the authority granted to them by their State Constitution and within the bounds set by the U.S. Constitution. And, unfortunately, Federal law currently prevents States from using this authority to protect voters and the integrity of our elections when it comes to protecting the rights of voters by excluding noncitizen voter participation. This law that we have been referring to is an existing Federal law, the NVRA--the National Voter Registration Act--which the Supreme Court decided prohibits the States from requiring proof of citizenship, even though the statute itself says nothing about that. That is the Supreme Court's conclusive, binding interpretation of it. It needs to be changed in response to this ruling. It is a statutory interpretation, not a constitutional one, so we have the power to do that. It doesn't require a constitutional amendment--just a simple act of Congress--to do it. So what I am saying is that, for those invoking federalism, the sovereign authority of the States, it is just nonsense. This is absurd. If what they are saying is that the Federal Government has no place operating here because it involves elections and elections are conducted by States, even when they involve Federal office, then the true remedy there would be then let's undo the NVRA because the NVRA is a Federal law that imposes obligations on States. Nobody is calling for that. I am not calling for that here. But what I am saying is you can't accept the NVRA as law, which we all do, and simultaneously say that Congress may not make laws governing the election of Federal officials because that might infringe on the authority of the States. That is an absurd argument. The only reason this bill became necessary is because we have an existing Federal law that has been badly interpreted, is prohibiting the States from making any inquiry into a voter's identity and citizenship, thus thwarting the purpose of Federal laws prohibiting noncitizen voting. Here is another charge. This is an interesting one. Another accusation, another argument being raised against the SAVE America Act is that this legislation would establish a private right of action that could be used to penalize hard-working election workers. OK. That sounds scary to a lot of people if you don't do any inquiry, if you don't do any digging into what the law actually says because what we all imagine when we hear that--we think of these great people, whether they are employed full time by the State or whether they work during election season, either to help people register to vote or help them cast their vote or otherwise, and it would seem unfair to put them in the position where they could become subject to litigation over it. But when you look into what the law actually says and the context in which it arises, it is not scary at all. It would be scary if we didn't have it. It would be unthinkable to not have it because otherwise the law could become completely meaningless and unenforceable, absent some sprawling Federal bureaucracy, which we are all loathe to create another one of those. The fact is that private rights of action against election workers engaging in voter fraud already exist under Federal law--the same set of Federal laws that we are amending and that we were required to amend in this very act, making the SAVE America Act necessary to begin with. Those private rights of action already exist under these existing Federal laws. This provision in the SAVE America Act merely extends the same provision that exists elsewhere in the NVRA to violations of the additional requirements of this legislation. And it would be insane not to do it because, again, we would render that dead letter, just as we are rendering dead letter the criminal prohibition against noncitizen voting. That is not an argument against this bill; it is an argument for it. Another argument is that Americans are simply not comfortable with government management of personal information for use in the database that would be used to help give meaning to all this: the Department of Homeland Security's SAVE system. This is a really interesting argument. Look, the information that the Federal Government uses to verify citizenship is already in the Federal Government's hands. It is already available for its use. The State voter data is not fully made available to the Federal Government under existing law but should be in order to verify the citizenship of those voting in State-run Federal elections. The U.S. Government is the only entity on planet Earth that has data already whereby we can ascertain the citizenship or lack thereof of anyone in this country; and it would be an absolute absurdity, an absolute shame, an absolute miscarriage of justice to say that the Federal Government can't use that, it can't maintain that database, and it can't use it in such a way as to prohibit noncitizen voter participation in the context of Federal elections. This is absolutely crazy. Now, if we want to start talking about the Federal Government having too much data about us, look, join the club. Sign me up for that parade. It bothers me too. But it is really absurd to say that this one can't be used, especially because the citizenship data is already there. The Federal Government has already got all kinds of information on you, on me, on every one of us--more than I wish it had. But if there is anything, any set of data the Federal Government ought to have and maintain and be able to use, it is data on who is a citizen and who is not. Show me any American who believes otherwise, any American outside of this building, and I will be shocked. Another argument is that the SAVE system is somehow a DOGE-like system, given to the same Department that runs ICE. Oh, horrors. Look, for people who think that we should have immigration laws but we can't enforce them, it makes perfect sense why they want to oppose the SAVE America Act. They want to render vestigial our criminal prohibitions against noncitizen voting, just like they want to render vestigial our immigration laws. In any event, this is a terribly misleading correlation. The SAVE system verifies citizenship and highlights ineligible voters. Citizenship verification happens across government. It does happen. It will continue to happen. It must happen. That is one of the fundamental duties of any government is to know and have access to information to ascertain whether somebody is a citizen. Verifying citizenship through the SAVE system would protect Federal voters, would protect actual American citizens who are allowed to vote while noncitizens are not. Another argument: Well, if you don't have a passport, you won't be able to vote. And passports cost money. You are going to have to shell out close to 200 bucks in order to get one, and this is going to end up disenfranchising everybody who doesn't have a passport. This is one of the most pernicious lies in the entire pantheon of paranoid-fantasy- derived lies against the SAVE America Act. See page 14, line 15, of the bill. If you don't have documentation, you don't have a problem. Page 14, line 15, is in the substitute amendment. In the text of the original House-passed vehicle which we are now considering, I believe that is on page 12, line 22. Again, maybe your house burnt down and all your documents burned with the house. Maybe your dog ate your passport, your birth certificate, and every other document or maybe all that stuff got stolen when you went to Europe or Mexico. Maybe your Aunt Madge took off with all of them before she went crazy and sent all of it to the dry cleaners and then ended up having all of it burned for some inexplicable reason. No worries. Even if all that happens to you, there is this attestation process administered by State officials to put the burden back on the State--not on you--without a single additional document other than what you provide to them in the form of a sworn affidavit, made under penalty of perjury. You put the obligation on them to complete the process without a single scrap of official additional documentation. Another argument is the SAVE America Act would somehow disenfranchise millions of citizens, including and especially women and persons of color. Look, no one--no one in this body, Democrat or Republican, should ever disrespect the dignity of racial minorities or women by claiming that they are somehow incapable of obtaining an ID and proof of citizenship. An ID is necessary in daily life to drive a car, to get a job, to board a plane, to open a bank account, or even to attend the Democratic National Convention. Yes, you have to show who you are. Yes, you have to prove that you have the right to be there, to attend and participate in the Democratic National Convention. No, you will not get in; no, you will not be able to participate in that because you don't have the right to do that. You have to have the proper documentation to prove who you are. So if this is somehow Jim Crow, then so, too, is the Democratic Party, the party which, after all, is the original gangster behind the Jim Crow movement. So this is stunning to me that anyone from that party, the party of Jim Crow, the party that subjected so many millions of Americans, over so many decades, to hateful, racist laws, prohibiting them from participating in the most basic activities of human existence, let alone their participation in civic life, in government, in education--for them to call this Jim Crow is inexcusable. It is illogical. It does not reflect well on them, and shame on anyone who makes that comparison because that is not what that is. Moreover, the soft bigotry of low expectations comes into play in here and to every woman and to every racial minority I know is deeply, deeply offensive. Shame on anyone who makes this argument. It is not credible. Mr. President, I have been passed a note from my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from Minnesota. The distinguished Senator from Minnesota needs to speak. I don't know whether this is in the form of a question to the speaker--

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, I appreciate the skill and the passion that my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from the State of Washington brings to the table on this. I appreciate her thoroughness in making the case that she has made to the Senate. I would like to address a few of those items which I think call for a response. One of the arguments that she points to--all of the arguments that she points to in one way or another--reminds me of how important it is to turn back to the central objective of what we are trying to achieve here: Let's make it easy to vote but hard to cheat. Again and again, she refers to the desire to make it easy to vote, but as to the ``hard to cheat'' point, she goes off on a number of tangents, and I would like to address a number of those right now to make sure we set the record clear. One of the arguments she makes right out of the gate has to do with the fact that this is a constitutionally protected right, and she is right there. We have a number of freestanding constitutional protections in various parts of the Constitution that protect your right to vote. The fact that it is a constitutionally protected right doesn't mean that it doesn't matter that we make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. In fact, it makes it that much more important to do it. The fact that something is a constitutionally protected right doesn't mean that it has to be uninhibited. In fact, very often, as is the case with voting, if we make it easy to cheat, then your constitutionally protected right to vote will mean less and less with each passing election, and our failure to take these risks seriously further undermines the public's perception of the legitimacy of the rights in question. Now, the mere fact that something is a constitutionally protected right doesn't mean you can't make it harder for people to break the law in gaining access to it. Otherwise, there would be all sorts of things that would be off in our society. Take for example the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. Yes, we have a constitutionally protected right to bear arms, and it is a fundamental right that is available to individuals. Yet, when you decide to exercise that right by going into a federally licensed firearms dealer to purchase a firearm, guess what you have to do? You have to produce identification, and you have to wait a period of time. It might take a few minutes or it might take a few hours, but you have to wait until they run your identification and your information through some databases to make sure you are eligible to purchase a gun. It still is a constitutionally protected right. It doesn't cease to be a constitutionally protected right simply by virtue of doing that. Never in a million years would you see my colleagues on the other side of the aisle or many in my party, I assume, saying: OK. This is all we need to do in order to deal with this issue since the right to bear arms is protected by the Constitution. Yes, we have laws about who may purchase what firearm and when and under what circumstance and when they might be disqualified based on a prior conviction or otherwise from purchasing a firearm. All we need is a signature because, according to my colleague's logic, a signature is all the identification you need. Well, is it? Well, signatures can be forged. With increasing ease, they can be forged. In other circumstances, they can be presumed not to be checked, and in some cases, that might pan out to be more true than in others. But nobody would seriously suggest--particularly those who like these background check laws--they wouldn't be content with somebody just signing their name even if it said: I hereby declare under penalty of perjury that I am entitled to purchase this firearm, that I am an adult, that I am a U.S. citizen, and that I have not been convicted of a felony offense which would disqualify me under 18 USC section 922(g); nor do I trigger any of the other exclusionary factors articulated in various subsections of 922(g) or under any other Federal law. The signature wouldn't do it there, and that is a constitutionally protected right. This is a constitutionally protected right, but we are still making it, yes, easy to vote and hard to cheat. You have to have both. You don't get that if you have a mere signature. It is so, too, with the purchase of alcohol or tobacco by minors. Even if you had people sign something saying, ``I hereby attest by signing this under penalty of perjury that I am, in fact, entitled to purchase alcohol; I am, in fact, at least 21 years old''--we wouldn't do that. Why? Well, it would be really hard to enforce the law at that point. When we turn to the examples--and I tried to count the number of times she said it, but I think she said ``very, very, very, very, very, very, very little fraud in elections.'' OK. I understand that. Election fraud is extremely difficult to detect and therefore is rarely prosecuted. There have been very few cases of voter fraud actually having been discovered--detected--and prosecuted through to completion. Well, likewise, with other laws, if all you were required to do was to check a box and sign your name, there would be a lot of other instances of legal wrongdoing that would also be very hard to detect if that would be all you had to provide. We have this known vulnerability in our laws here, and Heaven help us all if we don't acknowledge the vulnerabilities that we face and take reasonable steps to close those loopholes. The fact that we are requiring documents here--yes, it adds a step. Now, there are a couple of things I need to be clear about. No. 1, if you are already registered to vote, this doesn't undo your existing voter registration. We are not going to make hundreds of millions of Americans who are already registered to vote go back and start the process over again--that wouldn't make any sense--but it would apply to new voter registrations. If you move or if you register to vote in a new State or a new precinct and you have to establish a new voter registration file after this becomes law, then, yes, you would have to do that. But, again, if you are an American who has ever had a job anywhere or who has started any new job at any point in your career with a new employer, you have already had to supply the same documentation. In fact, you have had to supply a much more rigid set of documents than what this requires because this, unlike that, allows you to prove it even if you have not a single document--not a single one of those. Again, going back to page 12, line 22, and the sentences and paragraphs that follow, it makes it abundantly clear. Even if you are missing all of it, we have taken that into account, and we can put the onus back on the State to go back and prove you wrong. That is very different than just checking a box and signing your name. Even if it does have some warnings attached to it, that is very different than having to supply the necessary information about how and where you were born. If you are a natural-born citizen, meaning if you were a U.S. citizen as of the moment of your birth, based on the circumstances surrounding your birth--either born on U.S. soil or born elsewhere to U.S. citizen parents--then you have to establish that. That is very different than simply checking a box and signing your name. Yes, signing your name can be used to identify a person under some circumstances, but it is a lot less information than we are required to provide elsewhere. She then makes this about what she refers to as States' rights. I don't like to use that term because I think it is a misnomer. It also conjures images of a bygone Jim Crow era in which the Democratic Party subjected substantial swaths of the American population to a set of racist, evil, exclusionary laws. It has a George Wallace connotation to it that I don't like. Besides that, States don't have rights; they have authority. ``Authority'' is sort of the inverse polar opposite of a right. It is the ying to the yang that is a right. States have authority; people have rights. Rights are a check on authority, and that is what we are talking about here. Regardless of whatever you want to call that--State sovereign authority, federalism, whatever you want to call it--it is not implicated here. Remember, this objection is coming from the same party that, no less than 5 years ago, through a vehicle that, in the Congress empaneled between 2021 and 2023, was run by Democrats during a Democratic administration, under the auspices of a bill commonly known at the time as H.R. 1, tried to undertake a wholesale takeover of our Federal voting and election system. Among other things, it would have subjected every voting jurisdiction in the United States to the status that today we equate only with section 5 jurisdictions. What that means is, anytime any voting jurisdiction in the United States anywhere--no matter how large or small, whether Tribal, local, State, or otherwise--wanted to redistrict, they would have to go to a political appointee at the U.S. Department of Justice and obtain preclearance. It is a ``Mother, may I?'' of sorts from Uncle Sam and Aunt Sam. It is something that is as fundamentally un-American, something as fundamentally contrary to federalism as we know it. This is the same party that is now making the federalism objection to this. While we are on this Federal objection to this, let's remember the whole reason this is necessary in the first place is because of an existing Federal law passed in 1993 by Congress--the National Voter Registration Act. So the whole reason it is necessary to begin with is because of an existing Federal law. Don't tell me this is an insult to federalism, especially if you are one of those people from that party who supported a wholesale takeover of our entire electoral system as recently as 4 or 5 years ago. None of us should be surprised that leftist media establishments in the mainstream news media have come out against this because, let's face it, they are leftists; they are hardcore Democrats. Of course they don't want this, and of course they use this inflammatory language in their headlines. ``Ah, this is a threat to our democracy everywhere.'' ``This will disenfranchise 21 million American voters.'' Do you want to change that sentence to make it correct? Well, it could be a whole lot of people who are not citizens. The only people we don't want voting are those who are not citizens and are not eligible to vote. That is all this does--easy to vote, hard to cheat--using documentary standards that are far more generous, far more flexible, and far more easy to comply with than any other system we have access to. You can still do it. You can still satisfy this standard of proving citizenship even if all your documents have suddenly disappeared. You supply the necessary information under oath, under penalty of perjury, and then it becomes the State's burden to either confirm or refute those things, but with this specificity, we find it a lot easier to prevent fraud. As far as chilling voter activity, we have data from a number of different studies showing that in States that have adopted voter ID laws, you don't drive down voter participation. In some cases, it goes up. It works out perfectly well. We need not, we ought not, we must not fear this. If we fear this particular issue, we risk running afoul of that which we hold most dear about our electoral system. Sometimes we get confused about what we ought to fear. We see this in nature. We fear the snake. We don't fear the deer. Yet, a few years ago, my wife and I were having this conversation. I don't know how we got off on this tangent, but we decided to look up your chances of dying as a result of an interaction with a rattlesnake as compared to your chances of dying as a result of an interaction with a deer. Now, deer are cute. Who doesn't love Bambi and Bambi's mom and Bambi's dad? You know, it is all so great. Your chances are way higher of being killed by Bambi than they are by a rattlesnake. Yet we fear the rattlesnake because it is creepy and it is scary. When we fear the wrong things, we leave ourselves vulnerable to that which can harm us. And perhaps we don't fear enough what happens when our elections lose their credibility because we don't take reasonable safeguards to make sure that only those who are legally entitled to vote in them are, in fact, allowed to vote. So as far as the private right of action goes, that private right of action exists under previously enacted laws. I believe that one applies as a result of the original NVRA, and, possibly, some of it could be under the Help America Vote Act. But there are existing Federal laws that make that exact private right of action available, and all this does is it extends it to the obligations that arise under the SAVE America Act. And those, too, are generous. They are generous to those State officials that are complying with them. If somebody identifies a problem with the way that the law is being implemented, if they are not complying with the terms of the SAVE America Act, there is a notice requirement to the State elections official in question. And it gives a certain period of time. I don't remember whether it is 30, 60, or 90 days. I think some of it may depend on the exact context. They have the ability to cure the harm or make the argument back as to why they are not, in fact, violating it. So there is nothing scary about this private right of action. It is just a way of, without growing the bureaucracy, making sure that there is a means by which you can procure a court order requiring compliance with the law so that it doesn't become dead letter. Look, on personal information--the Department of Homeland Security wielding personal information--well, if that is the case, there are all kinds of things. And if that is on the table--I mean, a lot of Americans don't much like how much personal information the IRS has, and that gets leaked sometimes. A lot of people don't like how much personal information can be found in the databases that are used in connection with the background checks that one has to go through when purchasing a gun. That is just the beginning of it. There are all kinds of things where people are not comfortable with the government having access to too much information. Look, I get it. I am one of those people. I don't like it either. But the fact is the government does have that information. Why not allow the government to use that information lawfully to make sure that those who have a particular right are the only ones who are allowed to wield it, so that it doesn't get cheapened or diluted or bastardized by those who would flagrantly violate the law. At the end of the day, this is, in fact, about making it easy to vote and hard to cheat. The Democrats in this Chamber seem, so far, to be very comfortable with the first half of that equation but not the second half. We have to pay attention to both. We ignore either to our own detriment and the detriment of those we represent.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, we often consider difficult, complicated issues in this Chamber. It happens all the time. In fact, if it is not complicated, we sometimes wonder why we are devoting time to any particular matter. Very often, these are issues that don't enjoy consensus among the American people. We might have a degree of consensus over the existence of a problem but a thousand different ways of tackling that problem. In other instances, there might not even be consensus on whether a problem exists or what that problem might be. This is not one of those moments. This issue could not be simpler. American elections are for American citizens. This is an assertion that is so elementary that its controversy is itself the only remarkable feature. There are 83 percent of Americans who support voter ID--83 percent. Out of 100 people, 83 of them believe that we need that. That is 95 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Democrats. That is still 71 out of every 100 Democrats who agree with us. Now think about that for a minute. How many issues in this country unite 83 percent of all Americans? This is one of them. For months now, I have been working with colleagues, working with President Trump, and with citizens across this great country--citizens who have rallied behind this effort in numbers and with a degree of intensity that I have not seen in my entire time in the Senate, and I am now in my 16th year here. All of them are begging us to pass the SAVE America Act, not in a nonchalant, haphazard fashion but instead in a way that indicates they really feel it--that they feel it strongly, in fact. They understand the need for this. I have heard one thing over and over and over again: Why would anyone oppose this? Who would oppose the notion that only American citizens can vote in American elections? In this room, I can't imagine any of us would think that we, in not being citizens of the United Kingdom or of Yemen or of Japan or of the Philippines, could vote in elections in any of those countries. Why? Well, because we are not citizens of those countries. If we happened to visit those countries, would that change anything? No, not a thing. What if we lived there for a few years but didn't become citizens? Still not. It still makes no difference. If we are not citizens, we wouldn't dream of being able to vote in their elections. Why should American elections be any different? Why should someone who is not a citizen of the United States of America be able to vote in a U.S. election? Well, of course, they shouldn't. Look, the SAVE America Act takes those dynamics into account, and it says something very simple. It says that only American citizens should be able to vote in U.S. elections. And it does something very important. It makes it easy to vote and hard to cheat. You need both of those ingredients to have a good election. It has got to be easy to vote and hard to cheat. You can achieve both at the same time just as you can chew gum and walk at the same time, but this is a whole lot more important than being able to chew gum while walking. In any free society that purports to have a representative government of any form, especially in a constitutional republic like ours, you must have both. You can't cut corners on either one. That is common sense, and yet here we are. If you don't accept that only Americans should vote in American elections, then what exactly are you defending? Tell us why you want to make it easier for noncitizens to vote in our elections. But, so far, what we have heard from Democrats is not that. What we have heard from Democrats in the U.S. Senate Chamber--and I say here ``in the U.S. Senate Chamber'' because that is different than Democrats nationwide wherein more than 7 out of 10 agree that we need reforms like what the SAVE America Act would bring about. It is only here in the Capital City of this great Nation; it is only here in this building--in Congress, in the House of Representatives and in the Senate--that this is considered volatile or somehow unacceptable by Democrats. It is only these Democrats who inhabit these hallways and who serve in these two legislative Chambers who regard this as somehow phenomenally controversial, and what we have heard from these Democrats here is nothing but fearmongering and outright lies. Now, whether they themselves know that they are lies or they are just believing lies others have told them, that is a topic for a different day. I am not going to try to vet that out here. None of us can know what any other person is thinking or feeling, but I can assure you that these are, at their core, the product of fearmongering and of lies. They told us that requiring proof of citizenship to vote in U.S. elections is somehow ``racist.'' The minority leader himself called this bill Jim Crow 2.0. Wow--what an accusation, what a crazy, absurd, ridiculous, and, frankly, insulting accusation. I think he owes the American people an explanation as to how requiring proof of citizenship to vote is tantamount to racial segregation laws. Racial segregation laws, under the banner of Jim Crow, the Democratic Party itself forced on a substantial portion of the American population over many decades in one of the most evil--evil legislative tirades in American history for a prolonged period of time. Why he would want to draw any parallel to Jim Crow is beyond the ability of this Senator to understand. I don't get it. Frankly, the American people aren't buying it, nor should they. They have told us that requiring photo ID somehow ``disenfranchises'' women. I can't think of anything more racist. I can't think of anything more misogynistic than saying people of color or women, whether married women or otherwise, are incapable of obtaining an ID and proof of citizenship. That is frankly insulting. It is something that millions of Americans do every single day--often many times a day--to get a job, to board a plane, to open a bank account, to enroll in school, to shovel snow in New York City; for that matter, to go to the Oscars, the Emmys, the Grammys, the Super Bowl, almost any theatrical production, and, yes, to get into the Democratic National Convention. To get into the Democratic National Convention, you have to show photo ID, and you have to establish credentials showing that you have a right to be there and participate in that event. So if the SAVE America Act is Jim Crow 2.0, then so, too, is the Democratic Party itself; so, too, are the campaign rallies hosted by my friend and colleague the Senator from Georgia, up for reelection this year, who recently advertised a campaign rally and announced on the same website that to get into said campaign rally, you would have to show photo ID. We are not getting the story. We are not getting the complete story. We are not getting anything close to the complete story, and we are going to talk about that tonight. Look, millions upon millions of married women navigate documentation requirements every single day for a whole host of reasons. To suggest that Americans, that women, that people of color are somehow incapable of doing something so basic is deeply, fundamentally insulting, and it is beneath the dignity of this Chamber and all who occupy it for these arguments to be raised here in this hallowed Chamber. I can't think of anything more patronizing, more dismissive, more out of touch than telling Americans that they can't meet the same basic requirements that govern so many other parts of daily life--not just some people's daily lives but the daily lives of pretty much everyone in this country. This bill does not suppress voters. It protects them. It treats them like capable citizens in a functioning republic and ensures that their votes actually do matter. And let's be honest. There is only one reason to oppose this bill and what it does--one reason: They want to cheat. This bill makes it easy to vote and hard to cheat. They are happy with exactly half of the equation and not the other half. But you can't have both and have a functioning representative government. You can't have half of the equation and have a successful constitutional republic. It doesn't work. Here is today's headline from POLITICO. I am not exaggerating this. I don't write the news; I just report it. Why climate champions are sweating the ``SAVE America Act.'' It goes on to say: If Republicans do ultimately succeed in getting a version of the bill passed, environmentalists and some Democrats fear it could damage the democratic process ahead of November's midterm elections and suppress the will of climate-minded voters and candidates. The level of hyperbolic panic, of paranoid fantasy from the Democrats and the media enterprises they control is telling, and it is stunning, because the only way this bill changes election outcomes is if those outcomes have been dependent on votes that shouldn't have been counted to begin with. If that is part of the plan, then I can understand the panic. That is the reality. We are closer than ever to getting this bill across the finish line. Just a few hours ago, we voted to proceed to this bill, and that is because the American people have made their voices heard. They have shown up. They have spoken out. They have demanded that our elections-- their elections--be protected. Failure here is not an option, and it must never become such because if we cannot secure the most basic element of our elections, of any free and fair system of elections, we are inviting a level of distrust that this country cannot afford. I would say this to my Republican colleagues: If we do not act on an issue that commands this level of support, not just from our own base but from the entire spectrum among the American people--this level of support--we should not be surprised when the American people lose confidence in our willingness to fight for them if we fail to get it done and to do everything along the way in order to ensure its passage. This is our moment. Stand for a simple principle. Let the American people see who is willing to defend their sacred right to vote and who is not. I am confident that the principle at the heart of this legislation will, in fact, prevail. It will prevail because it is fair, because it is right, because it reflects the truth, because it reflects how our laws are written and how human nature interacts with our system of laws. This is the line. We have drawn it, and we must defend it. You are either willing to say that only American citizens should vote in American elections or you are not. There is no middle ground. Sure, we can talk about whether this word or that word would most capably accomplish what we need it to. We can argue over a semicolon here or a comma there. But unless we are talking about how to achieve the same objective of making sure that only Americans vote in American elections, we will have missed the boat in a very dangerous way. The American people are, to be sure, paying attention--very close attention, indeed--because they understand what is at stake. They understand that if their vote is diluted, it is taken from them; if their elections are compromised--if their elections are compromised--their voice is diminished. That is what this bill prevents. So let's stop pretending this is complicated. It is not. If you believe, as I do, that only American citizens should vote in American elections, then this should be the easiest vote of your entire legislative career--not just that which has passed already but that which you are likely to see ever while you are here. Now, sure, there are all sorts of votes about, you know, recognizing National Sofa Care Month or this or that awareness resolution, but in the world of actual laws coming into being in this Chamber, you are not going to find something much similar--much more true to this principle of being clear, of getting the message right, than this one, of this being a very simple equation. We have to get this done, and we have to get it right. While we are on this topic, I want to talk a little bit about why this bill is necessary and walk you through some of the legislative history, some of the history in American law and American society that has made this bill so necessary and so timely today, because there have been times in our history when this wasn't the same risk that it is today. But it will help if we set the table by explaining how we got here and why it is that we need this so badly, so immediately, right now. Let's start with something that happened about 33 years ago when Congress passed a law back in 1993 called the National Voter Registration Act. It is frequently abbreviated as the NVRA and sometimes known also as the motor voter law. The NVRA says in essence that in any State that chooses to participate, as the overwhelming majority of States do--nearly every State participates--in any participating State, anybody going into a DMV to apply for a driver's license may simultaneously register to vote if they would like to do so. It made it easier for more people to register to vote doing something that most Americans--the overwhelming majority of all Americans do from time to time, which is get a driver's license. So you could go in, and while filling out the paperwork, after establishing who it is that you are, you could also say, ``I would like, with this same paperwork, to register to vote'' because, after all, they have your address, they have your name, and they have other information about who you are. So the same State that is processing your driver's license application can also in that same moment harness the power of a State to register you to vote. That is one of many things that made the NVRA appealing. A couple of things have happened since the NVRA passed that warrant our careful consideration of this legislation now and that make this legislation so very necessary. For one thing, over time, you have seen different trends in States in how they issue driver's licenses, to whom they issue them. There have been times when States didn't necessarily have occasion to even consider the question of whether or under what circumstances to give driver's licenses to those who are either not citizens of the United States or perhaps, in addition to being not citizens of the United States, are here illegally. As some of this became a little bit more complicated when legislation passed in 2005 dealing with the REAL ID issues, with this move toward establishing a REAL ID driver's license that could have some indication as to whether somebody was a citizen, States have paid careful attention to that. Most States today--the overwhelming majority of States today will issue a driver's license to a person who is not a citizen of the United States. In I believe 19 States, plus the District of Columbia, you could get a driver's license even if you are not just a noncitizen but a noncitizen who is here without documentation, without legal permission, authority to be here. If you are an illegal immigrant, you can still get one in 19 States, plus the District of Columbia. So if you can do that, if you can walk into a DMV in any of those jurisdictions and check a box and sign your name, in theory, you can register to vote. Well, some of this came to a head about 20 years after the NVRA was passed when, in 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States decided a case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. In that case, the Supreme Court of the United States conclusively interpreted the NVRA as preempting out any State authority that might have otherwise existed when it comes to requiring proof of citizenship of someone registering to vote, using an NVRA form at a DMV while applying for a driver's license. In other words, they said: Even if a State is worried about perhaps inadvertently registering noncitizens to vote, even if in certain circumstances they might have affirmative reason to believe that one or more voters are not citizens of the United States, they may not ask for any proof of citizenship in that moment. Now, I believe that interpretation was misguided. I believe it was wrong as a matter of statutory construction. Justice Alito, my former boss, wrote a masterful dissent explaining why the majority got it wrong. Nonetheless, the majority ruling still stands. It conclusively interpreted the NVRA as prohibiting the States from making any effort to figure out whether somebody was a citizen as long as they were using the NVRA-supplied form when registering someone to vote. This created a big problem--a big problem that a lot of people, myself included, hadn't thought much about until relatively recently, until just a few years ago. I got involved in this, started writing this bill 2 or 3 years ago when I put all of these pieces together and I realized what it could spell for the American Republic if we didn't solve the problem. Without regard to what might have already happened and what might be happening today, when you play this forward, even if you were starting from the assumption that none of this ever happens, that nobody ever has registered to vote in the past who was not a citizen or never had voted in any election who was not a citizen--that is an assumption contrary to fact, but even if you were to reach that conclusion, you play this forward, and this could and ultimately will lead to a whole lot of mischief when you put all of those factors into the mix, especially when you consider what happened between 2021 and 2025. On or about--I don't know--let's say January 20, 2020, through to January 20, 2025, there were policies in place in this country that led to relatively open borders, you might say, in which an estimated 10 to 15 million people entered this country unlawfully, with many of them here to this day. (Mrs. MOODY assumed the Chair.) Some people have estimated that the total population of noncitizens inside the United States today stands in the neighborhood of around 30 million people. That is a lot of people--a lot of people who, in most States, could apply for and receive a driver's license, particularly if they live in some States more than others. And all they have to do is walk into a DMV, apply for a driver's license, check a box saying, ``Yes, I would like, while applying for my driver's license, simultaneously to register to vote.'' And all that remains after that is you sign your name. And by signing your name, you are certifying that you are entitled to register to vote, that you are a citizen and not under any kind of legal impediment from voting. And that is done. So even if you were someone who assumes, contrary to fact--and contrary to more facts that I believe will be coming out in greater detail in the coming days and weeks--even if you were someone who believes that this does not happen, that people don't register to vote if they are not citizens of this country, this still would be a trend, given all of the circumstances that I have just outlined, all the things that have happened since the NVRA became the law of the land back in 1993. This is something that we should all very much worry about. This should concern us greatly; that is, you don't want people voting in a system in which they are not entitled to vote. You think about every other circumstance where people vote. It is not just in U.S. Federal elections for Federal office, which is the concern of this particular legislation. In countless interactions--separate and apart from Federal elections, separate and apart from State elections--people hold elections of one sort or another. One set of elections that people sometimes encounter are within voluntary organizations or within a homeowners association. They might have elections to decide different issues, to elect their leadership. They might have those on a PTA, on different charitable organizations, fraternal organizations that they might belong to. In every one of those circumstances, you don't want somebody who is not entitled to vote, who is not part of the organization, to be casting a vote. If it is a homeowners association, you don't want somebody who is not part of that organization, because they don't own a home within the homeowners association's jurisdiction, to be casting a vote. If it is a shareholder election in a corporate context, you don't want nonshareholders casing a vote. Why? Well, they don't have the same interest that the shareholders have. We sure as heck don't want foreign nationals voting in U.S. elections because what unites us is the fact that we are citizens. We may come to things from different perspectives, different parts of the country, different origins. We might have inherited different language patterns, different languages, belief systems, political beliefs, cultural customs--whatever. But what unites us is that we are American citizens. If you start inviting in and allowing those who are not U.S. citizens to do it, bad things could happen. You talk about the risk of foreign election interference. It is really significant here, as every American's vote is threatened to be diluted every time this happens. Now, it is not just there that it matters, that we prove who we are or that we are entitled to do the thing that we want to do. Think of many other circumstances you encounter. When you go to the bank and you are going to withdraw money, we should all hope that any place anybody has money deposited on account isn't going to allow somebody else to show up and withdraw money from that account without having to prove who they are. That would be its own form of chaos. When people go to pick up a prescription drug, to go to the doctor, to seek medical treatment, to apply for a hunting license or a fishing license, to apply for Social Security benefits, to board a plane, to pick up theater tickets, to do all kinds of things where it matters who you are, your ability to engage in the activity that you want to engage in depends, hinges, on your ability to demonstrate that you are who you say you are and you have the right to participate in the thing you want to participate in. Harkening back a moment ago to my discussion of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic National Convention would be crazy to allow people in there who have not been elected as delegates to the Democratic National Convention--same with the Republicans. And so what do they do? Well, they have to show ID. What about here? Look, in order to get here, all of us who have been elected to the U.S. Senate had to go through a series of processes and procedures that involved showing who we are and that we are entitled to participate in this process, in several, very meaningful steps. I remember, the very first time I filed to run for the U.S. Senate, I had to go to the Lieutenant Governor's office. The Lieutenant Governor in Utah, under the Utah Constitution, performs the secretary of state function. It is the Lieutenant Governor who oversees the conduct of elections in our State, and it is the Lieutenant Governor's office that files and processes the candidate filing information. I had to go to the Lieutenant Governor's office all three times I have run for and been elected to the U.S. Senate, establish who I am, establish my citizenship and my residency in the State. And, of course, there is payment that has to go along with it. And after all of that process, you have the opportunity to be on the ballot. If everything goes well, if you are nominated by your political party or otherwise get on the ballot, then you are considered. But long before any of us ever showed up here to cast our very first vote or give our very first speech as Senators or even be sworn in, there was other paperwork that we had to process in order to establish who we are and that we have a right to be here and that we have a right to cast a vote. Obviously, we had to win elections. So there is a very important document without which I wouldn't be here, without which any of us wouldn't be here: our election certificate. In my State, again, that too is issued by the Office of the Lieutenant Governor, performing that secretary of state function, that certifies the election results. All three times I have been elected to the U.S. Senate, I have had to produce that document, and that document has been sent by the Lieutenant Governor of the State of Utah to the Secretary of the Senate, who had to review that. I had to produce ID when I showed up here in multiple forms. In fact, I had to, just as everyone does, every time they start a new job as an employee. If you are an American citizen, anytime you start new employment with a new employer, you have to fill out a form. The form is called the I-9. It is not just that you fill out the form. You have to fill out the form, and you have to produce, yes, proof of citizenship--because if you are not a U.S. citizen, then you have to produce a visa, and you have to show that your visa status allows you to have the type of employment from the employer that has hired you. But even if you are just an American citizen, you have still got to prove that. And the I-9 and the requirements that go with it are very exacting. As I recall, there are a few ways of proving that. You can prove it by showing up with a U.S. passport. If you don't have a passport, as many Americans don't, then you can show up with a birth certificate and a government-issued photo ID. At some point there has been a Social Security card involved, but not everybody I know carries around their original Social Security card all the time. So there are other ways that allow you to do it without the original Social Security card, but there are other ways of doing it. But it is pretty exacting. And you can't start the job unless or until you have proven who you are and that you are a U.S. citizen. Now, when we wrote the SAVE America Act, we allowed for those same documents to be used in order to establish your citizenship. But we didn't stop there because even that, in some circumstances, could be more difficult for some people. So we made it even more flexible. Yes, you can establish it by producing a U.S. passport, if in fact you have one, if that U.S. passport establishes your citizenship; likewise, a passport card, if you don't have the whole thing, and that establishes your citizenship. You can do it by a REAL ID-compliant driver's license, if that REAL ID-compliant driver's license also establishes your citizenship conclusively, as some do and others do not. That will also suffice. As with the I-9, you can also do it with the combination of a birth certificate and a government-issued photo ID. But in addition to all of those things, we also have some catchall exceptions that cover all kinds of territory, including one of my least favorite arguments but one of the most frequently arising arguments that is made, that somehow this is going to disenfranchise women everywhere, especially married women who obviously, at the time of their birth, neither they nor their parents could have had any idea, first of all, when or whether they might be getting married; secondly, if and when they got married later, whether they would choose to take on the last name of their husband, of the person they married, and what that name would be. This isn't really a problem. I mean, this actually happens all the time in other contexts. Whether it is for your interaction with the Internal Revenue Service, with the Social Security Administration, a driver's license, there are all kinds of ways to deal with that. And the SAVE America Act makes clear, if you have changed your name as a result of getting married, obviously a marriage certificate will suffice. If you change your name through some other mechanism, some record of the change in circumstance, whether that is an adoption certificate, a divorce decree that with it came another change of names, you can supply that. But it also contains something else that is available not just for people who have changed their name but people in lots of other circumstances in which, for whatever reason, they don't have the documentation. So imagine, for instance, that you are somebody who had changed your name upon getting married, but you can't find your marriage certificate. No problem. We take care of that as part of the same provision that we take care of those who may have lost all their documentation of all their citizenship. Maybe their house burned down yesterday and everything is gone. Poof, up in flames--it is gone. Maybe your dog ate all of your documentation that you would otherwise use when starting a new job and filling out your I-9 form. Maybe you never had it to begin with. This bill takes care of it. We made clear of that. We went out of our way to make sure that that would be the case. In this legislation, the House-passed SAVE America Act that we proceeded to just a few hours ago in the U.S. Senate, it can be found at page 12, line 22. Or if you want to look at the Schmitt-Lee substitute amendment that may be discussed later this week, it is on page 14, line 17. Either way, the text says the same thing: If you don't have the documentation, whether of a name change or of any of it, you can supply it by a sworn statement that you yourself can fill out, a sworn affidavit in which you provide the basic details surrounding your birth, if you are a natural-born citizen of this country, describing when and where you were born, to whom and so forth; or if you are a naturalized citizen, the circumstances surrounding and dates involved in your naturalization. You then hand it over to the State election official who is in charge of those things, and it then becomes the burden of the State to confirm or refute what you have submitted under oath, under penalty of perjury, to do this, with the understanding that if it checks out, if you are who you say you are, you are still going to be able to register to vote and, in fact, cast a vote, notwithstanding the fact that you may not have any of those documents, either because your house burned down, your dog ate them, or you never had them or otherwise. So these arguments are not legitimate, and these arguments, which I see made every single day--sometimes in this Chamber, sometimes on social media or elsewhere--these are false arguments made with knowledge of their falsity or reckless disregard for their truthfulness or both. And they are inexcusable. They do not carry water. This is all about making it easy to vote and hard to cheat. We have to do both. We must do both. Now, getting back to what I was talking about a minute ago, when we show up here, by the time we have shown up here, we have had to establish who we are, our right to run for the U.S. Senate, and we have to produce other documentation showing that we have, in fact, been elected to the U.S. Senate. When we do that, we also have to fill out the I-9 form here and establish, again, that we are who we are, who we say we are, and that we are, in fact, U.S. citizens. And if we do all of that right, then they give us a sort of cheat code version of the documentation, this pin right here. I remember when I first got here, the day I was sworn in, January 2011, after my first election had occurred a few weeks earlier in November of 2010, I stood right over there. I was sworn into the Senate. Right after I was sworn in, they had me sign a little book indicating that I was, in fact, sworn in as a Senator, and they gave me a pen and then they gave me this little pin. I wasn't sure what to think about the pin. I am not really into accessories or jewelry, but it was in a nice little box, and I wasn't sure what to do with it. Because I don't wear such things frequently, I put it in a drawer of my desk and I closed the drawer and I kind of forgot all about it. After I had been here for a while, I commented to one of my colleagues: Is it me or does everybody get carded a lot here? When I first showed up, I had a great head of hair, by my standards today. It is gone now. But I looked young. I was 39 years old when I was elected to the Senate. In the Senate, being 39 can feel like you are sort of like 12 years old or something like that. I got carded a lot, in part, because I didn't--maybe I didn't yet look like a Senator to them. In any event, they didn't recognize me as a Senator, and I found, regularly, that I was having to pull out my ID, you know my Senate ID, and the cops would look at it as I would approach the building, make sure that the tamper-resistant strip was intact, and they would say: Well, I guess we have got to let him in. I commented to a colleague saying: How long will it take before I stop getting carded every time I come into the Senate? And this colleague said: Well, you got to wear the pin. What pin? Well, when you got sworn in, they gave you that little pin. Then I remembered the little pin that came in the little jewelry box. I put it in the desk drawer and I closed the drawer and I forgot all about it. I said: Why do I need to wear the pin? They said: Well, the security personnel in and around the Capitol recognize that pin because it is worn only by Senators, and it is sort of like your portable ID badge. You won't have to get carded as much. Ever since then, I have worn the lapel pin, and it works like a charm. I have even named it. I call it my ``Sorry, Senator'' pin because if I get carded, I point to it, and they say: Oh, sorry, Senator. You can come on in. I remember one day I was standing over there at one of those desks in between two votes. I had one arm gently resting on the desk in front of me. One of the nonuniformed security personnel came up to me and said in a somewhat harsh tone of voice: Excuse me, sir. Will you please not lean on the Senator's desk. I, still being new, I was very sensitive to not want to do anything wrong. I said: I am terribly sorry. I will try not to put any weight on it-- because a lot of these desks are original equipment, which means they are, you know, 150 years old or more, and we want to be careful with them. I thought he was concerned about the fact that I had one arm gently resting on the desk in front of me. But the inquiry was not over. He wanted to interrogate a little bit further. He then said: Are you with minority? The Republicans--I am a Republican. We were in the minority party at the time. Are you with the minority? I said: What do you mean, on this vote or the next? I often vote with my party. Sometimes they get it wrong. Sometimes I don't vote with my party. I am not sure why you are asking this. He said: Are you with the minority leader? And I said: Well, he is our leader. Why wouldn't I be with him? I don't understand your question. Is this a loyalty test? And then he asked me another question that made me realize what was really going on. He said: Are you part of the minority leader's staff? Then I realized, oh, OK. That is why I am getting the third degree. So I pointed to the ``Sorry, Senator'' pin, thinking that would be the end of the inquiry. All it got me was a blank stare for some reason. And at that point, I realized what was happening, and I used my title. I didn't want to use my title. I don't like to use my title. It makes me feel uncomfortable to this day, even after 15, going on 16 years. So I kind of mumbled the answer. I said: I am Senator Lee. He said: What? And I said: OK. My name is Mike Lee. I come from the State of Utah. It is sort of squarish and chair-shaped. It is in the Rocky Mountains, best snow on Earth, really well-known place to visit. And then he realized what was happening and what I was saying. And he said to me in one hurried breath: I am terribly sorry for the misunderstanding, sir. My name is Steve if you want to report me. And then before I could tell him it was OK, Steve was fast, and he got out of Dodge. So he was too quick. But from then on until the day he retired, I always said hello to Steve, and I smiled. I said: Hi, Steve, just to make sure there were no hard feelings because it was an honest mistake; it was not a big deal. Steve retired a few years ago, and I miss him. Only recently it occurred to me that his name is probably not Steve. Maybe Steve is somebody he worked with that he didn't like, but he was looking for that badge of authenticity. And when he finally saw it and contextualized it, he realized, yes, that is worn only by Senators. He can be here. My point is this: In order for us to be here to make these decisions in this building, in this Capitol, affecting 350, 360 million Americans, we first have to prove that we are who we say we are and that we have a right to be here to make those decisions. So, too, with our elections. We don't want people choosing those who will make laws on their behalf unless they themselves are the people who are the people referred to in the Constitution who get to make those decisions. So let's get this right. Let's not get it wrong. Let's not pretend that this is something that it is not. It is fundamentally unfair and dishonest in every way, shape, and form to refer to this as racist, misogynist, as voter suppression. It is none of those things. This is entirely about one thing, which is making sure that our elections are secure, that they are legitimate, that they are fair. We want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. Yes, we can have both of those things, and we must pursue both of them or in the long run, we will have neither. We will have none of them, and it will become a problem. So let's nip this thing in the bud, and let's get this right. Let's make it easy to vote, and let's make it hard to cheat. Nothing short of chaos ensues if we don't have that, especially whereas here we have an existing system of laws that make it so unbelievably, undeniably easy for someone to lie with no further proof, no proof of who they are, no proof of why it is that they have the right to vote. So how does that happen, and how do they justify it? One of the most amusing, if bewildering, arguments that I hear--and I hear it all the time and have since the day we first introduced the original SAVE Act about 2 years ago--is that we don't need it. We don't need it. Why? Why don't we need it? Because it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote. In fact, it is a felony offense. So we know it doesn't happen because it is already against law. Well, let's think about how that would work elsewhere. Let's take a really familiar example. If you want to buy alcohol, you want to go into a bar or convenience store, liquor store, you want to buy alcohol, what can and should and must every American expect? To get carded. Now, this is as a teetotaler something that I see mostly on TV and in the movies, but I also see it in real life when I see somebody buying something, something that I as a teetotaler don't drink, but you get carded when you buy alcohol. It doesn't matter where, you are going to get carded. It doesn't matter how old you are, you are going to get carded. Now, if it were acceptable there to say it is illegal for a minor to buy alcohol or it is illegal for anyone to sell or otherwise give alcohol to a minor, somebody who is too young to buy alcohol, somebody who is not yet past the age of 21, so they don't do it, so we don't need it because it is already unlawful--well, guess what would happen? There would be a whole lot more procuring of alcoholic beverages in retail establishments by people who are too young to drink. It would happen left and right. It would be folly to assume: Well, it is already illegal, so it doesn't happen, so we don't need to do anything about it. So what did we do? Well, we instituted a series of laws to make it so that you have to show ID when you buy alcohol. It doesn't mean that nobody can ever cheat to break their way through it. It doesn't mean that some people don't figure out clever ways of getting a fake ID or going through an intermediary, but there are more steps. But to assume at the outset that it doesn't happen because it is already illegal, regardless of whether you are taking any steps at all to verify that somebody is who they claim to be and that they are eligible to do the thing that they are trying to do is absolutely ridiculous, and we cannot assume that our laws can be enforced, especially against the backdrop of the vulnerabilities that I have described. The National Voter Registration Act, coupled with the 2015 interpretation by the Supreme Court in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, coupled with the trend among States to issue driver's licenses to noncitizens, with 19 of those States and the District of Columbia issuing them openly, even to known illegal immigrants, and then with an estimated 10 to 15 million Americans--some people think more--coming into this country unlawfully just in the 4-year period from 2021 to 2025, to say that we would be acting recklessly is a gross understatement. So, no, this is not some sort of subterfuge to engage in Jim Crow 2.0 any more than the Democratic National Convention or a Jon Ossoff campaign rally is about Jim Crow 2.0--and shame on anyone who stoops to that level of stupidity and dishonesty as to make that argument--nor is this about voter suppression. If this is about voter suppression, then literally any law that is designed to make sure that there is no fraud, that there is no cheating in elections, would also be voter suppression. Now does it add a step? Yes, of course, but we add steps all the time to make sure that we don't make it too easy, especially when it matters for somebody to just go in and take something that doesn't belong to them. And by taking something that belongs to others, cheapening it for them, diminishing substantially the value of what those who actually have that right, who own that thing--namely, U.S. citizenship--would otherwise have access to, you are taking it from them. We can't allow that to happen. This is why I am proud to be the original author and sponsor in the Senate of this bill, proud to have worked with my House counterpart Congressman Chip Roy from the great State of Texas on this legislation. We can get this done. And now that we are on the bill, we are going to debate it. I look forward to hearing the debates. I look forward in each and every instance to being able to refute the absurd arguments against it because, let's face it, there is no legitimate reason to oppose this bill. I stand by that, and I will continue to stand by that in the coming days and weeks. And I am ready for many, many weeks. We are going to stay on this bill until it damn well passes because the American people demand and deserve nothing less than that. Our Republic will not function, our country will not thrive unless we can protect the sanctity of the elections that determine who makes the laws, who sets the policy in this country. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can make it easy to vote and hard to cheat at the same time. We can, we must, and together we will. We must pass the SAVE America Act.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, 30 years ago today, my late father Rex Edwin Lee passed away after a nearly decade-long heroic fight with cancer. Now, 30 years is a long time. Children grow up, so do grandchildren. Families expand, chapters open and close, and yet there are some people whose absences are always felt because the influence of their lives continues to shape those around them long after they have left us. My dad, pictured here, was one of those people. He certainly was for me and I know for many others. During his lifetime, he held many offices, received many honors. He was, by any measure, a giant in the legal world. To me, he was, first and foremost, my dad. To my mother, he was the love of her life and the man with whom she built a family--a family of seven children, a family with evermore grandchildren and now great-grandchildren in their line of succession. To his seven children, he was a source of energy, of steadiness, humor, discipline, fun, and love. To his students, he was the kind of teacher who challenged views and inspired a love of the craft that was undeniably contagious. To so many others, he was proof that brilliance and kindness need not be mutually exclusive, that a man could be formidable without being harsh, intensely accomplished without being self-important, and deeply faithful without being pious. He grew up in a small town, St. Johns, AZ, a really small town that remained part of him throughout the rest of his life. He used to joke that he may have been 18 years old before he realized that the name of the town was not ``resume speed ahead.'' St. Johns was a sleepy little community, but it was home to him and so many he loved. He was grateful for his roots and didn't carry himself like a man embarrassed by his smalltown beginnings. Gratitude was one of the great governing themes of his entire lifetime. He loved that the parable of the 10 lepers referred to the fact that only 1 returned to Jesus to thank him. He described this as this establishing what he called ``a human gratitude index.'' Gratitude, he would say, is, too often, far too rare, and it is one of the most uncelebrated but valuable virtues a human being can learn to possess. However accomplished he became, he seemed to always be aware that life had given him much and that he owed much in return. Even as a young man, there were signs of what he might one day become. He had a precocious love of language, argument, ideas, and persuasion. He attended Brigham Young University initially. I might add, when he first got there, he went there with a little bit less enthusiasm for that institution than he would later develop. He had his eye elsewhere. In his small town of St. Johns, AZ, he had a couple of cousins, his first cousins whom he looked up to: Morris and Stewart Udall, just a few years older than he. They were the sons of his father's sister. They had both gone to study at the University of Arizona. He wanted to follow in their footsteps, but his parents insisted that he spend at least 1 year first at Brigham Young University in my hometown of Provo, UT, but he took an almost instant liking to BYU. When he got there, he was quickly elected as his freshman class president, and he noted how interesting this was to him that he was elected class president. His freshman class at BYU was several times larger than the entire population in the town he had been raised. He flourished in every way at BYU. He was, just before he served his senior year, elected to student body president, an early sign of the leadership that would later bring him back to BYU, first, to build its law school and, ultimately, to serve as the university president. Right in the middle of his undergraduate years, he left to serve a mission for 2\1/2\ years where he went to Mexico serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That experience strengthened his faith, and it gave him an enduring love for the Spanish language, of the Mexican people, and the rich cultural heritage that comes with it. He became fluent in the Spanish language and really understood features of the culture that stayed with him for the rest of his life in a way that many around him found remarkable. Many years later, when I myself became a missionary, he and I developed a practice of writing letters to each other in Spanish, and I was often astonished, particularly during my first few months of my missionary experience, at his degree of proficiency in the Spanish language. I quickly learned to keep a dictionary close by because he was routinely using words that I had yet to learn. I frequently have interacted with people, people who were born and raised in Mexico, who often described his proficiency in the Spanish language in a way that suggested to them, if they closed their eyes, couldn't see that they were talking to a gringo, you would think they were speaking to another person who had been born and raised in that country. It was, by the way, during his time in Mexico as a missionary that he first laid eyes on and crossed paths with the woman who would become his wife and eventually my mother. Of all the victories he achieved in his distinguished career, he would have been the first to say that one stands above the rest, that is persuading my mother Janet Griffin to marry him. By the time my dad reached the University of Chicago Law School, it had certainly become clear that his gifts were rather extraordinary. He ended up graduating first in his class from that institution, and from there went directly to serve a clerkship with Associate Justice Byron White, who was then a fairly new member of the Supreme Court of the United States. After his clerkship, he returned to Arizona, and he worked for one of Phoenix's premier law firms, Jennings Strouss & Salmon, where he later became a partner. In 1972, while I was just a baby, he received a phone call. Having received another phone call from someone in Salt Lake City a few weeks earlier, he had been told that the church was thinking about establishing a law school at Brigham Young University. They asked him as a Latter-day Saint lawyer what he would think of that. He said: I think that would be a big mistake. Why? Well, Utah--a relatively small State--it already has a perfectly good law school at the University of Utah. We don't need another one. A few months went by, another call came, and said: You know about that law school that we talked about starting, the one you told us not to start? Yeah. Well, we are going to start it anyway. We want you to help us figure out whom to hire to run it. Could you help us find a dean? He said: Sure. I will come up with a list of potential candidates-- knowing that the church probably wanted a Latter-day Saint who had been a faculty member at an accredited law school, and he came up with a good list of them. When that conversation occurred, he thought his job was done. A few months after that, he got a call from Salt Lake City informing him he would be the founding dean of the yet-to-exist, yet-to-be-accredited, yet-to-have-an-entering-class, any-student-body, or any-faculty law school in Provo, UT. It was, at that point, that my family moved from Arizona to Utah when I was a year old. Again, there was no faculty. There was no building. There was no library. There were no students. He had to recruit all of this in just a few years' time, starting from scratch, not only without ABA accreditation but without any real promise that ABA accreditation would come. Later in life, I realized how difficult this must have been. This is the first class, the charter class. It began in the fall of 1973. I asked him: How on Earth did you do that? He said: I just looked for really smart undergraduate students. I would find them. I knew where to look, and I would have conversations with them in which I did a heck of a sales job, and I promised them it would be a good experience. Looking back on that now, I am not sure how I would have responded, but I do know that the charter class of BYU's law school went on to accomplish all sorts of things. They punched way above their weight. The school was accredited long before that charter class graduated. My dad approached that job with his characteristic determination, and under his leadership, the J. Reuben Clark Law School at BYU began to take shape. In 1975, a couple of years into that experiment, he took a leave of absence from the law school and went to Washington, DC, to become the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Having been invited to assume that role by Ed Levi, who served as the Attorney General of the United States under President Ford. He would return back to the BYU Law School 2 years later to continue serving as dean. He enjoyed that experience very much, and a few years later in 1981, he received another phone call and was invited to return to Washington to serve as Solicitor General of the United States under President Reagan. In that capacity, it was his job to represent the U.S. Government before the Supreme Court. He argued many dozens of cases during one of the most demanding and interesting periods of time in the Supreme Court's history. During his time as Solicitor General, he won 23 of the 30 cases he argued during that roughly 4-year period, during President Reagan's first Presidential term. He held records both as the Solicitor General of the United States and later as an attorney in private practice before the Supreme Court for arguing more cases before the Supreme Court in a single term than anyone had in the Court's history at that point. In 1986, he returned again to the faculty at BYU as a professor while working simultaneously as a partner at Sidley Austin, one of the Nation's finest law firms, where he helped found the flagship Supreme Court practice at that firm. From that point forward, much of his legal practice consisted of arguing cases specifically before the Supreme Court. For a lawyer, there are few greater privileges. As a child, I learned something interesting. I learned that anytime I wanted to attend one of my dad's arguments, it was a very effective way of missing school. I had an almost perfect track record of this. I figured out what his argument schedule was, and when I saw it approaching, I knew that if I pled my case correctly, I could go and watch. More about that in just a minute. Right before he died, he was still rehearsing in his mind, still preparing to argue what would have been his 60th case before the Supreme Court despite being confined to a hospital bed. A lot of my own early exposure to the law came from watching him in court, often just as an excuse to miss school. I discovered to my delight that if I asked, they would usually let me go, and I would sit there in court as a young boy trying to take in the majesty of the place, listening to language I didn't fully understand and yet understanding just enough to know that what my dad was doing was important. Over time, I learned to decode some of the language--not all of it by any means, but I started to play games. I could figure out which Justice was going to ask a question next, how the Court might respond to certain arguments. I even picked up subtleties of mistakes lawyers would commonly make that would usually make the Justices not respond well. All of my siblings attended my dad's arguments from time to time, and for whatever reason, the law bug seemed to have bitten two of his seven children more than others. My brother Tom and I both became lawyers, entering our dad's profession. As fate would have it, many years later, Tom and I, after entering the practice of law and having served in various capacities--law firms, government service--Tom later became a law professor at BYU's Law School. But back in 2010, within a 24-hour period, we both experienced different turns to our careers. On one night in 2010, I won the Utah Republican primary in my first Senate race. The very next morning after winning that primary, my brother was confirmed by the Utah State Senate as a member of Utah's Supreme Court--a post he held for 12 years. There were many influences in our lives, of course, but no one can seriously doubt the source of so much of that inspiration. We were raised by a father who loved the law with all of his mind and loved God and his family with all of his heart. Our father's faith was central to his life. He was a devout Latter-day Saint, and he taught all seven of us--my brother and I and our five sisters--he taught us how to pray, to read the Scriptures, to trust in the Lord, to serve and love others. He served in many callings, many positions in the lay ministry in our church. He had a profound belief in religious liberty, and he thought carefully about why it mattered. He understood the structure of the Constitution. He understood the historical development of religious liberty. He understood the arguments of Jefferson and Madison and the distinction between the establishment clause and the free exercise clause and how they intersect and the jurisprudence that had grown up around those important guarantees. But he also understood that for millions of Americans and so many billions around the world, religion is itself a covenant and a duty and a blessing. He understood that a free people cannot remain free if they are denied the right to live out the deepest obligations of the soul. He believed that. He defended that. He lived that. At home, for all of his stature, he was never remote. Sometimes he had to go out of town, other times he might have to work long days at the office, but he always came home without too much time elapsing, and he was ever present when home. In fact, one of the wonders of my late father was that taking into account all he did, I don't think any one of us ever felt neglected, despite how many obligations he had. When I was a boy, I decided to make some money by shoveling the neighbors' driveways after heavy snowstorms. I very quickly found myself during certain winter months with more work, more jobs than I could easily handle within a finite period of time. My clients, after all, demanded that their driveways be shoveled, and I didn't want to let them down. My father offered to help me. I offered to pay him. He declined. I remember--I think his exact words were: Consider me your indentured servant. You don't have to pay me, but you can collect the money attributable to my labors on your behalf. Consider it my service to you. So there I was, a boy with a small snow-shoveling enterprise, collecting the proceeds, while my father, one of the finest lawyers in America, worked beside me in the cold, helping his son keep commitments. He was still much bigger than I was and able to shovel a lot more snow than I was. He was there for me. Another family story that captures something essential about my dad is a story I have always loved, a story that I have gotten from my brother Tom. Tom is a few years older than I am. When I was either very little or perhaps not yet born, my dad one day was assembling a swing set in our backyard in Arizona. He was using some specialized tool that had come with the swing set, specific to that set. My brother Tom kept asking what that tool was called. My dad looked at it, a little confused at first, and then said: Look, I don't know what it is called, but when you need one of those, nothing else will do. The same, as my brother has often observed, could be said of my dad. He was so many things at once, and he did so many things at once-- scholar, advocate, teacher, administrator, church member, husband, father, mentor, friend, patriot, and that list could continue on for some time. It is hard to reduce him to one word or even one set of words, but when you needed a person of exactly his unique combination of gifts and talents and interests, nothing else would do. He had a genuine warmth and a mischievous side to him. He loved amusement parks and roller coasters and wasn't too dignified to shout both on the way up and on the way down on the roller coaster, especially if some of his teenage children were there, capable of being perfectly embarrassed by that spectacle of a grown man shouting at the top of his lungs. In 1987, while he was still in outstanding physical condition--an avid runner, a marathoner--he was diagnosed with a very aggressive, advanced form of stage IV non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. It was a devastating cancer diagnosis. He was told by many of the doctors that he may not live more than a few months. Yet what followed from that moment was one of the most instructive chapters of his life. He fought for months and nearly died during that initial period following his initial diagnosis, and then, through excellent medical care and what felt to us like a providential chain of events tantamount to miracles, he was granted more time, nearly 9 more years. What did he do with those 9 years? Well, he didn't retreat into bitterness or caution. He didn't allow pain to become the dominant feature in his life, or the fear of subsequent deterioration of his health. He returned to work. He continued to serve in the church as the bishop of our local church congregation in Provo. He continued to teach as a professor at BYU while maintaining a full-time law practice. He continued to argue cases before the Supreme Court--something he loved, once commenting that is the most fun one can have in any activity that doesn't involve eating ice cream. He continued to be a father, a grandfather, a mentor. And he did so all without any complaint. Just about 2 years after that initial diagnosis, which fortunately turned into remission, he was asked to serve as the 10th president of Brigham Young University--a position he had neither sought nor anticipated, but he did it willingly, gladly, grateful for the opportunity to serve. He served with ambition and with purpose. During his presidency, among other things, he established an academic freedom policy and launched the university's first, ambitious capital campaign. He told me that when he designed this campaign to create BYU's first endowment, he intended to raise $250 million. They thought he had lost his mind. They thought they would never get that done. Well, it happened a few years later. They finished it under his successor, president Merrill Bateman, and his vision helped launch that. At the time, BYU didn't have an endowment, but it began the work of building one. He laid the groundwork that made that possible, and it came to fruition just a few years after he died. Today, that endowment stands valued in the billions of dollars--a lasting part of his legacy. He was proud to help bring about massive expansion of buildings on campus. He was thrilled with the opening of the BYU Museum of Art-- another enduring contribution to his service as president of the university. Yet even those achievements are dwarfed by the less tangible part of his presidency. He created a culture on campus in which people felt they belonged. Students felt seen. Faculty felt and, in fact, were heard. There was a sense of shared purpose on campus, and much of that came from his ability to build genuine rapport with all of those around him. That spirit became one of the defining features of his time as president. I remember talking with one of his law partners after he had died-- Carter Phillips, a longtime partner at Sidley Austin and a dear friend and colleague of my dad's. He said: Walking across BYU's campus with Rex Lee serving as president was unlike any experience I could ever imagine on any other college campus in America--a combination of walking across the campus with someone who is at once royalty, a rock star, a sports star, and everybody's buddy, and also just a revered academic figure. He said: I have never seen anything like it. But people liked him, and they greeted him with a smile. In March of 1990, less than a year after he had been installed as BYU's 10th president, cancer came calling again, and that cancer diagnosis was a troubling one. I remember when he informed me one morning in March of 1990 that they had rediscovered cancer. It was a slightly different form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He said: This one is more aggressive, less amenable to treatment. This one will take my life. It is just a question of how long, but we think we can stretch out my lifespan by a number of years through aggressive treatment--which he continued to receive almost entirely during the time he continued to serve as BYU president while continuing to still argue Supreme Court cases every single year. That was part of the deal he made with the university. He would do that if they would let him keep his hobby of arguing one or two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court a year. They relented. Fast-forward a few years to the winter of 1996, the early months of 1996, late February. I remember taking him to the hospital for what would be his last hospital visit a couple weeks before he died. He had an oxygen mask over him helping him breathe. He was mostly unconscious. But as a second-year law student, I understood the words that he was muttering under the mask, and I associated them with one of the cases he had been briefing and was hoping to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court--what would have been his 60th argument. He was almost unconscious as we were wheeling him in and yet still he managed to continue that fight. He was, even in those fading hours, still preparing in his mind for what he believed would be his next argument before the Supreme Court. That was my dad to the very end--he was ready to make the case. I will never forget the moment I experienced it--exactly 30 years ago today--as a young law student, right in the middle of my second year of law school. When that day arrived, we knew something was afoot. I had to go back to law school for a few hours for a class. We knew he would likely not survive that day. Early in the morning, I was at the law school already, preparing for class. I looked out the window, and I saw the Sun rising over the Wasatch Mountains, over the Y Mountain, and Squaw Peak Mountain, which was close to our home and close to the law school. I realized that day that the Sun was rising over those mountains for the last time that he would inhabit this Earth. I knew that the world would be a sadder place without him. Just a few hours later, I went to class, and I went down to his hospital room in the intensive care unit, where all seven of his children and my mother surrounded him. I called Sharon, my wife, just before I went down there, realizing that things were about to change. She was at home with our two 1-year-old twin boys, James and John, and cried for herself and for me and the rest of my family as I told her we were about to lose him. As the end drew near, we could tell by his vital signs that it was happening. I kept looking at him, thinking: I wish I could download everything that he has got in there. I need this knowledge--this vast reservoir of the law, of human relations, of how to be a good follower of Jesus, of how to be a good neighbor and friend. I want to download all of it. I knew that was in vain. We don't have the technology to do that. We didn't 30 years ago, and we still don't. But I knew I needed to learn everything about him and that I had an abundant supply of things that he left behind in his writings, in his speeches, and in his interactions with people with whom I interacted on a regular basis. As I reflect back on these 30 years without him since he has been gone and how fully his influence remains, I hear him still, and I still hear a lot of the advice that he gave me: Use the simple word if it will do. Never use a 3-dollar word if a 10-cent word will suffice and get the idea across. Be kind. Give others the benefit of the doubt. When you have won your case, sit down, and don't say another word. Do not spoil a good argument by saying one word too many. And for the love of all that is sacred and holy, when asked by a judge in a courtroom a question--even the most remote, hypothetical--answer the question. Don't try to dodge it. You will regret it. The older I get, the more grateful I am for these and so many other valuable words of advice I got from him--grateful not only that he was admired but that he was admirable; grateful not only that he was brilliant but that he was good and kind; grateful that his ambitions were elevated by faith; grateful that his public life never consumed his private duties and never eclipsed, in any way, anything else that he had to do. If he were here, I would tell him that we still miss him, that we still love him, that his example lives on and still instructs us, that his faith still steadies us, that his gratitude still shames our own occasional forgetfulness, our own departure, or our own falling into the trap of what he called the human gratitude index; that the things he built, both in institutions and in people, continue to endure. Most of all, I would thank him. Thirty years later, I still feel now what I felt then. I miss you, Dad. I love you, and I thank you.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following decision from the Government Accountability Office be printed in the Record.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, the fact that the acting president and CEO is a DOGE individual doesn't disqualify him from making this statement. It is corruption. Sure, it has been going on since the eighties, but so have a lot of things that are corrupt. We must defund this now. Vote on Motion

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 10 seconds to respond.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, something happened very significant this morning. This morning, it was announced that the Chief Financial Officer of this Agency, USADF, has been charged and simultaneously pled guilty to corruption charges this morning. The Department of Justice just announced it. Also, we have received word from the Acting Chairman and CEO of USADF a request that we defund this entity because, as he put it, it is trash and, as he put it, it is a corrupt culture of waste, fraud, and abuse. So when the Acting Chairman and CEO of an entity that is getting all this public funding--all these millions of dollars--says defund it because we have a problem here--meanwhile, the DOGE office at the Department of War, today, echoed that and agreed with his assessment-- please, colleagues, join me. This one is not an earmark. This is spending within the bill--spending within the bill where the head of the entity asked us to defund it because the culture within that entity is impossibly corrupt. We must end it. Please support my amendment.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 4286 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, this amendment would strike the earmarks from this bill. In this bill package, there is about $7 billion in earmark spending. Now, a lot of people like to say: I don't like those other earmarks, but I like my own. So I am going to vote for all of it so they can all stay in there. Remember, the Republican conference, back in 2010, adopted an earmark moratorium. This was converted into a permanent earmark ban, in 2019, that is still in effect, which shouldn't be ignored. What do these $7 billion do? Well, among other things, they do a lot, including a whole lot of them in spending on ``woke, wasteful, and unjustified'' spending: for recipients to fund housing and legal aid for illegal aliens; puberty blockers for kids; building EV charging stations, part of the ``green new scam''; subsidize California's disaster rail system; fund infrastructure and renovation projects at the wealthy Met Museum and the Michigan AFL-CIO; a dance festival in Massachusetts; DEI initiatives. Look, we don't need this. We don't want this. This is what is driving the train toward the $38.5 trillion debt that we are adding to at a rate of $2 trillion a year. It is unacceptable. It must end. Support my amendment.

Mr. LEE. I call up my amendment No. 4236 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I have come to the floor today, once again, to raise objections--in fact, deep concerns--about something known as congressionally directed spending, but the more colloquial term for what I am describing is ``earmarks.'' Specifically, I want to talk about the inclusion of earmarks--a lot of them--about $5 billion worth in this particular package of bills. The government-directed micromanagement of any large, complex economy never works. By ``never,'' I mean literally never. Never in the history of human beings has this worked or has it ended well except for a small handful who grow richer and more powerful every time government attempts it. Very often, it is undertaken with an eye toward a populous objective, one that is supposed to elevate the poor, but it, in the end, has quite the opposite effect. A reverse Robin Hood world then develops, one in which those who are already wealthy and already powerful become more so and everyone else suffers. It has been attempted time after time in this country and in other countries all over the world, in many different eras, and it literally never works. It is like the game Mouse Trap. If you ever played Mouse Trap as a kid, you know the experience that I am talking about. In the game of Mouse Trap, you would set up this elaborate system of marbles, and they would go down a little tunnel and a little ditch, and they would turn a wheel and ring a bell at the end of it. The game never worked. Mouse Trap never works. Earmarks never work--neither does socialism, neither does the progressive nightmare that we have been living in for a long time--nursing it along--pretending that somehow, this time, it will turn out differently. It will not. Our former colleague and dear friend of mine, the late Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma--a dedicated fiscal conservative and a fierce, stalwart opponent of earmarks--once said, ``Earmarks are the gateway drug to spending addiction.'' His words were prescient, and they remain as truthful today as ever. Earmarks are, by their very nature, corrupting--corrupting of the process--perhaps not in a legally cognizable way, but they are corrupting, nonetheless, of the process. They allow for special interests to exert greater influence in our politics and steer Federal taxpayer dollars to pet projects in individual States or specific congressional districts often to benefit a particular business enterprise, nonprofit, or someone else. They fund projects that, as worthy or unworthy as they might be--and there is a broad spectrum of earmark beneficiaries that can be found at every point along a continuum of worthy in the abstract, or unworthy. But they have got certain things in common, and one of those is that they often shouldn't be funded by government at all. And for those that ought to be funded by the government, many of them shouldn't be funded by this government--this government, which is a government of limited, enumerated power, something that we fail most of the time to even acknowledge anymore, much less respect. Remember, James Madison described, at the dawn of our Republic, as our Constitution had been proposed but not yet ratified--and during the ratification debates, he penned so many of the Federalist Papers. And in Federalist 45, he wrote that the powers of the Federal Government are ``few and defined'' and those reserved to the States are ``numerous and indefinite.'' The ``few and defined'' powers really are that. As much as we sometimes like to pretend otherwise, we are in charge of just a few basic responsibilities where we have exclusive domain within our system of government, where our power trumps State and local power. But those areas really are limited, you see, because our Founding Fathers understood a very simple truth, which is that the risk of corruption grows larger and the difficulty of overcoming corruption becomes more distant, more remote, more tenuous the higher the level of government you go. They understood that problems arising in a government are much more difficult to eradicate in a larger, more national government, and that is why they very carefully--almost religiously--reserved most of the power to be exercised at the State and local level. But they carved out exceptions. What are those exceptions? Well, the most notable and obvious among them are national defense, weights and measures, trademarks, copyrights and patents, postal roads, regulating the interstate, and foreign trade or commerce. And there are a few others, but that is the gist of it. There is no general power in there. There is no power in there, for example, to say: Let's make sure we have good schools. Let's make sure everybody is happy. Let's make sure that a good idea gets funded. No, those things don't exist in there. That is a figment of our imagination. For the first 150 years of our Republic when operating under the Constitution, we respected those limits and those boundaries. It started to change during the New Deal era in the 1930s where Congress and the executive branch and the judicial branch undertook a sort of collusive pattern of behavior to sideline principles that had fostered the development of the greatest civilization the world had ever known and ushered in one of the greatest, most prolonged eras of more or less continuous peacetime economic expansion. And they just said: Oh, those rules that have worked here in the past that are still the law, were still the law in the 1930s, and remain the law today, we are going to set those aside. We are going to make them malleable. We are going to decide that they can mean whatever we want them to mean. But, Mr. President, as Mark Twain is quoted as having said: If you name the tail of a dog a leg and you ask how many legs does the dog have, what is the answer? Well, it is still four legs. The tail of a dog is still a tail and is not a leg, even if you call it a leg. We have called these things Federal powers, many of them since the 1930s, or at least looked the other way, with the Supreme Court also looking the other way since the 1930s, but it doesn't mean that these are appropriate activities for the Federal Government to engage in. Now, what does this have to do with earmark spending? Everything. Because when we earmark spend, almost every time--not always, but almost every time--it is dealing with something that is at the far frontiers of what is even debatably connected to something that is debatably connected to an enumerated Federal power. We have steered so far away from where we are supposed to be acting, we have forgotten why we are here. And as is the case when raising kids, especially when they get to be teenagers, you get into trouble when you stop doing the things that you are supposed to be doing. And when you start doing things that you are not supposed to be doing, you forget the things that you are supposed to be doing, and you don't do them very well. We see that today, here, in this bill package right now, where we are being asked to jettison funding for a Department that includes, among other things, the enforcement of our immigration laws and the enforcement of our borders, something that has been severely compromised in the last few years and that President Trump is working hard to overcome. We are being asked to jettison that portion of the bill and replace it with a 2-week substitute, a 2-week temporary continuing resolution. What does this have to do with earmarks? Everything. It has everything to do with it because, as we are not doing that, we are focusing on a whole bunch of stuff that we have no business doing, no business funding. And the way in which we are funding it is itself corrupting and corrosive of our process. Any process that is designed to maintain sanity, fiscal responsibility, it is designed to maintain limited government with limited enumerated powers, we have thrown it all to the wind. The consequences have been disastrous. We are $38.5 trillion in debt, and we are adding to that debt at a staggering rate, close to $2 trillion a year, with no end in sight. Now, I can already hear the apologists of earmarks, the earmark brigade we will call them, saying: Well, earmarks are just a tiny, tiny percentage of overall spending. That is true. They are. The same way that when you look at a locomotive, something that might stretch, I don't know, a half mile or a mile, the engine car of the mile-long locomotive is a tiny, tiny piece of the train, but it is what is driving the train. That is what earmarks do. They drive excessive Federal spending; they facilitate $2 trillion annual deficits; and they drive us into this awful downward spiral that leads us to a very dark place. Now, at a time like this when American families around the country are working hard and the comeback is still just getting started, Congress really does need to remember its role as the steward of tax dollars. And to be a good steward of tax dollars, it has got to recognize some limit around its authority, but it doesn't do that. Its earmarks facilitate our further drift away from that standard. We should consider earmark spending in the context of our $38.5 trillion debt, but we are adding to it at a rate of nearly $2 trillion a year. And our debt itself is a percentage of the economy--and you have to remember, it is at an alltime high. It is not just that the nominal debt, that the number is higher than it has ever been. It is true. We have never had a $38.5 trillion debt. But adjusted by every conceivable measure, whether you look at it in inflation-adjusted dollars, whether you look at it as a percentage of the economy, it is at an alltime high. Now, fortunately, President Trump and many Senate Republicans have worked hard in an effort to root out wasteful spending and decrease the likelihood of a debt crisis or inflation or both. Remember the excitement when, about a year ago, first--a little over a year ago, as we were preparing for the new administration and the new Senate Republican majority to kick in and the new House of Representatives to continue under Republican control, there was a lot of enthusiasm over it with President Trump and Elon Musk kick-starting the DOGE process? You saw every Republican in Congress, and really in both Chambers, champing at the bit to be part of the DOGE movement. It was cool. It was hip. It was happening. It was the energy that this town needed. Everybody was excited about it. Everybody wanted to be part of the DOGE process. And then all of a sudden, they lost interest in it. Within just a few months, it has faded. And that is really, really sad. But fast-forward to now, and there is still a lot of good things that we could and should be doing. In fact, just days ago, President Trump announced his appointment of a new Department of Justice official who will focus specifically on efforts to root out the fraud and abuse of American taxpayer dollars. That is a good thing. That is a natural outgrowth of the DOGE effort. It is a natural outgrowth of President Trump's desire to make America great again. This is an important project, and I hope and expect that it will succeed. Yet sometimes I think that, while we draw near to the concept, to the idea, to the suggestion of being more efficient, of being more careful as stewards of the people's hard-earned money, we draw near to these concepts with our lips, but we show through our actions that our hearts are far from it. Democrats are continuing to push for more spending, more earmarks, and more government. That is not the path to prosperity. As I have said before, earmarks don't just promote reckless spending; they are reckless spending. The process itself, when in the hands of fallible, mortal human beings, is itself naturally corrupting. They naturally do lead to and contribute to but fundamentally are reckless spending. Now, according to the Congressional Research Service, from 1944 to 2011, there was a 282-percent increase in earmarks in appropriations bills. So after the very successful red wave election of 2010, the election in which I was first elected to the U.S. Senate, both the Senate and the House Republican conferences simultaneously adopted earmark bans correctly recognizing the corrupting nature of earmarks and their growing contribution to an increasingly problematic and unsustainable fiscal picture for the Federal Government. I remember that moment well. I had just been elected to the Senate. It was November of 2010. I had yet to be sworn in. That wouldn't happen until January of 2011. But I came back here for my new Member orientation and was permitted, as a newly elected Senator-elect, to participate in my first Senate Republican conference. And it was in that measure that I supported and advocated aggressively for the earmark ban that we adopted. It was a great move. So successful and so popular, so backed by popular voter demand was this anti-earmark wave that even former President Obama, while occupying the White House at the time, agreed, agreed right then, he said--shortly after the November 2010 election, about the same time the Senate Republican conference, just down the Hall from here in the Capitol, adopted this earmark ban which, in my view, is still in place--he said: I agree with those Republican and Democratic members of Congress who have recently said that in these challenging days (referring to rising deficits and debt levels) that we cannot afford . . . earmarks. He was absolutely right. And if he was right then, it follows--in fact, it follows a fortiori that it is even more true today that the same words that President Obama uttered then are even more applicable then--they were applicable then; they are more applicable now, way more applicable. Our national debt is several multiples of what it was then, $38.5 trillion, adding to it at a rate of about $2 trillion a year. Now, in 2019, Senate Republicans made the earmark ban permanent that had previously been considered temporary, a pause, a moratorium. And we had this decades-long earmark moratorium. During that moratorium, what happened? Did the sky fall? No, it didn't. It didn't fall. Were there dogs and cats living together in the streets? Book of Revelation stuff? Not at all. There was no Armageddon. Were there disastrous political consequences to the Republicans who had spearheaded that earmark ban? No, not at all. Republicans did not suffer massive electoral defeat. In fact, within a few years, we captured the majority again in the U.S. Senate. So to my Republican colleagues, stop telling yourselves that earmarks are necessary, that they are indispensable either for electoral success or the survival of the American economy or the survival of your home States' economy. They are not. That simply is not true. That is a lie we tell ourselves. It is not true. Unfortunately, however, after Democrats took back the White House with House and Senate majorities also under Democratic control in 2021, they brought back the earmark practice. And, sadly, many Senate Republicans decided to go along with it at that time. Let's just go along because they are doing it. We might as well not let them have all the fun. So some started to do that. Now, this return in recent years, starting in 2021, to include billions of dollars' worth of earmarks in annual spending bills, this is a microcosm of Federal waste and Congress' refusal to properly act to stave off a fiscal crisis. This is the kind of direct attack on the President's economic agenda that goes unnoticed because those who support it often do so quietly, sometimes with a whisper or a whimper. I will not go quietly, nor should I, nor should any of us when we consider what we do to our children and our grandchildren, whether they are born or unborn. Whether their parents are alive yet or not, our posterity will suffer from the consequences of these. But it is not just that. It is those of us who are alive today, those of us who are working hard just to provide for our families today who suffer because when we spend too much money, everything costs more money. As Milton Friedman used to say, the true rate of taxation has to be measured not just by the top marginal tax rate. You have to look at the rate of government spending as a percentage of the economy because, one way or another, that piper has got to be paid. One way or another, it comes out in the wash. One way or another, the people will pay for it. They pay for it in terms of higher prices on everything they buy-- every good, every service. And, tragically, it is not the wealthy who bear this burden disproportionately. It is hard-working Americans, poor and middle-class Americans, those who work hard, pay their bills, pay their taxes and find that every dollar they earn buys a little bit less. We have seen more of that in the last few years than we have in a very long time. Government Agencies, for their part, very often will try to hide the true impact of this, but they can't hide it for too long. They can conceal it. They can obscure it a little bit. But the American people know; they know what is happening. This is catching up to us. Are earmarks the whole problem? No. Are they a small percentage of overall Federal spending? Yes, they are. Is discretionary spending much smaller than all mandatory spending? Yes. But this is all part of the same problem. And, again, it is earmark spending that drives the train. It is earmark spending that very often distracts us away from the things we are supposed to be doing and takes us down the direction of areas where the Federal Government probably shouldn't be acting in any event. So let me ask this question: How are voters to trust Republicans in Congress to get spending in order and reduce our national budget deficits and eventually our debt if we don't have the discipline as a conference to cut even a few billion dollars in pork-barrel spending? How can we, as Republicans in Congress, in the House or the Senate, rightfully cancel wasteful foreign aid and subsidies to leftwing public radio but then simultaneously offset those things by greenlighting the enactment of several billion dollars' worth of wasteful earmarks? Now, I will concede here everybody has a different definition of what is wasteful, what is good, what is bad. I will concede that a number of these probably go to worthy beneficiaries or at least good people intending, wanting to do good things for the American people. That doesn't mean that it is our money to spend. It doesn't mean that it is the appropriate role of the Federal Government to do that. It doesn't mean it is appropriate for any government to do that. And it doesn't mean that this process--the way we do it here--isn't terribly corrupting, with the tendency to drive up overall Federal spending. To quote President Trump, ``For years, the radical left Democrats exploited the green-energy scam as an excuse to funnel many billions of dollars into their own massive slush funds'' and ``drastically drove up prices.'' That is what happens. That is what they do. Well, through certain earmarks, they quietly do the same, diverting the tax dollars of the American people to the kinds of projects that should never receive taxpayer money. In total, the cost of earmarks this time around is around $5.2 billion. Yes, it is a small percentage of overall Federal spending. Yes, it is a small percentage even of the Federal spending in this particular package. But it is what is driving the train, and it is emblematic of the kind of problem that creates the much larger problem. While we are focused obsessively on doing these, we are not doing what we are supposed to be doing. Speaking of emblematic, as we remove funding from the Department of Homeland Security, one of the few Departments that is pretty easy to fit within the enumerated powers of the Federal Government--why? Because the Federal Government is in charge of immigration laws, borders, and the enforcement of those laws governing immigration and nationality and that sort of thing. And yet that is what gets pulled out. We leave in there all the stuff that is tangentially related, at best, to enumerated Federal powers under the Constitution. Now, in total, yes, it is a small percentage, but it is what is driving the train. Earmarks aside, perhaps the biggest problem with spending bills--with these spending bills, this package of spending bills that we will soon be considering--is that they simply spend too much money. Much of this stems from the fact that discretionary outlays spiked during COVID, and they never came back down to pre-COVID levels. In fact, total discretionary spending from fiscal year 2020 through fiscal year 2024 was $1 trillion higher than the Congressional Budget Office had projected it to be over that timeframe when they issued their 2019 budget baseline projections. That is the discretionary side. Meanwhile, the mandatory side also exploded, so it got a lot worse. A lot of people are fond of saying: Well, it is not discretionary spending; it is mandatory spending. But they both went way, way up. It is time to stop talking a big game about fiscal responsibility and to show voters that we measure up to the task. We cannot simply relent when Democrats want to tie the hands of this administration and saddle the American people with unsustainable debt. So the question I pose to my colleagues who are OK with earmarks in their spending bills is this: Why are Senate Republicans supporting the effort to ignore our conference's still active, still intact earmark ban to partner with Democrats and reverse course on President Trump? You don't believe me? Well, this bill, as presently constituted, does among many, many other things the following: It funds hospitals and healthcare clinics that provide puberty blockers to children and perform abortions. It does that. It sends money to a dance festival. This dance festival may be lovely. I am not really personally into dance festivals. Maybe some are. Those who like them, I hope they enjoy them. Dance festivals, I am sure, can be a great thing. That doesn't mean that the Federal Government should be funding it--or any government. I don't know why it is the job of any government that collects money from people, loosely speaking, at the point of a gun--because if you don't pay your taxes, eventually people with guns will come and issue a fine or haul you off if you refuse to pay--but we are funding it anyway. It provides for million-dollar renovations at both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Let's think about that for a minute. That is one of the wealthiest cities not only in America but in the world. And let's take the opera, for example. The opera: It is a great thing. I love the arts. It is fantastic. This is not exactly an everyman hobby. Now, I am sure there are exceptions. But it has a well-earned reputation for being something that is favored by the elite, by very wealthy individuals, in one of America's wealthiest cities. So why are we sending them a million dollars? The Metropolitan Opera, the last time I checked, has an endowment worth about $255 million. It has multiple employees earning in excess of $1 million a year. I believe it has real estate assets valued at around half a billion dollars. And yet hard-working Americans in Peoria, IL, and in Orem, UT, all over the country, people who probably don't visit New York very often, if ever, who may not be into the opera, they are all being asked to subsidize that, to pay a million dollars for elevator renovations not only at the Metropolitan Opera but also at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Why? Why is that our role? But not only why is it our role; why is it the responsibility of a plumber from Montana who is just trying to feed his family, who is probably never going to attend that opera or the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Why are you sticking that person with the bill? The spending package also allocates dollars for nonprofits; specifically, nonprofits providing aid and counseling and legal services to illegal aliens, to individuals whose sole uniting characteristic is that they are here inside the United States unlawfully. Why are we doing that when it is counter to what we are supposed to be doing, which is to discourage illegal immigration and to make possible bringing to justice those who break the laws--something that--oh, yeah, we are removing that part of the bill that would even do that because we are too busy making sure that we are funding the hobbies of the ultrawealthy in one of America's wealthiest cities that most Americans will never visit. This is reverse Robin Hood at its worst. This is taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich, and it is wrong. The bill also contains earmarks funding a nonprofit organization called NICE. Now, don't let the name fool you. NICE is not so nice. NICE is the New Immigrant Community Empowerment to assist illegal aliens in getting jobs--jobs that ought to go to American citizens or at least individuals who, if not citizens, are inside the United States legally and legally authorized to work in the United States of America. The Federal Government, through taxpayers, should not be funding hospitals that give puberty blockers to children or nonprofit museums or leftwing labor activist organizations or leftwing physicians activist organizations or groups providing legal aid or subsidized housing specifically to illegal aliens. It shouldn't do that. It shouldn't do that ever, regardless of who is in charge, especially in a time when the House of Representatives is under Republican control, when the Senate is under Republican control, and the White House is occupied by a Republican President. It shouldn't do it ever but especially not when Republicans are in charge of all three levers of the two political branches: the legislative and the executive. Senate Republicans especially should not be facilitating this abuse of power and at the hard-earned money of the American people, many of whom work months out of every year just to pay their Federal taxes only to find that every dollar they have left buys less because we are spending too much money. We shouldn't be facilitating this abuse of power and violating pledges that President Trump and that we ourselves, as Senate Republicans, have made on the campaign trail to root out and end wasteful, woke spending across the Federal Government. Even in a Republican-controlled Congress, Democrats are still able to effectuate and fund a radical agenda that the American people opposed when they elected us to this majority and that we promised we wouldn't perpetuate. And yet here we are. It is tragic. Congress does not need to and should not use earmarks as sweeteners, for lack of a better word, to make the appropriations process work. We cannot continue appropriations bills that perpetuate excess spending, especially when those same things are pushing policies that inevitably, invariably, deliberately hobble the efforts of this administration. This is like putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier in the same room and just letting them fight it out when you promised only the dehumidifier would be there. And at a minimum we should build on the successful rescissions bill initiated through the DOGE process and carried forward throughout the last year, the successful rescissions bill that, by exerting some basic fiscal discipline to enforce our conference rules and put an end to earmarks--or rather than just put an end to it, resume the end that we put in place 15 years ago, heal the breach that has now been there for about 5 years, and honor what is still our conference position. Only then will we be able, I believe, to tackle the self-inflicted economic wounds that cloud the bright skies of opportunity before us. As President Trump said in his end-of-year speech, just a few weeks ago, ``we're poised for an economic boom the likes of which the world has never seen.'' I believe him, and he is doing a lot of things that are helping us get there. The least we can do is not undercut him. And to achieve that potential, we the Congress, we the Senate, and we the Senate Republican conference in the majority must act. Earmarks aren't the way. They are the wrong way. Earmarks aren't the solution. They are the problem. We need to end them. In connection with this package of bills, I have put forward an amendment to strip them from this bill, and I humbly, with all the conviction I am capable of communicating, implore my colleagues to support the amendment.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I have seven requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I respect and deeply appreciate my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from Florida. And I respect and admire her great devotion to protecting her State, its pristine beaches, and the many qualities that it enjoys. People from all over the United States of America and all over the world love going to Florida. No one wants to take that away. I, nonetheless, take umbrage--great umbrage in fact--to a couple of characterizations to which I must now respond. First, as to what she characterizes as the ``long bureaucratic process,'' this process is itself quite short, especially in comparison to an actual bureaucratic process, which it is not. Make no mistake, this is not a bureau; this is not bureaucratic process; this is a legislative process. It is a legislative process that has endured for hundreds of years in this country, and it may not be perfect, but it is the best one we have got. It existed for many hundreds of years before that in our mother country, before we became our own country. There are reasons why these things develop. To call it a long bureaucratic process is neither fair nor accurate, and it misapprehends the nature of the legislative task, including the legislative task before us at this very moment. Now, with regard to the suggestion that by not passing this today-- not passing it after leapfrogging over about 10 legislative steps that are essential to that process--we are somehow threatening Florida's pristine beaches and waters, this is simply not true. That couldn't be more untrue. Let's remember what happened in 2020. President Trump issued a moratorium. That moratorium stays in place until 2032. Absent some other action taken pursuant to that, the status quo is to protect them. What she is trying to do is to protect against President Trump doing anything consistent with his authority, consistent with that 2020 order. She is trying to tie his hands to prevent him from even figuring out what is there, to figure out whether there is a cost-benefit analysis on any of that. Now, sure, the Senate can consider that from time to time. And perhaps after the legislative process--not the bureaucratic process. That is something different. That doesn't exist here. Nor is this simply a delay for the sake of delay. I pride myself in running the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and bringing forth these hearings as expeditiously as possible, and I have offered to put it on the next appropriate subcommittee hearing. Now, if a mere delay of a few weeks or a few months, where it takes that time, isn't acceptable, I would like to know why. We have yet to hear a single reason, a single argument as to the parade of horribles of what could happen if we don't, as she would do here, tie President Trump's hands and bind further legislatively beyond what he has already bound himself to through his own 2020 Executive order. So this is in place. It will remain in place. And there has yet to be a single reason articulated as to why we should treat this as an emergency. There is nobody going down there to drill right now. We still have got the Agencies that are looking at it. The least we can do in consideration of President Trump, his administration, and the affected Agencies, including those that I have mentioned earlier today--most particularly BOEM--is to hear them out first. In the absence of a compelling reason to leapfrog all of that, I must and will continue to object.

Mr. LEE. Reserving the right to object, this legislation has not been through regular order. It has not received a legislative hearing, and it hasn't been marked up. And it hasn't been reported by the committee of jurisdiction. As a result, there has been no opportunity, with all of those stops along the legislative pathway having been skipped--there has been no opportunity--for Members of this body, for members of the Trump administration, for the two principal involved Agencies within the U.S. Department of the Interior, known as BOEM and BSEE, to provide their feedback or offer testimony on the implications of this legislation. Now, look, the Senate's committee process exists, and it exists for a reason. It exists for exactly these sets of reasons. While it might have slightly different implications depending on the committee involved and depending on the type of legislation, there are reasons why these things are there, and almost regardless of which committee is affected, you can normally benefit from this. And, in fact, it is normally quite hazardous to just bypass all of this, because that is how we legislate, without making sure that we have gone through all the necessary steps. This process that has evolved over the last, roughly, two and a half centuries allows legislation to be examined in a transparent and a deliberative way, with input from affected Agencies, from industries, from the President of the United States and members of his administration, and Senators on both sides of the aisle, including but not limited to the Senators of the States who might be behind the legislation in question. Before legislation is advanced to the floor, it should be vetted through that process so that the Senate can fully understand and appreciate its scope, its effect, its legal posture, and whatever unintended or intended consequences the legislation might have. I have made it clear, from the beginning, that I am willing to work with the Senator from Florida. In fact, I have offered to place it on the agenda for the next subcommittee hearing within the Energy Subcommittee of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. That would provide the Trump administration with the opportunity to weigh in with its views and allow us to hear analysis from BOEM and BSEE and any other Agencies that are affected--consistent with how the committee has considered other legislation within its jurisdiction this year, and consistent with the way it has always done it in the 15 years I have been a U.S. Senator. As chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, I have consistently stated that bills within the committee's jurisdiction should proceed through regular order. That process positions bills for successful consideration on the floor, consideration by the House, and, ultimately, enactment into law. Skipping that process allows a bill to jump ahead of others that have followed the rules and respected the committee system. So my objection today is not based on the merits of the underlying policy. It is based on the process. But the process is important to getting the policy right. That is why we don't skip it. That is why, in the absence of a compelling, overwhelming, urgent reason, we don't just ignore it, and I can't and won't ignore it here. The Senate should not abandon its regular order by advancing legislation that has not been considered by the committee of jurisdiction. I look forward to working with my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from Florida to consider her bill in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in a transparent matter. Until that occurs, I must object and object now.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action for the Isaacman nomination and any nominations confirmed during Wednesday's session of the Senate.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. I ask unanimous consent to waive the mandatory quorum call with respect to the Weaver nomination.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I appreciate my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from New Mexico, who has a genuine concern. It is a worthy concern, and it is a concern that I share in the sense that I want to make sure that both Democrats and Republicans serving in this body on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, when they submit these bills--particularly bills in this category that I described that have passed unanimously in this body--be given ample opportunity for consideration and passage over in the House of Representatives. He is understandably concerned about the possibility of Republican and Democratic bills being sent over together, only to discover after the fact, that the Democratic bills would languish. I understand that concern. I am deeply sympathetic to it. And it is because I share that concern--and not in spite of it--that I believe this is the way we ought to do things. This is the way we do things elsewhere in the Senate where we have got noncontroversial legislation. Let's move them forward. Now, we have moved them forward. You have seen pairings here; Democratic bills brought to the floor, not stitched together surgically in one legislative package but paper- clipped together in one stack so that we are presenting them for unanimous consent passage at the same time but not as part of the same legislation. Why do we do this rather than the other way? Understanding the legitimacy of his concerns, we want to make sure that bills in this category, in particular, receive fair consideration regardless of whether there is a Democrat or Republican sponsor of the bill. No. 1, our House counterpart committee and others within the House of Representatives have told us that not only is this their preference-- that they would rather have them paper-clipped and not stitched together as one bill but sent over as separate bills--they said this will actually expedite, facilitate their ability to get them passed, whether they are introduced by Republicans or Democrats in the House or in the Senate. Not always, by the way, is a Democrat bill here a Democrat bill on the other side of the Capitol. Sometimes it switches. But regardless, even for the bills that are introduced by a Democrat here and a Democrat there, these bills are considered--and we have been told over and over again by those with responsibility over this, they have got a better chance of passing separately than they would if we start stitching them together. In their view, as they have told me repeatedly, it will hinder--not expedite or facilitate--their chances of being passed if we surgically stitch them together in one bill. There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that the laws of gravity don't always operate the same way here as they do on the other side of the Capitol. Sometimes a bill that can move through over here without a single objection might draw some opposition on the other side of the Capitol for reasons that can be difficult to predict. In any event, there is a great safeguard in all of this in the way the House of Representatives passes this--and I think this is inherent in why it is that they want them as separate bills that can be paper- clipped together for purposes of getting it passed by unanimous consent over here--over there. When they do it over there, they use a procedure in the House known as suspension of the rules. Under suspension of the rules, you have got to have 290 votes to pass it rather than a simple majority of 218 votes. That feature ends up replicating, to a significant degree, the effect of the cloture standard over here such that it has got to be bipartisan. So they can't afford to--and therefore don't on bills like this--favor Republican bills over Democrat bills. Now, my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from New Mexico noted a moment ago that his concerns are already materializing and that they are neglecting Democrat bills in the House while preferencing Republican bills. I don't see this. In fact, to the contrary. Within the last week, the House of Representatives has passed multiple bills--I believe it was three or four bills--introduced by Democrats; Democrat bills run through the suspension of the rules calendar passed this week. They are not depreferencing them. And from what I have heard from multiple credible sources on the other side of the Capitol, this is because of the way the suspension of the rules practice works over there. They don't, in part, because they can't get these passed if they preference Republican bills and depreference Democrat bills in this respect. Look, at the end of the day, we have to remember that a lot of what this Chamber does operates by means of unanimous consent, certainly in scheduling votes, scheduling just about anything. Heck, scheduling what time we are going to go to lunch or adjourn for the evening until the next day requires unanimous consent. But a lot of legislation we pass gets done that way, too, and thank Heaven above that it can. If we can't do the easy stuff this way, the harder stuff becomes much more difficult. And the really tough stuff, the stuff that still needs to get done--things like permitting reform, for example, where on both sides of the aisle you have strong opinions, you have a strong desire overall to see that permitting reform gets accomplished, you have somewhat differing ideas on what must be in there and what must not be included--things like that that are very important to the public but that are by no means noncontroversial become far more difficult to impossible. Let's get the easy stuff done. We did it yesterday afternoon. We can do it again. I will be back as I am determined to push these bills forward, Republican and Democrat. And if we tie them together surgically in one bill, it will impair their passage, Republican and Democratic alike. We don't need to do that here. We ought not. This is unfortunate, but I will be back soon.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, the American people understand to varying degrees but have a general understanding of the fact that the work we do here in the Senate is a combination of things. Some of the things that we address are controversial. Some of them make the daily or evening news or the cover of the newspaper the next day. Those tend to be the things that are more controversial, things on which there might be sharp disagreements, sometimes sharply divided down partisan lines, reflected based on where one's desk sits in relation to the center aisle of this Chamber. Other times, there might be controversy, but the controversy doesn't cut cleanly across party lines. We might have some Republicans and some Democrats on one side or the other. In many instances--maybe not enough but, mercifully, there are many instances--there is not only not much controversy but no controversy at all. There is a significant amount of legislation that passes through this Chamber every single year unanimously, without a single ``no'' vote. Some of this, to be sure, might recognize the naming of a post office or it might recognize--I don't know--``National Sofa Care Month,'' if there is such a thing. Others deal with discrete, local issues--issues that, while important to a select few people who live around, for example, a particular piece of land owned by the Federal Government and might be affected by the land management policy associated with that parcel, are very important to that local population but might be completely unknown not only to people on the other side of the country but even to people in other parts of that same State. There is a fair amount of legislation that moves through the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources--a committee that I currently chair--that fits into each of these categories: controversial bills where there is a sharp Republican-Democratic divide; bills that have some controversy that cut across party lines; and, yes, mercifully, this other category of noncontroversial votes without a single substantive objection. The American people understand that there will be opposition to a lot of pieces of legislation, but they also, justifiably, expect us to consider and pass bills on their merits. As to this category of bills that are important to some, unknown to most, and controversial to no one, well, they expect us to get those passed in a timely fashion. I am trying to do this quickly, expeditiously, and to do it in the right way. Now, I tried doing it the right way--the same way I am going to try today--back in May, on the 22nd of May. I tried to do it the right way again on July 29. I tried doing it the right way again, 2 weeks ago. This will be my fourth attempt to try to pass a small handful of extremely noncontroversial bills that already passed this Chamber unanimously, without a single ``no'' vote in the last Congress, at the end of last year, and that have moved forward from the Energy and Natural Resources Committee--again, without opposition from either side of the aisle, from any Senator--earlier this year. Each of these times, I have received an objection from the Democratic side of the aisle. At no point have I heard a single substantive objection to any of these bills in this category that I have tried to pass through this procedure--a procedure which is well-worn and which exists for exactly this circumstance. You know, across multiple committees--certainly within the Energy and Natural Resources Committee--there is a lot of legislation that falls into that category. We are told repeatedly that there are simply too many bills for the Senate to consider individually. This is often the case. And it is often the case, in particular, that for a bill that has no opposition, for a bill that is very important to a population of people within a particular State as to a discrete issue--it might be important or interesting to literally no one else in any other State or in other parts of the same State--we are told that these bloated bills that sometimes get combined, which are multiple pieces of legislation, sometimes amounting to thousands of pages at a time, can become a necessary evil to accommodate all of the small lands bills important to our States. I am here to tell you that this is simply not the case. It certainly need not be the case here, and it isn't. Now, had we moved these bills each time I have been on the floor this year, we certainly would have already been able to make significant progress in clearing the backlog, so that we could deal with this problem that many people cite as a reason we would need a massive, all- or-nothing, bloated, sewn-together lands package--take it or leave it, all or nothing. If we really need the bills passed, why can't we start, at least, with the low-hanging fruit? I have no delusions that this makes everything easy. It certainly doesn't, as there is a lot of this process that can be difficult. But we ought to start with the bills that are noncontroversial, that have yet to receive a single substantive objection on their merits, and that are things that we all agree on. Why can't we move the bills that have already passed unanimously, that have already been vetted in committee this year and last year, and that passed on the Senate floor without a single ``no'' vote last year? Why come down here and object, over and over again, to bills that are noncontroversial? Well, sometimes this is the muscle memory that can start to evolve, that can start to take hold within this body. But it need not be this way; it ought not be this way, as it doesn't lead to good decisions. If this is how we treat the things that are noncontroversial, it is going to make the things where there is some debate, some opposition, some dissent more difficult and, as to the stuff that is sharply partisan, impossible. If you have a bill that you know can't pass on its own, well then, what do you do? Well, perhaps what you want to do is pair it with a bunch of other bills that are themselves noncontroversial, hoping that it won't get noticed or hoping that there will be enough other Senators who will say: I guess we have to take it or leave it; so let's let it all pass. They might say: Are you really going to sink all of this important work just for one section of this much larger bill that you disagree with? Well, look, taken to its logical conclusion and repeated, over and over again, and applied even to noncontroversial bills, this ends up being sort of extortive in its effect, and it doesn't produce a good outcome--not for people of either party, not for people of either legislative Chamber, and, certainly, not for the American people. Just yesterday, we were able to do some things on the floor the right way. Senator Sullivan came to the floor and passed his bill to extend the deadline for Alaska Native Vietnam-era vets to claim the land allotments that they earned through their service. This was only after Democrats--including my friend and colleague the distinguished senior Senator from New Mexico, Senator Heinrich--had objected to it twice. But his bill--Senator Sullivan's legislation that I just mentioned--is now headed to the President's desk to be signed into law. Now, there is no reason that that success that we tasted, just yesterday afternoon, can't continue here with similarly situated, similarly noncontroversial, unanimously passed bills. So, again, I have got four bills that I will be asking unanimous consent to pass here today. They include S. 1084, which is the North Dakota Trust Lands Completion Act of 2025. This bill, sponsored by Senator Hoeven, passed last year with unanimous support and would authorize equal value exchanges to enable the State of North Dakota to manage its own State lands. S. 1142 is the Scarper Ridge Golden Gate National Recreation Area Boundary Adjustment Act. This bill, sponsored by Senator Padilla, passed last year and would make a minor boundary adjustment to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It is entirely noncontroversial. S. 1016 is the Vicksburg National Military Park Boundary Modification Act. This bill, sponsored by Senator Wicker, is a minor but important boundary adjustment to the park, and it passed last year with unanimous support. S. 603, sponsored by Senator Kaine, designates the George C. Marshall House in Virginia as an affiliated area within the National Park System. It is simply allowing them to be affiliated with the National Park Service. This bill also passed with unanimous support. What do these bills have in common? Well, they are bipartisan. They all passed the body unanimously, without a single ``no'' vote in the last Congress. I have heard zero substantive objections on the merits to any single one of these bills. I stand ready to work with any Member--Republican or Democrat--to move their bills off the floor, especially with regard to these noncontroversial bills. We can get this done. We can work through this broken process. It need not be broken, especially as to this category of bills. This is the easy stuff. Let's not make the easy stuff hard, lest we incur the risk of making the harder stuff impossible. So to that end, Mr. President, as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be discharged and that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of the following bills en bloc; further, that the bills, as amended, if amended, where applicable, be considered read a third time and passed en bloc and that motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, all en bloc: S. 1084, North Dakota Trust Lands Completion Act of 2025 from Senator Hoeven; S. 1142, the Scarper Ridge Golden Gate National Recreation Area Boundary Adjustment Act from Senator Padilla; S. 1016, the Vicksburg National Military Park Boundary Modification Act with a substitute amendment from Senator Wicker; and S. 603, to designate the General George C. Marshall House in the Commonwealth of Virginia from Senator King.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I want to thank my friend and colleague the senior Senator from Colorado for his outstanding work on this, for working with me and my team. I am glad that we were able to make this a success. It is my hope and my intent that this will not be the end but the beginning of a much bigger pattern of success. It is a good example of the kind of legislation we ought to pass every time we get the chance. When we have bills that are uncontroversial, we can get them passed. Sometimes these bills are held up not in spite of the fact that they are noncontroversial but because they are noncontroversial--because we want to couple them with other legislation that may be less popular. We have heard some observations today, some concerns expressed about the ability, once we pass legislation over here, to get it passed over on the House side. There are a couple of things I think we ought to take note of that should give us hope on this. In the first place, the way legislation like this works on the House side--they don't have the 60-vote cloture standard that we have in the Senate, but with these lands bills, they tend to pass them under a procedure known in the House as suspension of the rules. Under suspension of the rules, it requires them to be passed with 290 votes instead of 218. Because of the way that works, it ends up yielding a similar outcome to how it works over here. They tend to be able to enhance their ability to pass those under the suspension calendar if they bring them to the floor while paired with other bills--not surgically stitched together so it is the same legislation, but they bring them forward for procedural consideration in the House on the floor, resulting in an approximate number of noncontroversial Republican and Democratic bills passing regardless of who happens to be in the majority at the time. My friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from California had mentioned a moment ago concerns about that process over in the House, but I will remind him that at the end of the last Congress, he and I had several bills that were brought together and passed through the procedure that I am describing on the floor and that were passed into law by the House of Representatives after that. Although, under certain circumstances, two separate bill sponsors of two separate bills may choose to merge, surgically stitch their bills into one bill, there are downsides to that too, and it certainly ought not be that without which, not passing legislation in the Senate--they ought to be able to stand on their own. I, for one, am happy--particularly within the range of this type of bill that we have dealt with here, bills that have passed the Senate in the past and that do not have significant opposition over here--happy to work with my counterparts in the House to make sure those move forward. There are sometimes reasons why something doesn't move as quickly over there as it might over here, and there are as many different reasons for that as there are types of legislation. In any event, I want to thank all the people participating today--in particular Senator Bennet and Senator Sullivan for their tenacity in moving these bills forward. Finally, Mr. President, let me just remark briefly on another topic that has come up within the last few minutes where we are celebrating anniversaries related to the First Step Act. This is something that I worked on for nearly a decade before it became law. It was an honor and privilege to do that. I appreciate the remarks made earlier by Senator Booker from New Jersey. I still remember the exact moment Senator Booker first stepped onto the floor in the Senate right after he came to the Senate in October of 2012, I believe it was. He introduced himself to me and in the same sentence said: I am really interested in your criminal justice reform efforts, and I want to be partners. So it was a great privilege to work with him, with Senator Durbin, Senator Grassley, and all the others who made it possible. It has been a good development for the United States of America. We have been more effective in combating crime by being smart in the way we punish crime. When we unduly take away discretion from judges to allow them to be judges, sometimes it can present odd outcomes, as it certainly did in the case of Weldon Angelos, the young man who, in his midtwenties, sold three dime-bag quantities of marijuana over a 72-hour period to what turned out to be a confidential informant. The firearm that he had in his possession at the time--because of the way minimum mandatory laws were being interpreted and applied in the courts at the time, Mr. Angelos was subjected to a minimum mandatory sentence that would put him in prison for the rest of his natural life--to a 55-year minimum mandatory sentence because he had a gun on his person at the time even though the gun was neither brandished nor discharged in connection with the offense. Under the so-called three-strikes laws at the time, the Federal district judge, Paul Cassell of Salt Lake City, who sentenced him said: There are hijackers, there are murderers, rapists, all kinds of people who do horrible things who don't get anywhere near this much time in prison, but I, as a Federal judge, have no discretion here, no choice but to send him to prison for 55 years based on three dime-bag quantities. Each of the two first offenses, even though they were all charged on the same document and occurred over the same 72-hour period--they counted as prior convictions for purposes of the three-strikes law, and that is one of the many issues we set out to address in the First Step Act. The country is better off for it. Mr. President, back to the lands package, I again want to thank Senator Sullivan for his tenacity in this, for his patience and his willingness to stick with the effort. The people of Alaska are fortunate to have him serving that great State.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 512.