Mike Lee

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, it is my distinct pleasure to recognize 17 exemplary men and women who are among the best and brightest that Utah has to offer. These individuals have answered the call to service and have received appointments to the U.S. Air Force Academy, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, the U.S. Military Academy, and the U.S. Naval Academy. As a member of Congress, it is my privilege under title 10 of the U.S. Code, to nominate a number of young men and women to these iconic service academies. But receiving a congressional nomination does not guarantee acceptance. To be admitted, each applicant must meet--on his or her own merits--the academies' rigorous standards. I am happy to report that each individual has done this and more. They have demonstrated impressive mental and physical aptitude. Perhaps more importantly, they have shown their high moral character and capacity for leadership, courage, honesty, prudence, and self- discipline. They maintain a steadfast commitment to serve and stand up for our country. I can say without hesitation that you would be hard pressed to find a more accomplished, talented, patriotic group of American citizens anywhere. They will be a credit to our Nation as they begin their journeys in Colorado Springs, Kings Point, West Point, and Annapolis. I look forward to seeing what they accomplish in their academic years and beyond. It is my honor to recognize and congratulate these fine Utahns in the U.S. Senate: Rieder N. Birch will be attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point after graduating from Park City High School. He earned the AP Scholar with Distinction Award for his high number of AP classes and excellent test scores. He was a member of the National Honor Society, Fly Fishing Club, Youth Group Bible Study, and Especially for Athletes where he was an officer. He played lacrosse for the high school team and a local club team. He worked on a local mayoral campaign, coached lacrosse, and was a counselor at Basin Recreation Camp. Sebastian William Bodily accepted an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. A 2025 graduate of Park City High School, Sebastian has successfully spent this year at the Naval Academy Preparatory School. In high school, Sebastian was captain of the football and track & field teams, where he held multiple state and school records. He helped his fellow students in the Hope Squad and was vice president of the Investment Club. He has followed his Marine father's advice in life's challenges to ``adapt and overcome.'' Matthew Jackson Cernyar will join the cadets and his brother at the Air Force Academy. He prepared for the academy by taking a large number of AP and concurrent enrollment classes while maintaining straight A's. At Wasatch High School he served as president of HOSA, and vice president of both Turning Point USA and the Let's go to the Moon Club. He was on the wrestling team, track & field team, and captain of the cross country team. Jack worked with special needs students as a peer tutor and through his church's ministry. Ayaan Garg will be joining his brother at the U.S. Naval Academy. The Providence Hall High School graduate was a member of the Navy Junior ROTC where he served in several leadership positions and earned the NJROTC Student of the Year Award three times. He played on the tennis team and ran on the cross country team. Ayaan was the Service Officer for the National Honor Society, the Health and Ecology Instructor for a Youthlinc humanitarian trip to India, and the Mayor Pro-Temp on the Lehi Youth City Council. Jacob Nicholas Hamblin, a graduate of Corner Canyon High School, will be attending the Air Force Academy. Jacob stayed busy in high school with both academics and sports. He took a number of AP classes while maintaining straight A's. He was captain of the high school swim and mountain bike teams. Both sports prepare him to compete in triathlons where he won the U.S. National Off-Road Championship. Jacob is inspired by his father's service in the Army Reserves and Utah National Guard to always be his best. Mei Li Han will be joining the cadets of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point after studying this last year at the University of Utah and interning in my Washington, DC office. She graduated from Park City High School where she was captain of the mountain bike team and president of the National Honor Society. She was a member of the Park City Ski and Snowboard and Ski Mountaineering teams. She also found time to take fourteen AP classes, participate in orchestra, and complete the U.S. Senate Youth Program. Marshall Stephen Huber will be attending the Air Force Academy after graduating from Brighton High School. He was a captain of the track & field team and the football team. He earned the 5A Offensive Lineman of the Year, First Team All- State, and Scholar Athlete of the Year awards in football. Marshall was a member of Especially for Athletes and served on the Leadership Council. In addition to being a leader on the field, he leads his peers as they work together to clean elementary schools, and is an example to his siblings. Isabel Avery Illian, from Cedar City, chose to accept an appointment to the Air Force Academy. Her time at SUCCESS Academy, a charter school tied to Southern Utah University, where she maintained a 4.0 GPA, prepared her well for an academy. She earned team and state honors on the track & field and cross country teams. Izzy plays viola for the Symphonic orchestra and Orchestra of Southern Utah. She achieved a Superior Rating in the State Viola Solo and Ensemble competition. She also volunteered at an elementary school with kindergarten and first grade students. Keira Marie Jones worked hard to prepare for the Naval Academy and is sure to have received good advice from her brother. The gymnastics standout graduated from Springville High School with a 4.0 GPA and a challenging academic courseload. As vice president of the senior class, president of the National Honor Society, and an officer in the Key Club, Keira led numerous service projects and completed over 95 hours of service herself that included repainting park benches, making comfort kits, and working at the local food bank. Ellen Renee Kennedy graduated from Waterford School and has been attending the University of Utah. She has accepted an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. An academy graduate inspired her to find meaning and purpose, so she is taking her talents to the Army. She served in student government and volunteered with animal shelters and the Park West Bees. She was captain of the volleyball team and most valuable player on both the high school and club teams. She was the assistant coach of a high school team during college. Caden Roger Kerrigan will follow his grandfathers into the Navy, having accepted an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. From Draper, he graduated from Juan Diego Catholic High School where he took a high number of AP classes, was awarded the AP Scholar Award, and represented his school at Boys State. Caden has been recognized as a natural leader--as captain of the wrestling team, coach for both wrestling and Jiu-Jitsu, a sports referee, supervisor at multiple jobs, and older brother to his siblings. Preston Callister Lang will join the midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy after graduating from Snow Canyon High School. Preston is a straight-A student who scored a 36 composite on his ACT has prepared himself both academically and physically for the academy. He was captain of the wrestling team and represented Utah three times in the U.S. Marine Corps 16U/ Junior Nationals Freestyle and Greco-Roman National Championships. He helps others by coaching youth wrestling and performing acts of service as a member of his church youth group. Edward Anthony Jonathan Peek will be attending the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy after his graduation from Judge Memorial Catholic High School. AJ was a member of the state champion basketball team that went All-State three times. He also played football and lacrosse. He served as captain of the basketball team and as a counselor at Camp Elim youth camp. AJ enjoys making music by playing piano and writing and recording his own pieces. Gianni Michael Renzetti is on his way to Kings Point, New York to attend the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. From Clinton, Gianni attended Northridge High School. As a member of the Air Force Junior ROTC, he earned the Air Force Sergeants Association Award and the American Veterans Award. He served as Cadet Chief Master Sergeant and Cadet Executive Officer. He was selected to attend the highly competitive AFJROTC Flight Academy where he logged over eighty hours of flight time and earned his private pilot's license. Jacob Garrett Scott will trade the mountains of the Wasatch Front in Midway for the Colorado Front at the Air Force Academy. A graduate of Wasatch High School, Garrett kept a 4.0 GPA with sixteen AP classes and six concurrent enrollment classes. He was a member of the Air Force Junior ROTC, president of the Let's go to the Moon Club, the Hive Newsletter, the Milkmen Quartet, and vice president of Interact. He was captain of the cross country team and on the long jump team. He is a co-founder of Sycamore Swing and a host on the Heber Valley Railroad. Berkley Jan Smith, after graduating from Mountain View High School and spending a year at the Georgia Military College as a Falcon Scholar will enter the U.S. Air Force Academy. Berkley has been preparing herself by taking a range of AP, concurrent enrollment, and college classes. She was a leader in the Mountain View Dance Company, a member of the mountain bike team, Model UN, and Mock Trial where she earned honors. She served as vice president of the Georgia Military College chapter of Turning Point USA. Conor Lorin Squires, a graduate of Lone Peak High School, will be attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Conor served on the Alpine Youth Council and as a leader in his church youth group. With these groups and on his own he found countless ways to volunteer in his community, including assembling food kits, setting up flags, helping refugees and those with special needs. He maintained a 4.0 GPA throughout high school while still participating in several sports and extracurricular activities. It has been inspiring to nominate each of these exceptional young men and women. They give me great hope for the future of our armed services and confidence in the destiny of our Nation. To these 17 appointees, and to all their future classmates from around the country, I commend your achievements and your demonstrated lifelong commitment to service. While this is but the beginning of your journey, I urge you to remember the foundation of your success thus far. You would not have arrived at this point without the dedication and example of your parents, family, teachers, coaches, and mentors. Moreover, you would not have arrived at this point without your own sacrifice and hard work. Strive to continue on the path of strong moral character and to keep love of country as a guiding principle. Look to the past with gratitude and to the future with conviction. If you stay this course, I have no doubt your future holds great things in store.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, we need dispatchable power. Something happens when the government subsidizes and otherwise encourages nondispatchable power and punishes and discourages dispatchable power: The price of dispatchable power and power generally goes up. That is exactly what happened following the passage of the Democrat bill with the Orwellian name of the ``Inflation Reduction Act.'' The same year that was passed, in 2022--that bill, which encouraged and fostered nondispatchable power and discouraged dispatchable power--the cost of electric power went up. It went way up. It went up more than any year since the Energy Information Administration began tracking this data in 1984. That is what happens, and that is what they want to do more of. We need less of that. We are trying to turn it down. They are trying to accelerate into the turn in a way that would make energy more expensive. So under the provisions of section 305(b) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I raise a point of order that the amendment offered is not germane.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, we are fortunate. We are blessed to inhabit a country where freedom is the norm, where popular sovereignty is the objective, and has been since the dawn of our Republic. We are celebrating this year the 250th anniversary of this country, which, itself, was founded upon the idea that all human beings are created equal; that we have certain inalienable rights, among these, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. The consent of the governed--that is the key part. That is what differentiates a tyrannical government--which is to say most governments that have ever existed--versus a government in which men and women are allowed to be free, in which government exists for the specific purpose of serving the people. That is part of what was recognized in the document whose 250th anniversary we will be celebrating on July 4, that governments are indeed instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. So what does that mean to provide your consent? Well, among many other things, it means the ability to participate in selecting who may operate your government, who will wield the levers of government power. Government power is something that is easily misunderstood. These things don't necessarily occur to us automatically. To remember what government is, sometimes we are inclined to attribute to government qualities that it does not have and can never have, qualities that government can never have specifically because the government is not a person; the government consists of official power, the power to act in the name of an entire country or other body politic, in order to establish rules carrying the force of generally applicable law, enforceable with the immense power of government. Ultimately, it is, then, about power, and that is one of the many reasons why, even though we need to respect government and respect the authority of government--especially when it is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people--we should never lose sight of the fact that government is best understood as wielding authority that is dangerous. In other words, like other things that we rely on, that we need, that are necessary in some cases to sustain life, or in other cases to make life manageable or enjoyable, government is one of those many things that, while a key indispensable part of our lives, it is, at its core, dangerous because it is ultimately about force. And what differentiates government from other entities or other people--endeavors that can bring about force. Government has the ability to use force to enforce law, to enforce compliance with rules that we call laws because they are enforceable by force, with the degree of official sanction and impunity that goes along with being a government. And that is why--I believe it was George Washington who pointed out that, like fire, government is necessary, but it has to be carefully contained and constrained, less it take over and destroy those very same things that it is there to serve. James Madison explained it really well in Federalist No. 51, when he explained that if human beings were angels, we wouldn't need government because if we were angels, we would be naturally benevolent, kind, virtuous, and respectful of the law, respectful of order, respectful of each other. And that is not to say that human beings are not that way; I believe that human beings are fundamentally, generally good. But not all human beings are that way, and no human being is that way all of the time. So getting back to Madison's point, if all human beings were angels, we wouldn't need a government because we wouldn't harm each other; we wouldn't physically injure each other; we wouldn't try to take other people's possessions, things that don't belong to us; we would live in harmony. That is not the condition that we inhabit because, alas, we ourselves are not angels. So he said: If men and women were angels, they wouldn't need government. He also said: If we had access to angels to run our government, we wouldn't have a problem with government that would require us to subject government to rules. And that is where this document comes in, the document that was written 11 years after the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence, remember, in many respects, sort of helped kick off the Revolutionary War. It was sort of already underway a little bit anyway, but it made it really official. But after the Declaration of Independence was put in place, it took years for us to win that war. By most accounts, 6 or 7 years. I believe it was about 7 years before it was deemed officially won and we defeated the world's last standing superpower at the time. Now, this was a conflict as if between David and Goliath. Now the original conflict between literally David and Goliath was not a conflict in which the smart money would have been on David. David was a small shepherd boy. David was no match for Goliath. Had the Vegas oddsmakers been in business then, there is no chance that they would have given David good odds at all facing Goliath--this huge individual, armed to the gills, fiercely trained warrior; he was a professional killer. Nobody would have bet on David. Unless they were really, really thrill-seeking, risk-oriented gamblers, they would not have placed bets on David. Now had they done so, I am sure they would have made a fortune because nobody else would have believed that it was possible for David to win, but he did. So too with the American Revolution. We were David in that battle, and England was Goliath--the world's last-standing military and economic superpower. We chose to take them on. And despite all odds being against us, we won. Took us about 7 years to get through that, but we won, and we reflexively, instinctively put in place a weak system of national government under the Articles of Confederation, which ultimately failed, in large part because in our reflexive instinct to resist that which we had endured under British colonial rule. We had come to fear large, distant national governments--because, in many respects, that is what the American Revolution was about. It is not as though our American forbearers sat there one day and said: You know, we are tired of flying the Union Jack, or we are tired of having a Monarch. That didn't really explain what happened nor was it about them being tired of singing ``God Save the King'' or tired of the pronunciation they had over there. Actually, I have no idea whether, or to what extent, the pronunciations differed as much then as they do now, depending on which side of the Atlantic you found yourself on. It really had to do with this: We were subject to a large, distant, omnipresent, brooding, intrusive, heavily taxing, aggressively regulating national government, one that was so far from the people that it was slow to respond to their needs, even their urgent pleas. It became overly aggressive, and it knew no boundaries around its authority. That is really what the American Revolution was about. During the seasons, the decades--really, the nearly two centuries--in which we were in this pattern of being British Colonies, we went through cycles. There were seasons when the national government of Great Britain would withdraw and let us sort of govern ourselves. It was during those seasons, in particular, when our local self-rule--our Colonial governments--blossomed, and Americans learned the art of local self-government. Then there would be other seasons, often during or in the aftermath of a large conflict, a large-scale expensive war. The Crown and Parliament needed to raise funds for a war or to pay off war debts, and very often that is when they would send forth their swarms of regulators and tax collectors to the Colonies, and they would start to hold the Colonies with a tighter grip. And it was after several cycles of this drama--several cycles of this bipolar, passive aggressive pattern--that we faced from the Crown and Parliament that, in 1776, we decided we had had enough. So back to the early 1780s, we won the war. We instinctively put together a government that would not resemble the system that we lived under previously. And so we reflexively created this quite weak, anemic national government, and that too proved problematic. Within just a few years, it became apparent that we couldn't survive unless we had a national government that was capable of functioning as such; and that our national government couldn't function effectively as a national government unless it had a few powers--including the power to coordinate and regulate commerce between the States and with foreign nations, including the power to raise taxes to, among other things, fund war efforts, fund national defense, assemble armies, and so forth. And so it was against that backdrop that our Founding Fathers came together in that hot summer of 1787 in Philadelphia. They tried the previous year in 1786. They assembled in Annapolis to deal with the same inadequacies of the Articles of Confederation. They tried to convene, but they failed because they failed to achieve a quorum. And they assembled in the late spring of 1787. It was still, ostensibly, with the mindset of amending the Articles of Confederation. It was not officially their objective to write an entirely new document and ordain an entirely new structure and framework for our government to operate, and yet that is what they came up with. I happen to believe that those men were special. They were unusually gifted, unusually well educated, both as compared to their day and ours, in every respect. I believe they were wise men raised up by almighty God to that very purpose, because it is my belief that this is a land that God has preordained for liberty, that he did not intend the sons and daughters of the United States of America to live in captivity under the oppressive yoke of any tyrant, foreign or domestic. And that is why we are so blessed with those uniquely inspired and inspiring and gifted and well-educated individuals who understood liberty. They understood power. They understood its dark side, and they understood the potential for greatness of any society that can live under the rule of law with this system of laws that attempts to treat people equally. We may not be equal in our capacity, in our possessions, in our stations in life, but we are all treated equally in terms of the fact that we are all equally subject to a just system of laws. That, from the American Republic's very beginning, has been the objective. While we don't always live up to that to the degree that we should, that is the aspiration; and, in that respect, it is something that differentiates us from so many other nations and certainly did at the time. What they came up with in the end was a system of government that fairly allocated powers between the States and the Federal sovereign. And it acknowledged that it is just as important for the Federal Government to have power, to be exclusive in its domain over the Federal sovereign, as it is for the States to retain all other powers not granted to the Federal sovereign. It is no less bad for the Federal Government to intrude upon the sovereignty of the States than it is for the States to intrude upon and undermine the sovereignty of the Federal Government. And that is why the Founding Fathers were inclined to devote so much time, attention, and brain power to this difficult task of assigning to each level of government what its responsibilities would be, and then separately assigning to each branch of the Federal Government--the U.S. Government--which powers could be exercised by and within each branch. These things were relatively foreign to our English counterparts. They were even relatively new concepts here in some respects. In others, there were patterns that emerged in which you can see a close resemblance between the British system and ours--you know, like a bicameral legislative body, as there was in Parliament; a chief Executive, as there was in England, with a President and a Parliament. There was some separation of powers, yes, but it wasn't complete. It was nothing like ours was. And then, as now, the dual sovereignty system did not exist in the United Kingdom. It was very rare in the entire world. It was a relatively new creature here. There were a couple of antecedents. I will mention two of them briefly. One of them was the Swiss cantons, which had survived for centuries based on an allocation of power. The Swiss Confederacy, as it was known, consisted of a consortium of regional governments called cantons, and they came together for certain national purposes-- including, and especially, national defense. So, too, was a more local, homegrown, familiar example known as the Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois Confederacy had existed and lived for centuries with Tribes that came together, maintained their right, their authority to govern themselves locally at a local level as to internal matters. But they came together and were one when it came to external affairs, especially military matters. It was in the 1740s that one of our Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin--many decades before we would become an independent Nation and many decades before we would have a Constitution--Benjamin Franklin attended a conference of sorts in Albany, NY. Other attendees at that conference included a chief from the Onondaga Tribe named Canassatego. Canassatego and Benjamin Franklin became friends, or at least allies, as Canassatego explained to Benjamin Franklin the secrets of the Iroquois Confederacy's longevity, its durability, its ability to defend itself--showing him that if you take one arrow and you want to break it, it is easy to break a wooden arrow. But if you take a bundle of five or six of those thin, wooden arrows and you bow them together, you can't just break them like you can easily break an arrow. Canassatego explained to Benjamin Franklin that this is the secret of the Iroquois Confederacy. If we were just one Tribe--his Tribe, the Onondaga Tribe--if just the Onondaga Tribe had to defend itself, it would be much easier for an enemy Tribe to break. But when we are part of the Iroquois Confederacy--as they had been for centuries--we come together as a confederacy and defend ourselves when we are under common attack, when we need to defend ourselves, and that worked. In many respects, it was really much more the Iroquois Confederacy than the Swiss cantons that were an inspiration. After all, this was right here on the American continent. Individuals were able to meet and interact with them far more so than they would have ever had the opportunity to interact with government officials from the Swiss Confederacy. And in many respects, the U.S. Government closely resembles at least that spirit, at least that general concept, embraced by the Iroquois Confederacy. So they wisely came together, and I believe it is fortunate. I believe it was providential and the product of a lot of divine inspiration and intervention that in that hot, sweltering summer of 1778, in Philadelphia, having convened ostensibly for the purpose of amending the Articles of Confederation to cover a couple of major deficits in the Articles of Confederation--they were just going to amend them. The concept was: We will get together. We will figure out how to deal with the interstate and foreign commerce problem, and with the ability to raise funds, the ability to raise an army and wage war, when necessary, and a few things like that. And then we were going to move on, but they didn't do that. And I think that was another part of the pattern of divine providence intervening on behalf of American people with these wise men raised up by almighty God unto that very purpose to bring about the result that they did. Finally, in the midsummer of 1787, they signed that document--that document that has now persisted, that has now endured close to two-and- a-half centuries and helped foster the development of the greatest civilization the world has ever known. Without each of these ingredients, this combination of local self- rule and national government, each remaining in its lane--this concept that we sometimes refer to as federalism--the American experiment would have failed. So too--and that, by the way, is what I refer to as the vertical, structural protection in the Constitution. We have a lot of protections. The whole thing is a protection. The whole Constitution is a protection in that its purpose for existence is itself restraining government power. In literally every instance, with one possible exception, that is what the Constitution does: It restrains government power. So it restrains it on these two axes, the one I just described--the allocation of power between the States and the Federal Government is the one we call federalism. The horizontal protection is the one that I alluded to briefly earlier--the separation of powers. We have got three separate branches of government. I prefer to refer to them coordinate rather than coequal branches. People use different terms to describe them. I never call them just equal because they really are not equal. They don't wield equal power. They are not equal in terms of their danger. Many people mistakenly refer to the judicial branch as the most dangerous branch. I think that is a huge mistake. It is just not true. Now, sure, when mistakes happen over there, they do have consequences. They can be bad, especially because it is the least democratic of the three branches. It is the least accountable to the people--by design, because its job is not to curry favor with the people. It is, rather, to decide cases and controversies. And having been appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, the Justices who hold the highest judicial office in this country, on the highest Court of the land, the Supreme Court of the United States--the only Court that is itself established by the Constitution, with the rest of the courts being the creations of Congress, pursuant to our constitutional authority under article III of the Constitution--they are the least accountable to the government because they are there to just decide case and controversies. The executive branch, run by the President--and, by way, as far as the Constitution is concerned, the President, and to a degree the Vice President, acting together, but primarily the President, is vested with the power of the executive branch. Insofar as we follow the Constitution correctly, if we were following it to its full capacity, we would continue to recognize today, as the Constitution itself does and has from the beginning, that all executive power is vested in the President of the United States. Yes, the Vice President is also elected and serves with him. The Vice President serves two principle functions under our Constitution. Function one is to serve as a spare, as a backup, as the person who steps into the role of the President in the event of a death, resignation, impeachment, and removal of the President of the United States. The second function is to serve as the President of this institution, the U.S. Senate. But beyond that twofold role that I described of the Vice President, the entirety of the executive power is vested in the President of the United States. This is significant power, to be sure; and yet that power and the power of the Courts is still ancillary to--it is still less than--the power vested in this branch of government, where we work--the executive branch of the U.S. Government, the Congress of the United States. How do we know it is the most powerful? We know it is the most powerful because we make the law. The other two branches perform ancillary functions to the lawmaking. We make the law. We decide what the law should be, what the penalty for not obeying the law should be. We prescribe these rules of action in the abstract, and it is then up to the executive branch--meaning the President and those who serve under the President--to execute, implement, and enforce the law; in other words, to carry out what it is that we decide. If you want to give it a corporate model analogy, it is as though we are the board of directors and the President is the CEO. The other way that we know that it is the most powerful and the most dangerous--beyond the fact that we make the laws that the executive implements and enforces and executes and that the judicial branch interprets where people disagree as to its meaning--again, both ancillary functions. Executing and interpreting are both ancillary to lawmaking. The other reason we know that the lawmaking function--and, therefore, the lawmaking organ--the Congress, the legislative branch, is the most dangerous and the most powerful is because they entrusted that power only to the branch of government that they made most accountable to the people at the most regular intervals. Presidents stand for election only every 4 years. By contrast, every Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, by constitutional design, stands for election every 2 years, every 24 months. In many respects, this feels like a nanosecond in the legislative timeline. It is very frequent. So every Member of the House is up for reelection every 2 years. In the Senate, one-third of our Members are up for reelection every 2 years. That is why we are never very far from an election cycle that will reorder things, that will send in new personnel, send some back home, bring others back in. This wasn't just because the Founding Fathers decided in the abstract or for optical reasons that this would be fun to try. They did it because they knew that this was the most dangerous power, the most abusable power within the Federal Government and that it shouldn't be entrusted to those who are detached from the people. You need to make them accountable to the people at very regular intervals, and that is precisely what they did. So when we look at that government today and what it does, it is, in many respects, far more powerful than the Founding Fathers could have imagined, and that is not just because the United States of America has grown from this sort of outpost of ragtag rebels who rebelled against their mother country to being the world's greatest economic and military and educational superpower, not just in existence today but perhaps that human history has ever recorded. So they would have been surprised by that, but that is not what I am really referring to here. They would have been surprised by the extent to which this government, our national government, our Federal Government, based in this city, has become as powerful as it is within this country, separate and apart from the prominence that this country has acquired through economic growth, military prowess, and so forth. In other words, this government performs a lot more functions than the Founding Fathers ever envisioned, ever ordained, or ever authorized it to perform. If you read through the Constitution--and you can do it in a few minutes, it is around 5,000 words, it doesn't take that long--most of the powers of the Federal Government are those powers enumerated or listed and given to Congress in one part of the Constitution. There are a few others that you can find throughout the document. Most of them can be found in article I, section 8, with 18 separate clauses. And its powers include primarily the power to establish a uniform system of laws governing immigration and naturalization: who can come into the country, who becomes a citizen, and so forth; the power to collect taxes, to raise money, and to spend that money in pursuit of Federal purposes as ordained by the Constitution--those are both deficits in the Articles of Confederation that they filled--the power to regulate trade, or commerce, between the States with foreign nations and with the Indian Tribes; the power to establish a uniform system of weights and measures and the power to set up a system of postal roads; the power to establish a system of what we now call intellectual property laws: trademarks, copyrights, and patents, basically. They used slightly different language then, but the idea was to protect the right of authors and inventors to protect their art, so to speak, whether that was a design or an invention, a poem, a book--whatever it is. These intellectual property rights would be distinctively national and Federal. And what, might you ask, do these things have in common? Well, they tend to be the sorts of things that need to be done at the national level. Basically, that seemed to be their standard: Let's figure out what has to be done at the national level lest there be chaos, and let's leave everything else to the States and localities. There are a few others. Bankruptcy laws come to mind and, of course, the power to provide for our national defense: to assemble an Army and a Navy, the power to declare war. Then there is perhaps my favorite power of Congress that often goes unutilized and inert, almost rendered vestigial but shouldn't be: the power to grant letters of marque and reprisal. I am referring there, of course, to letters of marque. That is spelled M-A-R-Q-U-E. This is basically a hall pass issued by Congress in the name of the United States that allows the person holding it to engage in state-sponsored acts of piracy on the high seas with utter impunity, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. If that is not awesome, I don't know what is. Now, it has been a couple hundred years since we have used those with any regularity. And perhaps it is time we do it again. It is a way of involving privateers in our dirty work, in our military work without the U.S. Government itself having to put American sweat, blood, and treasure on the line. If individuals want to sign up to do so, they may do so with the hope and expectation that they will reap a liberal, rich reward if they succeed in taking things away from our enemies and being able to bring those things back into our country. It is part of how we have won wars, particularly at a time when we didn't have a whole lot of money. We haven't used those in a long time. Perhaps we ought to look at doing those again. But my point in reciting all of these--and there are a few others, but this is the lion's share, where the bulk of the power is. There is one other I will mention here that is not found in article I, section 8. There is one that is found in article I, section 4, clause 1 that gives Congress the power to establish rules and regulations not governing elections generally, but governing the election of Federal officials, principally U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives. They understood and, in fact, openly provided in article I, section 4, clause 1 that those elections would be conducted not by a Federal election official--we don't want that, the Founding Fathers didn't want that then, we don't want that now, and we should never in the future want that--but that the States will conduct those elections and that the States could come up with basic rules to govern the time, place, and manner of those elections. And in the very same clause, they said: But Congress may alter or add to those basic rules and regulations, specifically concerning--exclusively concerning--the election of U.S. Representatives and U.S. Senators. Why? Well, because that is a Federal power. Congress is the Federal policymaking body. Congress would necessarily have that power. But my point is this: In all of those 18 clauses of article I, section 8, and then in all the other miscellaneous powers of the Federal Government almost always described in the Constitution as powers of Congress-- because, again, it is our job to set the policy. The two other branches perform ancillary--important but ancillary--functions of either executing and implementing the laws we make or interpreting the laws we make. The Constitution, in giving this power, never once gave the Federal Government power to just legislate generally. They instead gave the U.S. Government the power to do these limited things, to exercise these limited enumerated powers that James Madison described collectively in Federalist No. 45 as few and defined, while by contrast to those powers reserved to the States as numerous and indefinite. There is no power in there that says you can make good law generally, do good things for good people. That was not what it was about. State legislatures, except as constrained by their State constitutions or as prohibited by the U.S. Constitution, may have some limitations, but except as those limitations are found either in their State constitution or in the U.S. Constitution. State governments are free in our system to legislate on whatever they want just because it might be good policy, but not all good policy is constitutional within the Federal system because there are a whole lot of things that are not within our power. Among those things are things that tend to happen in one State at one time that aren't crossing across State lines, that don't trigger any of the issues that I mentioned a few minutes ago--national defense, weights and measures, bankruptcy laws, intellectual property laws, and so forth. Things like labor, manufacturing, agriculture, mining, health, safety, and welfare historically, except as they touch one of the Federal powers, were the province of States and localities. This was always how it was supposed to be. Now, we have deviated from that substantially, particularly since the 1930s in the New Deal era and particularly since one date that often goes overlooked in American history: April 12, 1937. It is a date when the Constitution was changed but not by constitutional amendment. Had the change in the Constitution that was wrought that day been implemented, been adopted as a constitutional amendment, it would have been one of the most significant constitutional amendments ever adopted, but they didn't do it that way. It was done by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, I believe, exceeded its authority and, by so doing, authorized the U.S. Congress to exceed its authority by interpreting one provision--clause 3 of article I, section 8, the commerce clause--to give Congress the open-ended power to regulate not just what it had theretofore been able to regulate as interstate commerce--meaning, up until that time, the commerce clause had always been understood--historically and according to its text, the text, the original understanding--it had always been understood and accepted as authorizing Congress to do a few things: No. 1, we could regulate things or persons moving in interstate commerce; meaning moving across State lines; meaning, if you had interstate commercial transactions. Let's say if you had a farmer in Virginia growing tobacco and he was selling his raw tobacco to a cigar manufacturer in Maryland, that was an interstate commercial transaction. That is part of why the commerce clause was put in there, because neither the laws of Virginia nor the laws of Maryland would be competent to address all the issues that could come up in that commercial transaction occurring across two different States. You had to have at least some government power that was capable of resolving disputes where one State claimed all of the authority to regulate that transaction and the other State did likewise. Just one of many examples of how and why the commerce clause was designed and originally understood: among other things, to authorize Congress to regulate interstate commercial transactions--things and persons moving in commerce across State lines. (The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore assumed the Chair.) It was also understood historically as authorizing Congress to regulate channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce, the conduits and processes and means by which persons and things typically move interstate in a stream of commerce. And by this we mean interstate roadways, waterways, canals. Today we would add airways, airwaves, and so forth. These are channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce. There are a lot of these. To give you an example of one: our telephone system or the internet. These are networks of wires that themselves are all connected, and those wires stretch across States--across every State. If you pick up a telephone here and you make a phone call in Washington, DC--or if you are in Utah--if you pick up a telephone in Provo, UT, my hometown, and you call someone else in Provo, UT--it hasn't crossed interstate lines--that is still subject to Federal regulation because you have touched a channel or an instrumentality of interstate commerce. By the same token if you board an aircraft in Salt Lake City, UT, and you fly to southern Utah, land in St. George, UT, that is an interstate flight. You have not crossed State lines. And yet that is properly regulated as a Federal thing because you are traveling in interstate airways. These are channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce. So what changed on April 12, 1937? Well, it was that the Supreme Court of the United States interpreted the commerce clause giving Congress the power to regulate not only that, not only channels and instrumentalities and interstate commercial transactions but also anything and everything that when measured in the aggregate, even if it takes place in one State at one time, as long as it substantially affected interstate commerce when measured in the aggregate one could regulate it Federally. Now, does that sound like legalese? Yes, because it is. Does it sound confusing? Yes, it is probably intended to be so. Let me just put this in perspective. This radically transformed our government the U.S. Government that was originally established and ordained as a government of powers that James Madison described in Federalist No. 45 as ``few and defined'' while describing the powers reserved for the States as ``numerous and indefinite.'' It almost flipped the equation. Because of the supremacy clause where we do act, where we have the authority to act, our law governs, our law trumps the inconsistent State law that might conflict with it. And so, yes, that matters. And that mattered immensely because all of a sudden we went from being a Federal Government with few and defined powers to a government with numerous and indefinite powers because almost everything--almost every aspect of human existence--in one way or another can sort of be characterized as something that when measured in the aggregate substantially affects interstate commerce. Let me give you an example of this carried to its logical conclusion where it went: NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel was the decision the Supreme Court made on April 12, 1937. It did so in the context of labor regulations. They said: Yeah, labor, even when we are talking--as we usually are-- about somebody who is working in a job in one State at one time not across interstate lines, not in a channel or instrumentality of interstate commerce, not in the District of Columbia, an Indian Reservation, or some other Federal enclave, but just garden variety labor in a particular State. Because other people work in other States and people sometimes move from one State to another and money is frequently transacted from one State to another, that means Congress can regulate labor--or that is what they concluded at the time. Within 5 years, this culminated into a really illustrative flashpoint. In a case called Wickard v. Filburn the Supreme Court of the United States reviewed a case involving the plight of a wheat farmer named Roscoe Filburn. He was a wheat farmer in Ohio, and he got in trouble with the U.S. Government. He was fined many thousands of dollars. I don't remember what the exact sum was, but as I recall, it was the present-day equivalent of what would have been many tens or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a grave offense against the United States. What, you might ask, was his grave offense? Did he kill somebody? Did he rob a bank? Did he remove too many mattress tags that you are not supposed to remove? No, they didn't have those then. No. This was his offense: He grew too much wheat. He grew more wheat than Congress in its infinite wisdom felt was appropriate. Technically speaking, it wasn't Congress' judgment, and this is part of the problem. Congress, in 1937, perhaps egged on by NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel--Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1937. In the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1937, Congress decided to ordain and establish the U.S. Department of Agriculture as the omniscient, omnipresent arbiter of who may grow what crops and in what quantity, because after all we can't have people growing whatever crops they want in whatever quantities or that would be chaos--dogs and cats living together in the streets, Book of Revelation-style chaos. We could not have that. We have got to have Congress controlling prices. So we delegated out to the Secretary of Agriculture the power to make his own set of laws, thus violating at once both the vertical protection of federalism because all of the sudden we cannibalized a lot of the State power and made it Federal. We had taken it over from them. And then we simultaneously disrupted the horizontal protection of separation of powers because we are supposed to make the laws--and we kind of still do--but ever since 1937, we have also kind of just been delegating it out to other people. That is what Congress did with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1937. So they said: Secretary of Agriculture, you may--in fact, you must establish production quotas for a whole host of agricultural products. Why? Well, because we can't have farmers deciding how much wheat or hay or rice or beef to raise. That would be chaos because then we won't be able to control prices. And if Congress can't control prices, it will be chaos. Dogs and cats living together in the streets, Book of Revelation-style apocalyptic nightmares. That was their warning. So they handed that power over to the Secretary of Agriculture. And what did he do? Well, he sent out to every farmer--we will start at least with every grain farmer in America--these little cards. I have one of them framed. My son John gave it to me for Christmas a couple years ago. It is a little card just like the one that Roscoe Filburn the wheat farmer would have received, telling him how much wheat--how many bushels of wheat he could grow based on the number of acres he farmed to grow wheat. And they said: You may not exceed X number of bushels. So we had just exercised the power that was always historically considered a State and local power--if they exercise that power. It would have been a State power because a wheat farmer typically grows wheat--at least in those days they would have and most farmers still today--they were typically operating in one State at one time. They are not growing wheat while on a conveyor belt or a bus that moves interstate or something. So it would have been subject to State and local power. No. We made it Federal. Once it was Federal, then we messed up the vertical protection of federalism. We then outsourced the lawmaking to the executive branch--not to the President directly, but to the Secretary of Agriculture--and we said: OK. You can now make a bunch of other laws, and those laws will decide how much wheat per acre a wheat farmer may grow and then the same thing for a whole host of other agricultural products. Back to Roscoe Filburn. He got in trouble. He got fined a ton of money, many thousands of dollars, which is lot more then than it is now. But, you know, this farmer Roscoe Filburn, he was no simple-minded human. And Roscoe Filburn had what every American should have; he had a darn good lawyer. So when he got to the Supreme Court of the United States he said: You know what? I shouldn't be in trouble at all for this because, yes--yes--it is true. I grew more wheat than Secretary Wickard--the Secretary of Agriculture at the time--told me I could grow. I did it. But I shouldn't get in trouble for that because the wheat--the amount of wheat that I grew in excess of my Federal grain production quota--my limit--never entered interstate commerce. And that, after all, was the hook, the Federal hook that allowed the U.S. Government authority over Roscoe Filburn's wheat and the wheat grown by every other farmer in America. So he said that: The amount of wheat that I grew in excess of my quota never entered interstate commerce. Why? Because it never entered commerce at all because it never even left my farm. I took that wheat, the wheat I grew on top of my grain production quota, and I kept it on my farm to use as food for my family and for my animals and to reserve the balance to use as seed in subsequent growing seasons. That is a darn good argument. It should have been the end of the matter. It wasn't. The Supreme Court wasn't finished with its verbal legal and mental gymnastics. They said: Ah, but by not complying strictly with your grain production quota and with growing even a small amount of wheat in excess of your grain production limit as granted to you by the Secretary of Agriculture, that means that you bought less wheat than you would have had to buy on the open market; because had you not retained that for use on your own farm, you would have to have bought it somewhere else. And that, in turn, when replicated by other Roscoe Filburns all over the country would itself have in the aggregate a substantial effect on interstate commerce. It is really quite disgusting if you think about it. We went from a government of few and defined powers to a government of powers that can be described as numerous and indefinite, all without altering or amending the Constitution, which was made deliberately difficult--to amend the Constitution--because it is a law of laws. It is not supposed to be something you can just change like changing a pair of socks. You have got to amend the Constitution, and amending the Constitution was made deliberately difficult. There are two mechanisms by which you can do it. We have only ever used one, and that is the mechanism by which two-thirds of both Chambers of Congress propose a constitutional amendment, and that amendment becomes effective only after it has been ratified by three-fourths of the States. We didn't use that. And had they tried to amend the Constitution like that, it would have never succeeded. It would have failed miserably because they would have known. It is kind of a problem because ever since then, we have just accepted this premise that the U.S. Government is really powerful, that it can exercise pretty much whatever power it wants because it is only a mental step or two removed from saying: well, this or that affects interstate commerce. Once we have all this power vested in this government, it became far too easy and far too tempting--far too alluring for Federal lawmakers, U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives, to cease to be the lawmakers and instead to make other lawmakers to delegate the lawmaking power, to pass laws that read sort of like this: We hereby declare as Congress of the United States that we shall have fair labor standards in the United States and we hereby delegate to the National Labor Relations Board the power to make and interpret and enforce their own rules carrying the force of generally applicable Federal law to make sure that we have fair labor standards. We hereby declare that we shall have fair trade practices in the United States and hereby give the FTC the power to make its own laws that govern what fair trade practices are, and they can make the law now. You do this with Agency after Agency after Agency, and so now the people who were once closely connected or at least only one step removed from those who made even their Federal laws, now they are several steps removed from it. And you have got people making their laws who were neither elected by the people nor accountable to them. Now, lest you think this is a de minimis problem, let me give you this example. I have got two visual aids in my office in addition to the Agricultural Adjustment Act grain production quota just like the one Roscoe Filburn had. I keep these two stacks of documents. One is a short stack. It is about that tall. It is usually a few thousands pages long, consists of the laws passed by Congress last year. Some would say that is too big, too many pages. Maybe they are right. Regardless, it is about that big. The other stack is 13 feet tall. In a typical year, it is about 100,000 pages long, stacked--with each of these documents stacked on top of each other. It is 13 feet tall, 100,000 pages long. That consists of the Federal Register. The Federal Register is the annual cumulative index of Federal regulations as they are first announced, released for notice and comment, creating the illusion of a democratic process--it is just the illusion, the notice and comment process in what is known as modern administrative law in the United States. It is a fraud. It is a farce, at least as far as any kind of democratic input goes. They do whatever they want. They don't really care that much. I mean, they try to go through the notice and comment period, receive the comments, and make some nominal changes, perhaps if they see something they haven't thought of before. But for the most part, they are going to do whatever they want because they don't care. They don't work for the American people. They can't be fired by the American people. They don't ever stand for election. Most of them don't even work for anyone who him or herself can be fired. It is almost government on autopilot, which is a type of government that can't be removed, which is not just something that has the potential for tyranny, it is the literal definition of tyranny. In fact, some of the leading political philosophers, some of the political philosophers that have the greatest imprint on the thinking of our Founding Fathers, noted that the consolidation of the power to make law with the power to enforce law--if that power is wielded whenever, if ever it is wielded by the same people, it is not just the case that that can lead to tyranny; it is tyranny. It is what tyranny is. So that is a problem. These are all areas in which we have strayed in one way or another, and it explains how it is that we started from this simple system that was established from the beginning on popular sovereignty and started also from the premise that we wanted local self-rule, local government to be the norm except, where necessary, to wield Federal power, and where Federal power was appropriate, it should be distributed between these three branches of government--one making the laws, one executing and enforcing them, and one interpreting them. We went from that system to a system in which consolidation of power has become the norm rather than distribution of power, which was the entire objective of the Constitution. Why, then, am I speaking of this today? Over the 2\1/2\ centuries of our country's existence and the soon-to-be 240 years of our operation as a constitutional Republic under the U.S. Constitution of 1787, we have seen these structural protections granted to the American people as part of their freedom, as part of what it means to have popular sovereignty. We have seen them whittled. We have seen them diminished, oftentimes in small increments, other times in giant leaps. But these offenses to the structural Constitution shouldn't be overlooked, they can't be overlooked, and when they are overlooked, it causes other problems. It also makes that much more severe what can happen whenever any other constitutional insult or injury or offense or deviation comes into existence. Let's take for example--let's suppose that even though most Presidents operating the executive branch of government would pledge while running to faithfully execute the laws of the United States as our Chief Executive Officer--in fact, that is kind of part of the job, part of the oath of office that they take. Insofar as they stray from that and they either exercise power that is not theirs or they refuse to execute power that they are charged with enforcing, that creates its own set of problems. One of many points in our history that I can point to where that became a problem is during the years January 20, 2021, to January 20, 2025. The President of the United States decided that the borders of the United States and the laws designed to protect the borders of the United States and the laws designed to decide who may enter this country and who may not were sort of optional, and that, after all, it really just needed to be much more about letting people who wanted to be here into our borders and live among us--in many respects, as one of us. During that 4-year period alone, as stunning as it may seem, 10 to 15 million people entered our country unlawfully with the President of the United States and those serving under him basically--not just basically but genuinely beckoning them on, saying: Come on in. May we get you a cold beverage? Is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable? Ten to fifteen million--now, this is problematic on so many levels. Congress, over many decades, has enacted laws deciding who may enter and who may not. Congress has, over many decades, decided the terms and conditions by which that may happen, who may enter, and for what period of time, who may work and in what capacity, subject to what restrictions. These were all just overlooked for the most part as that President-- the one serving from 2021 to 2025--just said: Let's just bring them all in. He paid lipservice to a couple of laws that appeared to grant fairly broad authority to allow people in for humanitarian purposes, but he didn't follow those. He did not follow the restrictions that those laws put in place; he just said: Come on in. Realizing that, you know, it was going to be very difficult to stop him from allowing that to happen--and it was. Ten to fifteen million people entered the United States unlawfully during that time period. That by itself is a type of insult, a type of injury to the constitutional structure in that if you have a President who refuses to enforce the law and, in fact, facilitates the violation of our law, that is itself a type of injury to the Constitution. It is a type of injury that is often difficult in many respects for the courts to enforce. In some cases, the courts have the chance to do so, and they don't enforce it. But there are a number of constitutional injuries that are very, very difficult for the courts to enforce, and the problem continues. This by itself was an injury, but the injury compounded. As you might imagine, people were fleeing countries in numbers that large, that many millions of people, all at once. Some of them were running from something. They were all running from something, and some of those people who were running from something had no doubt led a life of criminal activity in their home countries. Nearly every one of those people, nearly every one of the 10 to 15 million people--maybe more--paid an exorbitant sum. At the low end, we are talking $3,000, $4,000 a head. At the high end, for the higher risk ones--the people who had to travel from farther distances or who had bounties on their heads or warrants out for their arrest on Interpol or whatever--those people were paying many tens of thousands of dollars a head. To whom? Well, not to the U.S. Government--to international drug cartels, which ended up making tens of billions of dollars a year, year after year, during that 4-year reign of terror in which Joe Biden refused to enforce our border. Meanwhile, if we back up a few years, back up 30 years or so, when Congress passed another law--a law that I am going to reconnect with what happened between 2021 and 2025 in just a moment. In 1993, Congress enacted a law called the NVRA, the National Voter Registration Act, also known as the motor voter law. It was designed for a purpose--it was meant to make it easier for American citizens to vote. It said this: For any State that agrees to participate in this, they get an amount of Federal funding for cooperating in the Federal program. Nearly every State agreed to participate in it and participates in it to this day. The program works like this: Under the NVRA, an American citizen in any participating State, which is nearly all of them, can go into a DMV--a department of motor vehicles or whatever you call it in your State--and apply for a driver's license. When they apply for a driver's license, they are free to check a box saying: I would like, while applying for my driver's license, simultaneously to register to vote. It is kind of a good idea in some ways, I suppose, because when you go to a DMV and you are applying for a driver's license, you typically have to establish who you are. They are going to take your picture. This is going to become an official document. It is sort of like when you register to vote. So why not do both of them at once? It made a lot of sense, I suppose. But the way it works out is all you have to do is check a box saying: I want to register to vote as I am applying for a driver's license. Then here comes the kicker. All you have to do is sign your name at the bottom saying ``I certify that I am a citizen and otherwise allowed to vote,'' meaning ``I haven't lost my right to vote by virtue of a criminal conviction or something like that or for renouncing my citizenship'' or whatever else could end up doing that. There isn't much else that would have that effect. But that is all it requires. There is no proof. There are no details. Nothing. Well, back in 1993, even though it wasn't that long ago, the world was a little bit of a different place. We didn't have 30 million-plus noncitizens residing in this country then. We do now. And it wasn't commonplace in those days for the noncitizens who were here to need to have and, in fact, to have a driver's license. So many of them didn't apply for them. Many States didn't offer them if you weren't a citizen. That has changed, too, since 1993. Nearly every State today will give you a driver's license--no problem--if you are not a citizen. In 19 States plus the District of Columbia, you may freely apply for and receive a driver's license even if you are by your own admission an illegal alien. Even if you are a known illegal alien, you may do so. So what is to stop them from going in to apply for a driver's license and checking the box saying ``I want to register to vote too''-- especially when all they have to do is sign their name at the bottom? No further questions asked. That is it. It seems risky, right? It seems dangerous. Well, a couple decades ago, some States started to wrestle with this. Some States started to consider, well, maybe we ought to ask a few questions. Maybe we ought to ask for some type of documentation as to their citizenship. That issue was raised by the State of Arizona, and in 2013, two decades after the NVRA was passed, the Supreme Court of the United States decided a case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. In that case, the Supreme Court said: We have looked at the NVRA, and we conclude that the NVRA prohibits Arizona or any other State--when registering voters using an NVRA form at a DMV, we conclude that the NVRA prohibits those States from requesting any proof of citizenship or asking further questions with regard to citizenship because this is a Federal matter and any discretion about the requirements of the NVRA have been preempted by Federal law such that the States have no authority to act in that area. So since 2013, no State is even allowed to inquire into somebody's citizenship when they do this. It didn't get that much attention at the time. In fact, this is a case that until fairly recently--I introduced this bill in the Senate. My partner on this bill in the House of Representatives is Congressman Chip Roy from Texas. He and I started piecing this puzzle together about 2\1/2\ or 3 years ago. When we put it all together, we realized this really is a problem, and it became an especially acute problem during the Biden Presidency when 10 to 15 million illegal aliens came into this country. We realized the extent to which this could be abused--perhaps is already being abused. But our greater concern has from the beginning been based on what could occur in the future as people realize the extent to which voting in U.S. elections is really easy if you are not a citizen. That is why we wrote, that is why we introduced what was originally called the SAVE Act, which is a very simple approach. The SAVE Act simply said that when you apply to register to vote using an NVRA form or otherwise register to vote, you have to prove you are a citizen if you want to vote in Federal elections. Now, the States are free to do whatever they want with regard to their elections. State and local elections are the province of State and local governments. And they themselves may decide, consistent with the terms of their own State constitutions, who may vote in what election. Until a few years ago, I would have considered it an absurd suggestion if anyone even hinted at the possibility that some States might legalize noncitizen voting. Well, some States have at least for purposes of some local elections. There are three or four States, plus DC, that at least in some local elections openly allow noncitizen voters. Now that means that they are registering noncitizens to vote in those elections. As Federal authorities have inquired into how it is they go about separating out those voter registration files and making sure that those noncitizen voters registered to vote in those States are precluded from voting in Federal elections, they go mute. They refuse to answer. They won't say anything. That is chilling. They are registering noncitizens to vote. We asked them: How do you keep them from voting in Federal elections? And they won't answer. That is not the worst of it. About half of the States, particularly those with Democrat legislatures and Democrat Governors, refuse to answer any questions about whether, to what extent, in what way they are taking any steps to review their voter registration files to make sure that no noncitizens are not found among them. They refuse to answer. They refuse to share data. We have established, within the Department of Homeland Security, a database, a database known as the SAVE database, hence the term SAVE Act. I will get in a minute to the name change that happened more recently with the SAVE Act. It is this database called the SAVE database that was established and designed for this very purpose--to help States to review their voter registration files and take their voter registration data. It is one of the great miracles of modern technology. We have this huge country, some 350 million people who are still living here, most of whom are citizens. But we have got more noncitizens living here than ever before. But through the miracle of modern technology, it is relatively easy to take these huge files, these huge databases of voter registrations in the 50 States and the District of Columbia, run them through the SAVE database. And it will fairly quickly kick out a report, showing these individuals appear not to be citizens of the United States. To their credit, a lot of States have taken advantage of this. Interestingly enough, it is basically most, nearly all States with Republican legislatures and Governors have done that or at least have started the process of doing that. In the process, they have discovered many thousands of noncitizens who have, in fact, registered to vote-- many thousands. That is just in the States that have decided to clean up their files and decided to run them through the SAVE database. Those are the conscientious ones. What about the nonconscientious ones or the ones that are conscientiously, if they might want to call it that, refusing to comply, refusing to even figure out whether they are violating the law? Remember, it is a Federal offense--it is a Federal felony offense to vote in a U.S. Federal election. It is, likewise, a Federal felony offense to knowingly facilitate and arrange for someone who is not a citizen, knowing that they are not a citizen, to vote in U.S. Federal elections. And yet these States are just refusing to comply. It is like don't ask, don't tell. Do not tell me where the noncitizens who are voting in our State might be found because we don't want to remove them. What other legitimate reason could there be to turn a blind eye to this? Knowing all that we know, about 30 million noncitizens living in the United States, 10 to 15 million who just arrived in the last few years alone--how easy it is in almost every State to walk into any DMV and by signing your name and checking a box, registering to vote, including in Federal elections, with four of those States and the District of Columbia openly allowing noncitizens to vote in some local election, and then refusing to tell us what, if anything, they are doing to prevent those noncitizens from voting in Federal elections. That is why we introduced the SAVE Act. And then in the last couple of months, at the request of President Trump and Majority Leader Thune, we changed the SAVE Act to the SAVE America Act. We had the name change. It is descriptive. It is what we do. We save America by passing this. And we also added the voter ID provision. This was kind of part of the plan from the beginning. We had originally wanted to introduce it with the voter ID provision of the bill. But we were advised at the time to keep it simple so that we have a simple message about citizenship. But as time has moved on, we have realized that there is actually great symmetry. And we have come up with this mantra that the SAVE America Act is about making it easy to vote and hard to cheat. It is equally important to accomplish both of those objectives. Without both of them, you mess things up. If you leave off either of them, you are in trouble. So if you make it easy to vote but also easy to cheat, you are going to have problems. It is going to be chaos. If you make it hard to vote and hard to cheat, that is going to cause its own set of problems. You don't want to make it hard to vote. You want it to be easy because exercising that constitutionally protected right, that is the fundamental incident, the fundamental blessing. The core element of what it means to be a U.S. citizen should not be difficult to exercise. And so we wrote a bill that, when passed into law, will make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. If you cheat either one of those, if you give short shrift to either objective, you will have a problem. Now, how do we do that? Well, we achieve it through two principle means: The SAVE America Act requires voter ID at the time of voting, government-issued photo ID showing that you are who you claim to be and that you are the same person listed under your voter registration file. Very simple. A whole lot of our States, including, I believe, 22 States represented by at least one, if not two, Democratic Senators, have photo ID laws. So if a whole bunch of Democratic Senators come from States that have voter ID laws, you don't hear them complaining about the voter ID law. If they don't complain about their own States' voter ID laws, why should they be concerned about ours? Why should their State and local elections be any different than ours when we have the clearest and the strictest penalty against noncitizen voting? Well, there shouldn't--there isn't a legitimate defense against this. There isn't a legitimate reason to not have a voter ID law in place in the Federal Government, just as so many of the States have. The second element involves citizenship, citizenship verification. We achieve this citizenship verification in two different ways: One, it is the citizen's responsibility. When a voter shows up to register to vote, he or she must provide some type of proof of citizenship. Now, ideally, we would like that to be the same type of proof of citizenship that is used in other areas of the Federal Government, most notably, most commonly, the type of proof of U.S. citizenship that every American citizen has for decades and still to this day has to provide when starting a new job, whenever you begin a new job as a new employee. In fact, everyone in this room, everyone in this building, everyone in the entire Capitol Complex, nearly every--essentially, every employee in the United States of America has had to provide this documentation whenever he or she starts a new job as an employee. You have to fill out a form called the I-9, where, in addition to stating your name and date of birth and basic information like that, you are also required to provide documentation of your U.S. citizenship. And that is to make sure that those working in the United States, those employed in the United States are either citizens or, if they are not citizens, that they are here on a visa that allows them to work. Not all visas allow employment; and those visas that allow some employment usually have pretty significant restrictions attached to them, defining the nature and the duration of the work they may carry out here while being paid. That documentation typically consists of a birth certificate and a government-issued photo ID. Sometimes an original copy of the Social Security card can also suffice to buttress, to supplement the birth certificate. It has got to be an original copy of the birth certificate. Not hard to get. Easier today to get than ever before. In most States--I believe in every State today, in fact--you can order one of these online if you can't find yours. And for a few dollars, you can order a copy and have it mailed to you within just a few days. It used to be a little bit harder. You know, in the days before the internet, you would have to write out a letter, put it in the mail, stamp it, wait for it to come back. Maybe they would get it. Maybe they didn't. But it is a lot easier today. These documents are so common that every American has to provide a set of documents every single time they start a new job. I myself have had to do this a number of times. Since becoming an adult, every single job I have started, I have had to fill out an I-9; and I had to provide that documentation. I had to do that even here when starting as a U.S. Senator. I had to provide that documentation, and that wasn't the only documentation I had to provide. I also had to provide my election certificate that showed that the people of Utah had, in fact, elected me to the U.S. Senate. Had I not done so, I couldn't have started this job, just as I couldn't have started any previous job without proving who I was and that I was a U.S. citizen and that I was entitled to be here. So it requires you to prove your citizenship. The preferred form is the birth certificate, coupled with a government-issued photo ID. But when we wrote the law, when we wrote this bill, we really wanted to make sure that we didn't make it too hard because, again, we want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. If you cheat either one of those, if you pay too little attention to either one of those elements, you are going to mess up the equation. And so we said: Look, there may be some people who have incomplete documentation. Maybe they have got a government-issued photo ID but no birth certificate. Maybe they have the birth certificate but no government-issued photo ID. Or maybe some people will be missing something else. Maybe they have had a name change. Maybe they have--you know, a woman who has gotten married and decided to take her husband's last name has her birth certificate. The birth certificate doesn't have her husband's last name on it because, you know, obviously, her parents would have had no idea what her husband's name would be or who she would marry. So it wouldn't be on there. If she can't find her marriage certificate or some other proof of a name change, we don't want that to become a problem. And, in fact, we don't even want it to even become a problem if a voter registering to vote can't find any of his or her documentation. Most of us have those, and we can find them without too much trouble. And if we can't find them, most of us can order one--order a copy and get what we need. But even if you can't find one of the necessary documents, or you can't find any of them, or because your house burned down, or because your dog ate them or something else--I don't know--we still wanted to make that easy. And so we provided text in there that is now found in the legislation now pending before the Senate. It starts on page 12, line 22 of this legislation. And it says that if you can't find any of the other documents, I mean, any of them or all of them, it is OK. You can fill out an affidavit. It is just like filling out a form. You just have to provide a little bit more information. And then you allow the State to confirm or refute that information that can establish the critical elements of your citizenship. So, for example, the affidavit would look something like this. If you are a natural-born citizen of the United States, meaning you were a citizen as of the moment of your birth, by virtue of the circumstances surrounding your birth, then you are a natural-born citizen. And if you are a natural-born citizen, then your affidavit would look something like this: I, John Smith--or whatever your name is--was born on such and such a date in this or that city. Here were my parents' names. Maybe you need that; maybe you don't. And I was a citizen as of the moment of my birth. It is about all you would need if you had the birthplace, the birth date, and especially your parents' names. It would be very easy for the State to document that. Then, once you fill out that affidavit under penalty of perjury--it is a sworn statement. Once you fill that out, the burden shifts to the State, and unless the State concludes that you have been lying--and if you were to lie about it, there would be consequences because you will have signed it under penalty of perjury-- then you are good. There is no further responsibility, and there is no cost. If you are lying, then, yes, there would be problems, but I don't think most people are going to do that. Most people have sense enough, by the time they have to sign something under penalty of perjury in the form of an affidavit--providing that level of detail--that it is going to be less likely. In any event, that is a risk that we take on in this legislation. Why? Well, because we want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. We don't want to skimp on either one of those elements. You can also prove your citizenship with one document if you have got it. That document is a U.S. passport. Not everybody has one of those. A lot of Americans do. It is useful to have, especially--if you are ever going to engage in any international travel, you are going to need one. If you don't ever travel internationally, you probably don't want to go through the hassle and expense of getting one as they cost a couple of hundred dollars; but if you do have one, you can use it. So here we are. It is very simple legislation requiring that which we already require in other laws. It is requiring people to do what they do all the time. Every day in America, a whole lot of people are starting a new job. In fact, I would dare say that, of the working-aged adults in the workforce today--I don't know what the average is, but I would imagine that the average American employee probably changes jobs, changes employers, at least every--I don't know--5 or 6 years. Maybe it is more than that. This is not an uncommon thing. And every time you do that, you have got to pony up the documentation for the I-9 to prove you are an American citizen or you can't start the job. So we know people are doing this because we know most adults in this country--at least those who are able to work--do, in fact, have jobs. So this is no mystery. We also know that--I don't know--I think it is, maybe, 160, 170 million people have passports. To get a passport, you have got to provide--obviously, you can't provide a passport to get a passport unless you have already got one that hasn't yet expired. Then it will serve as proof. If you have never had one or if you have one that has expired, you are going to have to come up with the original documentation: a birth certificate, a government-issued photo ID, a Social Security card, whatever. But a lot of people go through this--and not just a lot--we are talking hundreds of millions of Americans do this all the time. It is not that difficult. Yet you would never guess this based on the hue and cry we hear from our colleagues across the aisle. This law has taken on a life and a flavor all its own. This proposed law, this bill, is really, really popular as 90 or 95 percent of all Republican voters support it, and between 70 and 75 percent of Democratic voters support it. Do you know how hard it is to find any bill or any set of policies that will garner that much support in every racial and age and geographic demographic imaginable? in every party affiliation demographic? It is really uncommon. This thing seems to be growing more popular every single day. In fact, it is controversial only in the halls of this building, the U.S. Capitol. The U.S. Congress is the only place where it is controversial. Only Senate and House Democrats don't like it. The American people overwhelmingly do. Sure, you will find a few people out in the country who don't, but they are vastly outnumbered. So why would the Democrats here oppose it? Well, let me go through some of the arguments that we hear most frequently against it. The first argument that we often hear is not necessarily the most common, but it is one that almost always comes up, so I will list it first, which is stunning to me. The argument goes like this: We can't do this because States are in charge of elections, not the Federal Government. This is a violation of the vertical protection of federalism for the U.S. Government to impose this mandate on the States, which are constitutionally responsible and exclusively responsible for conducting elections. This is a lie. This is just a baldfaced lie. It is incompatible with any reading of article I, section 4, clause 1. It is, moreover, the height of hypocrisy for people who continue to support a whole litany of laws already enacted by this Congress, pursuant to the very same provision of article I, section 4, clause 1--under the very same provision--yet they don't oppose those. In fact, the only reason that this law even became necessary--what first got us thinking about it--has to do with this expansive, absurdly incorrect interpretation of the NVRA made by the Supreme Court back in 2013. I say it was absurdly incorrect and it was and it remains that today. It, nonetheless, remains conclusive over the dissent of my former boss Justice Alito, who wrote a masterful dissent explaining why that interpretation was wrong. The majority of the Court persisted with what was an unconscionably bad ruling and not supported by the text. What irritates me, what astounds me, and what leaves me almost speechless is that not one of our Democratic colleagues--nearly all of whom are raising this trumped up, baseless federalism argument against the SAVE America Act--not one of them has ever breathed a word about the NVRA. Not one of them has ever even hinted at the possibility that we might need to repeal the NVRA. They are not saying that, and I am not arguing that. But taken to its logical conclusion, their own argument leads inexorably to the conclusion that the NVRA itself is unconstitutional, which it is not, but that is where it goes. That is where the hypocrisy starts and does not end. Shame on them to make a federalism argument here when the plain text of the Constitution says that this is a Federal responsibility and when our existing law that they do not oppose; that they wholeheartedly support; and that some of them were even here and voted for and supported and aggressively advocated to pass--they say nothing about. Yet it is the same law. If this is unconstitutional, that one was way more unconstitutional. Neither one of them is. They know it, and they persist in making these arguments. Argument No. 2: This argument was made just a little while ago by my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from Vermont--the last speaker in this Chamber before I started speaking this evening and a good friend of mine. I really do like him, but he is wrong on this. He is not just wrong, but somebody has badly deceived him. He is making the argument that this disenfranchises women. He even read a letter from a constituent, from a woman, in his home State of Vermont who was, understandably, expressing outrage because she believes that she and other women around the State of Vermont and throughout the country are about to be disenfranchised should this bill become law. She will not. Now, her argument and his argument, in building on her argument raised in her letter and sending alarm bells, should have been something that he as a U.S. Senator would have wanted to correct. After all, we don't want our constituents panicking, especially needlessly, and this one is a needless panic. She wrote to him in a panic, understandably concerned that she and other women across the State of Vermont and throughout the United States of America would be unable to vote because, if after getting married they take their husband's name and their birth certificate doesn't contain their married name--unless you happen to marry somebody with the same last name that you were born with, which very rarely happens--then all of a sudden, you would be unable to vote. What? This has never been the case. This has never been a problem. It is not a problem when you fill out the I-9 when you start a new job. Yet you use a birth certificate for that. It is not a problem when you apply for a passport. You use a birth certificate for that. It is also not a problem when you register to vote under the SAVE America Act. We make it very simple and clear: If you have got a marriage certificate, that can suffice for establishing the name change. If you have got a name change that occurred for other reasons having to do with adoption or you just wanted to change your name, you can provide the court order approving the name change and recording it. People do change their names, and sometimes there are interesting stories about this. Years ago, when I was a young missionary in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of the State of Texas, I met a family who told a story of a family friend who decided, one day, that he wanted to change his name to Squirrel. He went to a local courthouse and appeared before the judge. The judge said: Do you want to change your name? Yes, sir. To what do you want to change your name? And he said: Squirrel. The judge said: Squirrel? ``Squirrel'' what? And he said: Squirrel--period--meaning that is it. He just wanted to be ``Squirrel,'' sort of like--I don't know--Cher, Bono, Sting. ``Squirrel--period.'' Well, the court reporter, apparently, recorded that as an answer, so his name is now ``Squirrel Period,'' with the last name spelled P-E-R- I-O-D. That is what it is. So, from now on, unless he has changed his name since then, Squirrel Period has had to establish his identity as Squirrel Period. I hope he has changed his name since then because that doesn't seem like a great last name and rather confusing. In any event, Squirrel Period, if he were to newly register to vote under this law--and keep in mind, it is only if Squirrel Period decided to move or otherwise had to newly register to vote--this law wouldn't require anything new in terms of his voter registration, meaning, if he is already registered to vote--and there is nothing that requires him to reregister as this law does not--he is not going to have to go in and redo his voter registration. That doesn't change unless or until he moves. Nobody's status quo changes under the citizen provisions of the SAVE America Act unless or until you move. So, assuming Squirrel Period moved, Squirrel Period would need to, in the first instance, either provide a--if he had a U.S. passport, that would be the easiest way to do it because you can use one document. So he comes forward with his passport. If his passport says ``Squirrel Period,'' then he can register to vote with that. If he doesn't have one of those, then he would get his birth certificate. I have no idea what this individual's name was at the time of his birth. Let's say his name was John Smith. He would provide the birth certificate that says ``John Smith'' and then a copy of the court recording, with the court seal, saying that John Smith had changed his name to Squirrel Period. But even if Squirrel Period couldn't find any of those documents--not his birth certificate, not the court documentation of his name change from John Smith to Squirrel Period--he could still square out an affidavit establishing those essential elements: I was born John Smith in Harlingen, TX, in 1954. My parents were James and Emma Smith, and I changed my name 25 years later in the general district court of Harlingen, TX, from ``John Smith'' to ``Squirrel Period.'' I am a natural-born citizen. That would be the end of it. They hand that over to the State election officials, and it is up to the State election officials to do the rest. Even if he doesn't have a single document to his name at that point, he could still register to vote. What is wrong with that? There is not a darned thing wrong with that. This is just good government. This is protecting and preserving popular sovereignty--a form of popular sovereignty that we will lose if we continue on this course toward not caring about who votes in our elections. Yes, we lose a degree of popular sovereignty also when we allow, when we enable, when we facilitate, when we deliberately turn a blind eye to the risk of noncitizens voting in our elections. This is an act of facilitating foreign interference in our own elections. This is a form of democratic suicidality that I don't think we have ever observed in this country. Why any country would want to attack itself or allow or invite itself to be attacked like this, I do not comprehend. Against such a known risk, it is difficult to understand. Of course, in addition to these provisions that require the citizen to provide documentation at the time of voter registration, of new voter registration, there are some back-end citizenship verification requirements that don't impose any burden at all on any citizen, that just require the State election officials to routinely go through and review their voter registration files in an effort to weed out those who are not citizens. Now, they may leave them in there for purposes of voting in State or local elections if their State and local laws and State constitution allow that. That is their business--crazy, in my opinion, but they can do whatever they want on that. But for purposes of ascertaining who may receive a ballot to vote in a Federal election under the provisions of this law, they would be required to work with the people at the Department of Homeland Security who run this SAVE database, cycle their data through that database periodically to identify those who may have registered to vote, and then remove them from eligibility to vote in Federal elections. Again, that imposes no obligation, no burden on any U.S. citizen other than the government officials involved in that, whose job it is to enforce and apply the law anyway. This doesn't do anything to undermine anyone's right to vote. So back to the arguments against it. We started with the federalism argument; we refuted that one. We proceeded then to the argument that this would disenfranchise women--absolutely absurd. There is not a single particle of truth to that. Argument No. 3, Jim Crow 2.0--that this would somehow disenfranchise racial minorities, Black Americans. Sometimes they articulate it as ``rural Americans,'' which is weird, as if certain demographics within this country, whether racial minorities, rural Americans, or otherwise, can't be expected to have documents. This is just racist. It is not just unsettling; it is not just disturbing; it is not just insensitive; that is racist. Some refer to it as the ``soft bigotry of low expectations.'' There is nothing soft about this bigotry; it is just bigoted. And this is coming from the party of Jim Crow, the party that pioneered and designed Jim Crow, the party that designed this system of laws throughout the Southern United States to systematically, hatefully exclude African Americans from public life and much of private life, to segregate them. This is evil. I can't imagine why a member of the party of Jim Crow would want to resurrect memories of Jim Crow, especially when making accusations of Jim Crow where accusations of Jim Crow have absolutely no place. There is nothing about this that is that way. So for them to accuse us of supporting Jim Crow policies--were this not the U.S. Senate, where we have the speech-and-debate clause privilege--I mean, those are not only fighting words, those are defamatory. They are false and defamatory words spoken with knowledge of their falsity and reckless disregard as to their truthfulness. Even under the very, very strict standard of New York Times v. Sullivan, as against a public figure, that is defamatory language. Yet they do it over and over again. Do you know what else? To show you how absurd this is, if that is Jim Crow, do you know what else is? Well, the Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys, the Super Bowl, and the Democratic National Convention, because, you know what, to get into the Democratic National Convention, to participate as a delegate in the Democratic National Convention, guess what you have to do. You have to produce photo ID and documentation that you are entitled to be there and that you are eligible to participate and vote in the Democratic National Convention. So if the SAVE America Act is Jim Crow, then so is the Democratic Party. But, of course, the Democratic Party is not Jim Crow. Yes, they were into that thing many decades ago. Fortunately, that ended many decades ago. But neither is the SAVE America Act. On that note, let me talk about how that ended many decades ago. How did it end, this awful regime? For centuries before then, when slavery was a thing, African Americans lived in violent oppression and in a truly evil system that deprived them of the dignity of being human beings in every way imageable. After the Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were adopted and Reconstruction began, we were supposed to emerge from that. We were making progress toward racial equality in this country until gains made by the Democratic Party in national elections in the 1870s halted Reconstruction, and in many ways, that oppression--the same oppression that kept African Americans in bondage for so long--took on a different form. Now that slavery was abolished, of course, with the 13th Amendment, the equal protection clause in the 14th Amendment accorded them the rights of full citizenship, no differently than anyone else, and established this principle that the government may not treat you differently based on your race. The 15th Amendment ensured that those formerly in the bondage of slavery would have the right to vote. Yet, as Reconstruction was halted, a different form of oppression took over and lasted for far too long--for many decades. In fact, kind of the beginning of the end of Jim Crow in many respects started with the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, but there were still vestiges of Jim Crow alive and well after that. In many respects, what sounded the death knell--not immediately but really started nailing down the end of Jim Crow--was the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law is instructive here. When that law was still a bill, a proposal, it was passed by the House of Representatives in March of 1964. At the time it was passed by the House, it had a national approval rating of about 51 percent. It came over here to the Senate. Many people considered it doomed to failure over here because in the Senate, the supporters of the Civil Rights Act didn't have nearly enough votes to achieve cloture in the Senate. Cloture is, of course, the mechanism codified in rule XXII of the Senate rules that allows the Senate to bring debate to a close. They were 32 votes shy of the supermajority required for cloture. To his great credit, the Senate majority leader at the time, Senator Mike Mansfield, a Democrat, decided that he was not going to give up even though he was 32 votes short of cloture, which meant effectively that it couldn't pass, or at least that was conventional wisdom. He said: Nope. We are going to see about that. We are going to debate it, and we are going to require those who oppose this law to come down here day after day, week after week, for as long as it takes to state their opposition to it, and we will require them to hold the floor and to continue to state their opposition and see what happens to the popularity of that bill as they do that. They did that day after day, and this continued for weeks, a total of 60 days, excluding Sundays, when I think they would discontinue, so for 70 calendar days, but they were in session for 60 days. Eventually, that started to sharpen the senses of the U.S. Senators who were opposing the legislation. They got tired of standing here day after day to defend the indefensible, to defend an oppressive system of Jim Crow laws, and they got especially tired as they realized that law was getting even more popular even as they were trying to defeat it. Their position became indefensible, but it took weeks of debating it--literally many, many weeks, like 10 weeks of debate--before they got to the point where they decided they had had enough and they were losing. Their arguments were unpersuasive, and in the end, those arguments became impossible for them to overcome. So as a result of that fact, having their minds sharpened by physical exhaustion and by the sort of political exhaustion that comes from having to defend an indefensible position, they started negotiating amendments--perhaps initially to save face with the American people and eventually in an effort to try to resolve whatever lingering substantive concerns they had. They were able to do that, and they negotiated amendments, and they adopted amendments. Those amendments eventually were sufficient for them to be able to overcome a 32-vote cloture deficit. The law passed, and with that came the end of the oppressive Jim Crow era. I believe that the time has come again when we need that kind of filibuster. People who are aware of the filibuster, what it means, start to conflate it, view it as the other side of the same coin as cloture. They are kind of the same thing but not really. They are kind of the other side of the same coin but not really. You see, cloture is a procedural mechanism--one procedural mechanism that can be used to force debate to a close. You have to have a supermajority of Senators in order to stop all Senators from continuing to speak. But this isn't necessarily a static thing. The fact that in March of 1964, when there was not a sufficient supermajority to force debate to a close with a cloture vote--in fact, they were 32 votes shy of that-- these guys had the courage to continue debating week after week after week, meaning those who wanted to pass the law, those who were probably being told by some of their colleagues: You are wasting everyone's time. This can't pass. We are 32 votes shy of cloture. But thank Heavens that we brought Jim Crow to an end. That hateful, oppressive, evil system of laws was brought to an end because Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield, a Democrat, was willing to make Senators defend their indefensible positions until they could no longer defend them or, alternatively, until they decided it was time to start to agree, to start to negotiate changes and to make changes, to make the bill acceptable, and they finally did that, and they got it passed into law. Do you know what? Jim Crow is dead, and it is dead in large part because of Mike Mansfield's courage in forcing Members to debate. Thank heavens he didn't give up and throw up his hands and say: Oh, everybody is telling me we can't do this. Thank Heavens he didn't give up and say: Our Members are tired, and they want to go home, or they want to go to Paris or whatever it is that they want to do when the Senate is in recess. Thank Heavens that they were willing to stand with something knowing that it was the right thing to do, knowing that the American people wanted them to do it until it could get done. And it worked, and we are all the beneficiaries of it. Who knows how long that tyranny would have ended? Who knows how long that hateful regime of Jim Crow would have lasted had Mike Mansfield not had the courage to do that. Yes, I am a Republican, and he was a Democrat, and my hat goes out to him. Thank Heaven above for Mike Mansfield. I will not pretend for a moment that the similarities between the SAVE America Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are any greater than they are, but I am also not going to ignore the procedural parallels to them or the procedural dynamics at play in the U.S. Senate that I think warrant our best efforts to try to pass this thing. Unlike March of 1964 when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by the House, when it had a 51-percent approval rating with the American people, the SAVE America Act is supported by 80 or 85 percent of all Americans today. And unlike the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which when it arrived in March of 1964 in the Senate Chamber, it faced a daunting, seemingly insurmountable cloture deficit of 32 votes, we have a cloture deficit of only 10 votes. Unlike the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was groundbreaking, revolutionary, brave, yes, but also somewhat complex, it plowed a lot of new ground, a lot for people to digest to understand how it might work--this bill, the SAVE America Act, is relatively simple. It is only 28, 29 pages long. I think one of the reasons for its popularity is that people totally understand the need to do it, and most people can tell you what it does: It makes it easy to vote and hard to cheat. Well, how does it do that? Voter ID and proof of citizenship, it is that simple. So, yeah, it is hard. Yeah, we face a cloture deficit, but we have overcome harder obstacles before. We can do hard things. In the U.S. Senate, perhaps we sometimes forget that we can do hard things, but we can. And I assure you, we must. And if I have anything to do with it, we will. Now, I know that some want to give up, and I know that far too many of my colleagues who want this bill to pass maybe are wondering: How do we do it? I will tell them: Hold on, have faith, have hope, and have the courage to stand up and continue to defend what it is that we know our voters want and what in our hearts we know is right, what we know in our hearts the American people need and deserve. And it is, after all, already against Federal law for noncitizens to vote in U.S. elections, so why not make it official? Why not make it real? Why not make it enforceable? You see, because this ties to one of the other arguments made regularly against the SAVE America Act, however disingenuously, however shamefully. One of their favorite arguments against the SAVE America Act is we don't need it, we don't need it because noncitizens don't vote. In fact, they don't register to vote because--and here is the kicker--because it is already illegal. You know how crazy that is? Do you know how absurd that makes you look when you make that argument? That literally is like saying we don't need police to enforce the law because crime is already unlawful. It is like saying we don't need to require liquor store operators to ID their customers to make sure that they don't sell liquor to children because selling liquor to children is already illegal. This makes no sense. In fact, what they are arguing against the SAVE America Act is arguably even more absurd than those two extremely absurd hypothetical examples I just provided. Why? Because our system of laws, yes, makes it unlawful for noncitizens to vote, but our system of laws, because of the way this has been interpreted and the way it has evolved over the years, it makes it impossible to detect. And when something is impossible to detect, it is impossible to enforce. Now, it is not impossible to detect in the sense that if you run the voter registration files through the SAVE database, as many States-- primarily those run by Republicans--have done, it is pretty easy to figure out who shouldn't be registered and to remove them from the voter database, to remove their voter registration--or at least their voter registration for purposes relevant to Federal elections. So it is not that hard if you are a State that doesn't want noncitizens to vote because noncitizens voting in Federal elections is unlawful. So that is really what we are talking about here, isn't it? It is about the States that don't care. It is about the States that know they have got noncitizens registering to vote--and we do because every State that has looked into it has found them. And just from the few States that have started doing it, we know of thousands. I suspect before long, we will know of thousands just from the small handful of States that have started cleaning out their voter registration files and running their data through the SAVE database. And those are just the States that are conscientious enough to try to make some minimal effort to detect it. What are we to make then of the States that refuse to answer the most basic questions about who is registered to vote in their State? I would imagine--I am willing to make a guess--that some of those have some of the most rampant problems within their voter registration rolls, some of the most noncitizens. And so I will not be surprised if, at the end of the day, we discover that tens--perhaps hundreds of thousands of noncitizens are currently registered to vote. That number could sharply spike to many millions or even tens of millions, given the 30 million-plus noncitizens currently residing in this country and the 10 to 15 million noncitizens who entered this country illegally between 2021 and 2025 alone. And so we will end where we began, talking about our country's birthday, about our 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, of these core concepts of popular sovereignty that this is, in fact, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people; that this is a government in a country in which we acknowledge and have acknowledged for almost exactly 250 years that governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. This government isn't legitimate without our consent, and it ceases to be legitimate when we allow those who are not citizens, who are not part of our body politic, to exercise decisions. If everyone is family, no one is family. If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent. If everyone is given the benefit of citizenship by allowing them to vote, then citizenship means nothing. That is the core message that I wish our Democrat colleagues would accept, and I am confident they will ultimately accept, as we continue to make this argument because we are not going away. I am not going away. I will be back on this floor in this Chamber day after day, week after week, month after month, as long as it takes. I am not giving up--not a chance in hell am I giving up on this because this is about the American dream itself. This is about the fact that when you allow noncitizens to vote, you are robbing something from the American people, from each individual American citizen, something which is distinctively, rightfully theirs. You cannot take that away. You are taking it away when you allow somebody else to cast a vote that will cancel out yours. That is unfair, it is unacceptable, it is un-American, it is illegal. We must not tolerate it, and we will not. At the end of the day, we can ignore this problem all we want. I am not going to ignore it. Eighty-five percent of the American people aren't ignoring it. If there are a few people in this building who want to ignore it, so be it, but it is not going to be easy. And they will eventually have to acknowledge that they are on the wrong side of history, just as those who stood against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 eventually learned that they were on the wrong side of history. And make no mistake, you are. You are on the wrong side of history. You will ultimately be proven wrong on this. I hope that they come sooner rather than later for your sake, for mine, and for all those we represent. I fundamentally believe that America's best days remain yet ahead of her. They remain yet ahead of her because the American people, as Winston Churchill is noted to have said--perhaps apocryphally, perhaps accurately so--that the American people will always ``do the right thing'' after they have exhausted every other alternative. If Mr. Churchill didn't mean that as a compliment to the American people, I nonetheless take it as such. It is what we do. As I noted at the beginning of my remarks, we have certain aspirations that we try to live up to that are embodied in our founding documents, in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution. While we have, countless times, done so imperfectly and at countless times we have fallen far short of that to which we have agreed before God and before government, we know when we need to do better. This is one of those times. Almighty God intended this land to be a land of liberty--a land of liberty--and I hope and pray it always will be as we honor Him, as we honor our founding documents, and perhaps, most importantly, as we honor each other, as we honor our own citizenship and that of our fellow citizens. In order to do that truly, we must pass the SAVE America Act. I will be back again and again until this is done. I have miles to go--many, many miles in this journey. I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep. And it is not time to sleep. That time is in the future when this is done. Until then, I will not rest.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, moments ago, as we convened and before we cast votes getting ready to move forward with the confirmation of our friend and colleague the distinguished junior Senator from Oklahoma to serve as the next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security--it is important to reflect on the importance of this position and on the importance of the Department that he has been asked by the President of the United States to lead. This is a Department that, 25 years ago, didn't exist. It was created, of course, in the aftermath of the horrific attacks on the United States homeland on September 11, 2001. It includes within it, among many other pieces, the apparatus that is used to control, as the name of the Department implies, the homeland of the United States; our ability to protect and defend our border, including our ability to protect and defend the border at the border and all the way through the interior of the United States, through the enforcement of our immigration laws. This, of course, is one of the most fundamental and distinctively Federal powers granted to the U.S. Government by the Constitution. It is uniquely Federal not only in that it is given to the U.S. Government by the Constitution but that it has to be Federal. It would be impossible to do this without it being a Federal power because no one State could be charged with border enforcement. If you had only the border States doing it, it would be unfair to the border States, and the border States would have to make policy surrounding immigration, border access, and so forth. And that would impact the other States as well. That is why the Founding Fathers were wise to put all of this in the U.S. Government. So it bears mentioning here that the Department that our friend and colleague the distinguished junior Senator from Oklahoma has been asked to lead, the Department of Homeland Security, is a pretty important one to have funded. It is indeed regrettable, to put it extremely mildly, that that Department has now been shut down for well over a month. And this doesn't occur in a vacuum. This occurs just a few months after that Department was shut down for a very lengthy period of time, starting in the fall, starting in October. This isn't fair to the brave men and women who place, in many instances, their own lives, their own comfort, their own safety on the line, day after day after day, to defend the U.S. homeland, to defend our border, to enforce our immigration laws, and to perform so many other tasks that are essential to the security of the American people. And so when we evaluate that shutdown and its impact, we have to think about some of the other things that it also affects, including, of course, but not limited to, TSA; including FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Authority; including the Coast Guard; and including USCIS, CISA, and the entities within the Department of Homeland Security that operate the SAVE database. The SAVE database is this entity that is already set up, and it is related to the name of the legislation we have been considering: the SAVE America Act. The SAVE database, of course, is what is set up within the Department of Homeland Security to help us ascertain the citizenship or lack thereof of persons who are already registered to vote in the United States. Ideally, the information should be freely flowing on a very regular basis between the States, and, in particular, the secretaries of state, Lieutenant Governors, or whoever is the chief elections official in each State, to the Department of Homeland Security. They should be running their election data, their voter roll data through the SAVE database on a very regular basis, because by doing that, they can make sure that those who are registering to vote are, in fact, citizens of the United States. If you wait too long, the task becomes overwhelming or it becomes more difficult. But if it is done on a very regular basis, it can become routine and relatively straightforward. It is remarkable what can be done with these databases because, you know, we have got hundreds of millions of Americans. We have got--I don't know what the total number of registered voters is. I am guessing somewhere between 150 million and 200 million are registered to vote. That is a lot of names. That is a lot of numbers. That is a lot of voter registration files in 50 different States and the District of Columbia. But having access to this database allows us, in one central location, the benefit of being able to scrub through these voter registration files in every jurisdiction in America to make sure only citizens vote and to do so without its having to take weeks or months or years in order to ascertain. These are some of the many benefits of technology. But this, too, is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and this, too, is therefore affected by the shutdown. In particular, the hard-working men and women who run that Department, including that part of that Department, are now not being paid, not receiving the funding that they need, and that is, in fact, a problem. Now, ideally, this would take place voluntarily, and the States, uniformly, would share the information because why wouldn't they want to comply with the law? Why wouldn't they want to make sure that they are not facilitating--inadvertently or otherwise--violations of Federal law, including provisions of Federal criminal law that carry with them serious felony penalties? You would think that they would want to be cooperating freely and sharing their data. Some of the States do this--many of them do--but a whole lot of them, including and especially those with Democrat Governors and/or Democrat legislatures, are adamantly, defiantly refusing to share that data. What does that tell us? Now, it is not as though this would involve an enormous amount of effort on the part of those States. It is not as though they can blame it on being short-staffed or on not having the adequate expertise to send over that data because the work is done, largely, almost entirely, by Federal officials on the other end, and every State does have personnel on hand to manage and oversee the maintenance of these voter registration files. So one must ask the question: Why would these blue States--a couple dozen of them--refuse so consistently, so defiantly to share that information? What is it that they gain from that? What is it that they would lose? I can't really think of anything legitimate that they would lose by sharing the data. This is a service being offered to them by the U.S. Government. It is not like the U.S. Government is going to charge them a bunch of money to do it. It is not like it is going to require their personnel to do it. So why wouldn't they want that? Well, before you answer that question in your own mind, let me feed you an additional data point that, I think, has some relevance here. In a handful of those States--I believe it is three or four States and the District of Columbia at a minimum--they have legalized noncitizen voting within their States in some local elections. Now, why they would want to do this, I do not understand. I fail to comprehend why that is a good idea; it seems like a terrible idea. But no Federal statute prohibits it. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution prohibits it insofar as we are talking about a State or a local election for a State or a local office. In Federal law, neither the Federal statutes nor the U.S. Constitution prohibits that from happening. So, assuming State law allows it and their State constitutions don't prohibit it, States are allowed to do this. But once they do it, it creates a problem, and it creates a strong inference--a strong presumption--of an ongoing, much bigger problem because, if you are one of those States that allows voters to register to vote and then cast votes in some local elections, that means they have a voter registration file. Questions have been asked by Federal authorities of the State elections officials in those States: What is it that you are doing? Tell us the process by which you are able to secure a degree of confidence that those voter registration files belonging to noncitizens, who are, by operation of State law, allowed to vote notwithstanding their noncitizen status in local elections--what is it that you are doing to make sure that those same people who have registered to vote don't show up on election day in November or on a primary election day earlier in the year to cast votes in connection with Federal elections? Here I am referring primarily, of course, to U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives elections. They have been asked that question, and they refuse to answer. Now, just think about that for a moment. That is pretty chilling. No matter how many noncitizen voter registration files might be found in those States, one can imagine a scenario in which it could and would make a difference. We can all think of elections, including Federal elections that many of us are familiar with, that have been decided sometimes on the basis of a few thousand votes or a few hundred votes or even a few dozen votes. It does happen, and you never know in advance when it is going to happen. It is like my late father, also a lawyer, used to say about appellate arguments. It is something that both he and I spent much of our careers as lawyers doing--handling appellate arguments before courts of appeals. He would sometimes get asked the question: Can the lawyer and the lawyer's argument at oral argument--because before any oral argument happens in the appellate litigation world in the United States, there is an extensive period of briefing. Sharon, my wife, likes to say that a brief--a legal brief--is oxymoronic; it is anything but brief. It certainly isn't brief to write. It is not brief to read, but you have several months of briefing. Then there is a distinct point in time where the lawyers come together. They show up at the same time, on the same day, and the Court hears oral argument as distinguished from the written argument in the briefing. And he used to get asked the question: Does oral argument make a difference or is it always decided on the briefs? He would consistently say the same thing every time he was asked that question: It makes a difference sometimes. You never know when it is going to make a difference, but because we know it makes a difference sometimes, you have to prepare for each argument as if the argument in that case would make all the difference. So, too, here. We don't know which races, whether it is a State office, a Federal office, or otherwise--you don't know in which races the margin between fraudulently cast votes and legitimately cast votes might make a difference; so you have to prepare for each election as if it would make all the difference that you had cleaned up your voter registration files. In this instance, we are not talking about the entire universe of fraudulent votes that could be cast. We are talking about the universe consisting of noncitizens. We know for a fact that this number nationwide is at least in the thousands, and we know that because there are a small handful of States--a growing number of States--that have cleaned up their voter registration files often with the help of the SAVE database at the Department of Homeland Security. On that basis alone, they have discovered thousands--somewhere between thousands and tens of thousands--of noncitizen voter registration files. So, when we know that those are out there--and those are just from the States that are run by Governors and legislatures that are willing to share this information with the Department of Homeland Security and are willing to undertake an effort to make sure that only noncitizens are registered to vote in a way that makes them incapable of voting in a Federal election--it really does matter that we get to the bottom of this question because we know that, if there are at least a few thousand to a few tens of thousands from the red States, how many more are there from the blue States? I can't help but wonder whether there might be a close connection between the blue States being unwilling to share their data and the number of likely noncitizen voter registration files they will have in their databases because, after all, given how little effort it would take on behalf of those States in order to share that information with the SAVE database and the people at the Department of Justice and at the Department of Homeland Security who are looking for them, why else would they be so opposed to it? So, from that, one can wonder, instead of thousands to tens of thousands, could we be talking about tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands? And if that is how many there might be today, how many more could there be given that we now have something north of 30 million noncitizens residing in the United States, including 10 to 15 million-- maybe more--who came into the country illegally, unlawfully, just in 4 of the last 5 years alone, between 2021 and 2025, during the era of the prolonged Biden border invasion? In other words, this could get worse. It could get much worse, especially with the number of States that have very late voter registration requirements, including a number of blue States that have same-day voter registration. These numbers could spike very quickly if we don't get to the bottom of this problem and do it very, very soon, which is why I think there is such an interesting connection between the three things that we are talking about right now. We have been talking for the last few days, and we will continue, I hope, for weeks or for as long as it takes to get it passed, the SAVE America Act, but we are also, simultaneously, talking about that and the confirmation of Markwayne Mullin to be the next DHS Secretary, and legislation to keep the Department of Homeland Security funded, to fund it now that it has been defunded for well over a month. There is a parallel between all three of these things. In all three instances, our Democratic colleagues are dragging their heels. In all three instances, they are trying to stop something or a series of things that could result in our ability to secure our homeland; to enforce the laws governing our border, governing the immigration and naturalization of this country; and, ultimately, safeguarding our elections. These are not esoteric points. These are not hypothetical or hyperbolic points. These are about real on-the-ground facts--facts that continue to come out every day, and I expect that. Even in the next few days, as we are debating the SAVE America Act, I will not be surprised if we get even more data points indicating that this is not a hypothetical problem and that this is not a hyperbolic alarm bell that we are sounding. These are real--real--things that have to be dealt with. So how then do our Democratic colleagues propose that we deal with this? Well, they are saying that they will stop at nothing to stop the SAVE America Act. When you hear their arguments, their arguments sound overwhelmingly--they sound out on the basis of facts that are not in evidence, not only facts not in evidence but facts contradicted by the legislative text itself. They have erected straw man after straw man from within the contrived, imagined ``parade of horribles'' version of the SAVE America Act that is not actually in the SAVE America Act at all. Meanwhile, they overlook provisions of the SAVE America Act--most to the point, the text beginning on line 22 of page 12 that makes clear, under the SAVE America Act, the requirements for establishing citizenship at the time of voter registration, No. 1, in addition to the fact that they do not require anyone now registered to redo his or her registration. You don't have to worry about that. But the point I was getting to, which is second, is that it gives every American who is newly registering to vote under these new voter registration requirements of establishing citizenship--it allows them to establish that by attestation, through a simple affidavit. If you are a natural born citizen, you will provide one set of facts in your sworn statement: I was born in such-and-such a city. These were my parents. Here is the date when I was born--the basic essential facts that one would have to know in order to establish that you are a natural born citizen. Alternatively, if you were a naturalized citizen--if you were born somewhere else, if you were not a citizen as of the moment of your birth by virtue of the circumstances surrounding your birth, therefore, not a natural born citizen, but at some point you became a naturalized citizen--you would need to provide a different set of facts about where you were born, who your parents were, when you came to this country, under what mechanism, and through what process, and on what date you were made a citizen of the United States. You can do all of this through a simple affidavit even if you don't have any of the requirements--any of the more typical, more common documents that are required elsewhere--including when every citizen starts any job anywhere in the United States as a U.S. citizen. You have to establish your citizenship. You have to do so with a set of documents that is much more rigid and far less flexible than what we allow for in the SAVE America Act because, to start a job, you have got to fill out the I-9 form. The I-9 form requires you to provide either a U.S. passport to establish citizenship or, alternatively, an original certified copy of your birth certificate, accompanied by a government- issued photo ID or a Social Security card. Now, for the most part--I don't know how they get around the truly difficult cases there, but it has always been my understanding that, unless or until you can provide those specific documents under the I-9, you are out of luck. You are not starting that job until you can pony up with them. So you are going to have to track them down. You might have to spend a few dollars to get your birth certificate or if you end up going through the additional steps of getting a passport. Many Americans have them; many don't. They cost a couple hundred bucks. So if you are not doing international travel, there is a good chance you don't have one, and you don't necessarily want to shell out $200 to get one. But you pretty much have got to do that when you are starting a new job. But we wanted the SAVE America Act to be more flexible than that because, after all, we want to make it easy to vote while also making it hard to cheat. So, to that end, we allowed for this alternative method by which you can do a simple affidavit, and you can submit it to the State authority, shifting the burden to them. You are taking the load off of your shoulders and giving it to the State elections officials, who will then have the obligation of confirming or refuting the accuracy of the information you gave them. Now, if you lied to them and you did that under a sworn statement under penalty of perjury, you could be in a fair amount of trouble, and I don't think most people will do it for that reason alone. But if you are telling the truth, they are also going to figure that out. And given the databases of documents that these State officials will have access to, it should be relatively straightforward for them to be able to confirm or refute citizenship. So these arguments, these features of the legislation, get ignored over and over and over again. Instead, we hear these parade-of- horribles arguments that you are going to have to shell out 200 bucks to get a passport or you will be unable to vote--false; that if you lost your birth certificate, you won't be able to vote--false; that if you are a married woman who, after getting married, took on your husband's name and you can't find your marriage certificate, you won't be able to vote--false; that this will somehow disenfranchise, render unable to vote, 21 million currently registered voters in America. That one is completely false, and it gets repeated over and over again. There is not a scintilla of truth to that one. I understand, at least, where they get to the other ones, but this is just based on some survey done years ago, I believe, by the Brennan Center, identifying that there are about 21 million Americans who are not sure where their documents are that would establish their citizenship. That does not mean they would be disenfranchised. And that, again, completely ignores this provision in the text of the statute, beginning on page 22, line 12, of the SAVE America Act. So a picture is beginning to emerge. They don't want to fund the entire Department of Homeland Security. We are talking about somewhere between 230,000 and 260,000 hard-working Americans, who are not making a lot of money. They are paid for their services, but they are not getting rich off of this. Many of them, I would imagine, are living paycheck to paycheck. They have got people relying on them. They have got mouths to feed at home--children, spouses--house payments, car payments, and utility bills mounting up. They don't want to pay them because they are mad at the fact that the border is being enforced. They are mad at the fact that there have been some enforcement efforts in the interior of the country, some of which have resulted in tragedy. And those are all being investigated right now. Inquiries are going on to figure out what happened. But even before waiting for the final outcome of those investigations, they are willing to shut it all down, to defund ICE and make it impossible for them to do their job. Meanwhile, they are standing behind the entrenched unwillingness, defiant opposition on the part of these blue States, dozens of them, who are refusing even to share the most basic information--the most basic data--from their voter registration files, such as would allow for the detection and removal of noncitizen voters who are currently able to cast votes, including in Federal elections. They then move on to making an invented argument, under the Constitution, that this somehow violates the principles of federalism; that it violates the 10th Amendment; that it is Federal overreach. That is absolute nonsense, as article I, section 4, clause 1 gives us, unambiguously, the authority to set needful regulations concerning the conduct of State-run elections for Federal offices. By the way, that same provision of the Constitution--article I, section 4, clause 1--is that very same provision that was used and relied upon by Congress in 1993 when it passed the NVRA, the National Voter Registration Act, also known as the motor voter law. And it is that same law, the NVRA, that was interpreted, two decades later, by the Supreme Court--wrongly, but conclusively nonetheless--as prohibiting the States from doing any follow up when somebody shows up to a DMV. The whole point of the NVRA is to allow someone to show up at a department of motor vehicles office in their State, in any participating State--and that is nearly all of them that do participate--and you may, simply by applying for a driver's license, filling out the driver's license application, all you have to do on that driver's license application is check a box saying: Yes, I would like to register to vote. And then, at the very bottom, sign your name saying: Yes, I want to register to vote, and I am entitled to vote. There is no legal impediment to me voting. I am a U.S. citizen and not otherwise barred by law from voting. And that is it. No specific information is required. No specific information is even allowed. Per this Supreme Court precedent wrongly interpreting the NVRA, you can't even ask them any additional questions to verify that. Why? Why are they so defiantly, adamantly opposed to funding the Department that protects our homeland, that allows us to enforce border and immigration laws? And they are simultaneously adamantly opposed to legislation that would require people to go through the simple process of establishing who they are and that they are entitled to vote in U.S. elections. Why? When you marry up the absurdity and the invented form and the hyperbolic nature and, ultimately, the lack of foundation behind the arguments that they raise with what they are doing, this is alarming, to say the least. It is damning. We are a nation of laws, and we are a nation. You can be neither a nation nor a nation of laws if you don't enforce your border laws, if you don't enforce who may call themselves an American, if you don't enforce who may cast a vote to decide your laws. We talk a lot about a lot of policy ideas here. We make a lot of laws here. Some would say too many, and they might be right. But this one is different. This is upstream from all of them. They might say it is a metalaw or a protolaw. It is upstream from so many others because we are talking here about the law that determines who will be able to make our laws when voters across this country are casting votes in Federal elections, deciding who will represent them in the U.S. Senate and in the House of Representatives. We want to make sure that those voters are kept in the family, that those votes are kept within the bounds of who is allowed to vote. Only American citizens are allowed to vote in them. Now, if that upsets the Democrats, they should say so. I haven't heard calls from any of them calling to repeal existing legislation that prohibits noncitizens from voting in Federal elections. It would be interesting if they raised that. That would be an interesting debate. That would be, at least, a more honest discussion, if they were to raise that, but they haven't. They have instead said: We don't need the SAVE America Act because-- and this one is a kicker--because it is already against the law. That, under these circumstances, is analogous to saying: We don't need a law allowing police to issue citations and monitor traffic at intersections governed by a stop sign because it is already against the law in our State to run a stop sign. And even though police officers, under the status quo, are prohibited from monitoring intersections and taking note of when someone runs a stop sign, we know that people don't run stop signs because it is against the law. That is directly, closely, tightly analogous to what they are saying here. We don't need a law making our laws prohibiting noncitizen voting because it is already against the law. And we take that defiant, illogical, absurd position, even knowing that it would make it impossible to detect--and therefore prosecute and punish--anyone who breaks that law. We have got to clear both of these logjams. We have got to get Markwayne Mullin confirmed. I was happy to cast my vote for him and support him through that effort. He is a man with a lot of energy, a lot of ideas, and it is going to take such a man to run the Department of Homeland Security. We also have to get the Department of Homeland Security funded, and we have to fully enable the Department of Homeland Security to protect the American people--not just by paying them, which is long overdue, but also by giving them the authority to get the data they need from the States in order to make sure that only Americans vote in U.S. elections.

Mr. LEE

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

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, we have had more discussion today on a number of topics. One of the topics that has commanded a lot of today's discussion is the bill that is now pending before the U.S. Senate, the SAVE America Act. There have been more assertions made on this bill today than there have been in the past. So I need to address each one of those points, particularly those that have not been refuted--or at least adequately refuted today--in connection with these debates. While it is difficult to know exactly where to begin, I am going to begin--before I refute these--just with a generalized statement up front that will facilitate my ability to refute. These scurrilous and false arguments that have been made against this bill--now, although some of these arguments have been mingled with truth, they are almost entirely false. They are built on lies. They are built on a blatant mischaracterization of the legislative text now pending before the Senate. They are based on a mischaracterization of the legal status quo and the effects of existing laws. They are based on mischaracterizations of the Constitution. They are based on mischaracterizations of the individual motives of the lawmakers in this body--something that we are not supposed to call into question but that has been called into question on a number of occasions today. First, as to the general backdrop against which we are operating, we remember that the whole purpose of the SAVE America Act is to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. We remember the fact that the purpose of the SAVE America Act is to do this through a two-step mechanism--one that focuses on requiring proof of citizenship at the time of voter registration and another that requires photo ID at the time and place of voting. The whole reason that this law became necessary, that this bill, this legislative project came into existence about 2\1/2\ years ago, was that Congressman Chip Roy and I--Congressman Roy comes from Texas--he and I were talking, and, having been informed by some experts in this area, we pieced together a number of features--legal, factual, historical developments--that have converged into one, producing a massive gap in our election security. Remember that the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 has been interpreted by the Supreme Court in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona as prohibiting the States from doing any followup to verify, confirm, or refute someone's citizenship. Although Federal law does, in fact--as has been noted repeatedly today on the floor of the Senate--require that you be a U.S. citizen to vote in a Federal election, that doesn't enforce itself. In fact, that criminal prohibition against noncitizen voting in Federal elections has become more or less impossible to enforce because noncitizen voting is nearly impossible to detect under the status quo. Because of the Supreme Court's ruling in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona in 2013, the States can't ask for proof of citizenship for anyone who registers to vote at a DMV--through an NVRA form at a DMV while applying for a driver's license and simultaneously going through the process of registering to vote. Remember, all you have to do with an NVRA form at the DMV while you are applying for a driver's license is check one box saying: Yes, I would like to simultaneously register to vote. The only further act is to sign your name certifying that you are, in fact, eligible to vote. That is the end of the inquiry, and there can be no more inquiry, and that is part of what is causing so much of a problem. Decades ago, there were simply fewer noncitizens in the United States. In many instances, it was difficult to get a driver's license if you were a noncitizen--especially if you were an illegal immigrant--and that, too, has changed. We have now got 30 million-plus noncitizens in this country. We have 10- to 15 million illegal immigrants in this country, specifically illegal immigrants who arrived within that 4-year period between January 20, 2021--the day President Biden took office-- and January 20, 2025--the day President Trump became President for the second time. This veritable flood of illegal immigration--a mass-scale border invasion invited by the Biden administration, contrary to our laws--brought these circumstances about. So when you merge that with the fact that we have a lot of noncitizens here generally, coupled with the fact that it is impossible for the State to ask for any type of proof of citizenship for someone registering to vote at a DMV through an NVRA-supplied form, you have a recipe for disaster that we have never had previously in this country. All right. So as to the arguments, they are picking apart arguments with it. Now, these arguments, first of all, are themselves at odds with how the American people approach this. The American people understand that it is not that big of a deal--it is not the end of the world; it is certainly not Armageddon--to suggest that somebody ought to show who they are and that they have the right to do what they want to do, to establish that they are citizens when they register to vote, to establish on the day of voting at the polling location that they are the person indicated on the voter registration file. The American people overwhelmingly understand and accept the fact that this isn't that big of a deal. Sure, it might be an incremental burden for some, but it is not going to be a problem, and it is a problem that Americans are used to dealing with. You don't go to the bank or to the pharmacy or to the doctor's office or to a hospital, you don't apply for a hunting license or a fishing license, you don't buy a gun, you don't go through TSA and travel--you don't do any of these things and much, much more without being able to prove who you are and that you have the right to do the thing you are about to do. The same is true with the Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys, the Super Bowl, and the Democratic National Convention. You cannot get into and participate in the Democratic National Convention unless you show up with voter ID and credentials. What else is like that? Oh, yes, I know: the U.S. Senate. You cannot come to the U.S. Senate, you can't cast a vote in the U.S. Senate, you certainly can't make it into this Chamber without ID and without credentials establishing that you have the right to be here as a Senator, the right to vote as a Senator, to make laws as a Senator. Every one of us has had to go through this over and over again--not just when we vote or do any of the other things that I mentioned, but when we register as candidates, we have to show who we are and that we are eligible to run for the U.S. Senate, that we meet the constitutional requirements for service in the U.S. Senate. We have to show our ID again when we vote. Then even after we win our elections--if we are so fortunate as those of us serving in this body have been--you still have to show up and produce an ID on a couple of different occasions. You have to show your ID and your birth certificate or a U.S. passport in order to establish your citizenship, just as you would with any other job. Remember, every American citizen who has any job as an employee in the United States of America has to establish their citizenship. They have to do that by either showing a U.S. passport that establishes citizenship or, alternatively, a birth certificate and a photo ID. So we have to do that here, just like any other government employee, any other private sector employee in America. But as Senators, we also have to show up with other documentation. In addition to showing that we are who we claim to be and that we are that person who claims to have been elected to the U.S. Senate in the most recent senatorial election, we also have to show up and have the benefit of an election certificate by our chief elections officer--the secretary of state or Lieutenant Governor in most States--to establish that we are eligible to participate here. So this is no different. And the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention as well. These are not unusual standards or requirements. So let's get onto these arguments. Over and over and over again, we heard this from both the senior Senator from Rhode Island and from the junior Senator from Rhode Island, among others, over the last few days. We are being told this would bring about a massive campaign of voter disenfranchisement. Let's remember what ``disenfranchisement'' means. In this context, it means you are taking people who can vote today and making it so that they can't vote tomorrow. This is an argument conceived in Hell by the Devil himself because it is just utterly false. There is not a scintilla of truth to this. You could try to breathe life into it by adding inference upon inference, taking different statements out of context; you would still be lying if you were making this argument because there is nothing about it that disenfranchises anyone. (Mrs. BRITT assumed the Chair.) If anything, what this would do is this would prevent the disenfranchisement of actual U.S. citizens by those who are not citizens of our country, by those who--whether through mistake or, more likely, fraud--may register to vote notwithstanding the fact that they are not eligible to do this. The modern left has become obsessed with what they consider victimless crimes. We hear about this from the modern left all the time, and we have heard about that in this very Chamber this very day. They approach noncitizen voting as if it were such a minor thing not only in terms of the numbers, the frequency or infrequency with which it occurs, but also that even if it does happen, let's not worry about it. Remember, our mantra is, let's make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. Their mantra appears to be, let's make it easy to vote and screw the rest. We don't care. When you focus obsessively on ``easy to vote'' to the exclusion of all other things, you are not just increasing marginally the risk of voter fraud--something that they claim doesn't exist and that we have invented into existence because of our own tendencies toward paranoid fantasy--but they are also ignoring the fact that when we allow that to happen, we are disenfranchising actual American citizens, because their vote matters less. Their vote can be canceled out entirely by 1 or more or 1,000 or more or 10,000 or more people who vote in the same jurisdiction who might not be eligible to do so. So, yes, it matters. And this is not disenfranchisement. It is a little bit like saying you are excluding entire categories of people by requiring them to prove who they are when they start a job--something that we all have to do every time we start a job. And somehow, the American economy continues to function. Somehow, men, women, people of every race and combination of races imaginable in America do that every single day. Most of us do that many times in a single career--we start a new job, we prove who we are. When we go to the DMV, we have to prove who we are. When we get pulled over in our car, we prove who we are. Why is this any different? They say: Well, it is a constitutionally protected right. Darn right it is. And it is our job to make sure that is protected. But the fact that it is a constitutionally protected right in no way, shape, or form means that we have to make it easy to vote and screw the rest; let's let them cheat. That is not a rational conclusion--unless, of course, your objective is to facilitate noncitizen, fraudulent voting in our elections, to the disenfranchisement of actual American citizens who are there to vote. This is not a victimless crime, and shame on my colleagues for suggesting otherwise. We also heard--this one was from the junior Senator from Rhode Island, and we heard it multiple times not only from him but from the senior Senator from Rhode Island--that it requires a passport to vote under the SAVE America Act. This is not just a lie; this is a damned lie because the plain black- and-white text of the bill makes it very clear that there are a zillion ways that you can prove your citizenship. Now, there are a couple of them that are easy, that are familiar, that roll off the tongue because we use them elsewhere--like, for example, providing a U.S. passport that establishes citizenship on its own and like showing up with a birth certificate and a government-issued photo ID. That will do it too. Those are the documents we use in the employment context under the I-9 form. But there is a whole lot of other stuff that we have added to this one. For example, there are certain types of driver's licenses. I don't mean REAL ID because there are a lot of REAL ID driver's licenses that are issued to citizens and noncitizens alike. That has become a point of confusion. There is a subcategory of REAL ID driver's licenses known as the enhanced driver's license issued by some States to some people that contain indicia on the face of the driver's license that will establish citizenship. There are, as I understand it, some Tribal identification papers that will also establish U.S. citizenship--not all of them, but some of them do. There are a handful of other things that will do that. But in addition to all these mechanisms, you can also show up without a single document in hand. If you don't have them--you can't find them, you lost them, your house burned down, whatever it is--you can show up and you can fill out an affidavit, a sworn affidavit, saying: I, Mike Lee, swear under penalty of perjury that I am a citizen of the United States and this is where I was born. If you are a natural-born citizen, as I am, as I think most of us here are: I was a citizen as of the moment of my birth by virtue of the circumstances of my birth when I was born on June 4, 1971, in Mesa, AZ, to U.S. citizen parents. If you are not a--and those are the basic facts. You outline the basic facts of how it is that you became a natural-born citizen--enough facts so that the State election official knows what to look for, knows where to look, and can confirm or refute the existence of your citizenship as a natural-born citizen. You shift the burden onto the State. It doesn't cost you a dime. It doesn't even have to take more than a few minutes to show up and provide that information. Now, some might say: Well, that, too, is a step. Well, yeah, there are a lot of steps in a lot of things, and it is what we do to make sure that the vote matters, to make sure that the vote isn't being just completely left open to fraud and manipulation. If you take the easy vote nonsense far enough and you don't couple it with anything that makes it hard to cheat, you really are just inviting and--in fact, guaranteeing--fraud. You are guaranteeing effective disenfranchisement, nullification of U.S. citizen voting, and often facilitating foreign election interference--something that my Democratic colleagues claimed for years to be obsessively concerned about, and now, Nah, let's not worry about it. We just want to make it easy to vote. So it is not true to say that you have got to have a passport to vote. One of the reasons why they like to make this argument, as dishonest as that argument is, is because passports, of course, are something that not everybody has. Some Americans do, but some don't. Some don't travel enough for it to matter, and if and when they needed to travel outside the United States, they will get one. And it is expensive. It costs a couple hundred bucks to get a passport. And all of us, as Senators, have had a lot of experience helping our constituents get passports. Every one of us has had the experience, not just once or twice but often once or twice a day, where we get a call from a constituent saying: I am supposed to be boarding a plane. I am on my way to London or Yemen or Tokyo or wherever it is, and I can't find my passport or it has expired. And we walk them through the process of doing it. It does have some expense involved, and there are often delays involved in getting one, but if you have got one, it can be helpful. But the reason they like to use that argument--falsely claiming over and over and over again for the last 4 days in a row--that you have got to have a passport to register to vote under the SAVE America Act is because they like the fact that there is a cost associated with a passport, and they can use that to make one of the other spurious arguments, which is that this is a poll tax. Well, of course, we outlawed poll taxes more than 60 years ago by a constitutional amendment, and, of course, this is not a poll tax because you needn't shell out a dime. A poll tax is something that you have to pay for in order to have the right to vote. This is not that-- nothing like that. All right. Next point. My colleagues continue to argue that every part of this is so fraught with peril, including the very basic elements of what, under this law, the States would need to do to coordinate with and share voter registration data with the relevant Federal Agencies, primarily those within the Department of Homeland Security who operate the already existing SAVE database so that this coordination can occur between State elections officials--those who maintain their voter rolls--and the Federal personnel who maintain this database. The argument that they are making is that even those parts--even the sharing of data between State officials and Federal officials just to make sure that we don't have noncitizens voting is something that is going to happen, particularly with this many noncitizens in the country, the ease of going into a DMV and applying for a driver's license and simultaneously checking a box and signing your name to register to vote. Given how easy it has become to do that, it is an absolute certainty that you are going to have a number of people who are noncitizens who are registered to vote. Now, some of them might be doing it deliberately. I suspect there are quite a few who might do it inadvertently. There may be language barriers involved. They may think they are supposed to check that box, and they will sign their name. They might not know entirely what they are doing or they might not have a complete understanding that whatever their immigration status is, it doesn't allow them to vote. The point is this: It is a known fact that we have a lot of registered voters in this country who are noncitizens. Let's talk about how we know that. In the first instance, we have got a small handful of States--but a growing number of States--that have begun a systematic review of their own voter registration files, and they have shared their voter registration file data with the individuals and Agencies within the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, DC, to figure out who is a citizen and who is not. Those that have done this have found many thousands of noncitizens in their voter files so far. My hat goes off to those who have done it. This is the responsible citizen thing to do, and they have gone through the process of figuring out how to correct the errors. So some of them have found out that way. Others, as is the case, for example, with the State of Oklahoma--it is a general phenomenon that occurs all over the place, but in Oklahoma they have a law designed specifically for this situation. Remember, when you are summoned to show up for jury duty, that happens through a random selection of names from voter registration files in the jurisdiction in which potential jurors are drawn, so nobody should be summoned for jury duty unless they are on a list of registered voters. And when registered voters show up for jury duty, with some regularity, they will stand up, and they will say: Hey, I am not a citizen, and I, therefore, cannot serve as a juror. Now, there all kinds of reasons. I have seen this happen, as a lawyer, many times. People get summoned for jury duty, and some of them will look for excuses not to do it. And some are really good reasons, others less so. You hear people joke about different ways they could avoid it. I have heard people joke about showing up and saying, you know: I believe in jury nullification; that the jury can do whatever it wants without regard to the law. It doesn't matter. It is all our choice. And some say that is a way to avoid it. I don't encourage that. Others will say that, well, there was this great episode of the sitcom ``30 Rock'' years ago where I believe Liz Lemon, the main character of the show, showed up for jury duty while dressed as Princess Leia and with just as many indicators that she was really weird as possible, hoping that some of the lawyers would exclude her, perhaps using one of their peremptory challenges to get over it. Others still might show up and fraudulently claim that they are not citizens when, in fact, they are citizens. So, in Oklahoma, in order to ferret this out, they passed a law that said: All right. If you show up for jury duty having been summoned to show up as a potential juror and you claim that you cannot serve because you are not a citizen, we are going to check. We are going to check to see if you are, in fact, a citizen because if you are not a citizen, you shouldn't have registered to vote, and that is one kind of a problem. We are going to need to remove you from the voter registration files. If you are, in fact, a registered voter in our State, then you have just stated under penalty of perjury, in order to escape jury duty, that you are not a citizen when, in fact, you are. That is also a problem. Look, it is much better--don't lie. If you really don't want to do it, show up dressed as Princess Leia or as Chewbacca or something like that. That is probably a better point. I don't recommend that either. Just do your duty as a citizen. Those States that have adopted procedures like that, whether in the form of a formal law like Oklahoma or as is the case in Michigan, they have adopted a practice: When they assemble those names, they run them through, and inevitably they find a bunch of them were not citizens and then they can remove them. In other States still, there are four or five States and the District of Columbia in which they openly admit that they register noncitizens to vote because in some local elections within those jurisdictions, they allow noncitizens to vote. That is a terrible idea. I don't know why they would want to do that, but they do. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that prohibits it in a State or local election, as long as there is nothing in State law or the applicable State constitution that prohibits it; therefore, they can do so, and some of them have--some of them do. Foolish as it is, they do it anyway. Curiously, in those States, when U.S. Federal authorities have asked them to explain how it is that they deal with the problem of voter registration files consisting of people who are allowed to participate in certain local elections as noncitizens, how they prevent those same voters who are not citizens, but registered to vote, from casting votes with a normal ballot as for Federal offices like the U.S. House of Representatives or U.S. Senate, every time that question has been asked, they go silent. They won't say a thing, and then they refuse to cooperate. Now, a few minutes ago, I referred to a number of States that have, on their own, just because they are good citizens--they have taken advantage of the SAVE database within the Department of Homeland Security. They have shared their data, usually having entered into a memorandum of understanding between the State and DHS beforehand. And then they say: Hey, run the numbers. Show us where we have got people in there that we shouldn't have. To their great credit, they have done that. But there are a whole bunch of other States that refuse--most so- called blue States. States with Democrat legislatures and/or Democrat Governors have been refusing to do that. And so they have no idea--or at least we have no idea--how many noncitizens might be registered to vote in those States. So this is kind of a problem. Anyway, back to the argument made, I believe, by both of the Rhode Island Senators. Boy, the Rhode Island Senators sure had a lot to say today. They just didn't have a lot of good things to say about the SAVE America Act--and by ``good things,'' I don't mean that they were criticizing it. I mean they were using really bad arguments that are not rooted in truth and that are made with either knowledge of their falsity or reckless disregard as to their truthfulness. So this is where it gets interesting. They argue that we can't even trust the States--the States can't even trust the Department of Homeland Security or anyone in the Trump administration with that data that under the SAVE America Act they would be required to supply to the Department of Homeland Security for this review. And we can't, why? Well, the argument--they use a lot more words to say it, but it basically boils down to three words: ``Orange man bad.'' Now, that is not a good reason. That is a lame-ass argument to get to a very simple point. They are saying: We don't trust the U.S. Government with data because some of it contains personally identifying information. Well, welcome to the U.S. Government. They know everything about us. There is no fact that they do not have on us, on every American citizen, like it or not. We do everything we can--and we do everything we can in this legislation--to make sure that privacy is respected. But with or without that information being handed over by a State election official to the Department of Homeland Security for the sole purpose of ascertaining voter eligibility, it does nothing to maximize or to further protect the privacy of the American people, nor are my Democratic colleagues saying or even suggesting in any way, shape, or form that they want to undo all the thousands, if not millions, of other instances, areas in which they collect a whole lot of data, including a whole lot of personally identifying data on U.S. citizens. So they are just hyperfocusing on this one where, by the way, the ease and simplicity of protecting the privacy and the personal information of individual U.S. citizens is far easier than it is in the context of the IRS or of the financial transactions or everything else that the U.S. Government keeps track of. So this strikes me as pretextual; and, of course, pretextual is a fancy word for it is a cheap excuse for the real reason. Now, maybe we will get to a real reason in a minute. Let's just say that they are opposing this for a reason, but none of the reasons that they are offering pass muster--not one of them can withstand scrutiny. So their argument that ``Trump bad'' equals no State should have to share its data, even where necessary in order to weed out fraud in Federal elections--that argument isn't good. That argument is basically saying that we don't want our States to have to do that because we are pretty sure that our States have registered a whole bunch of noncitizen voters, and we don't want to have to give them up. (Mrs. MOODY assumed the Chair.) From day one, when they talked about this, even before debate began in the Senate, my Democratic colleagues have been arguing that anyone whose name would likely trigger alarm bells through the processes established by the SAVE America Act warranting their removal based on their status as noncitizens--they said that anyone who would likely be removed from the voter registration files would be more likely to be a Democrat than a Republican and that would be bad for us. They literally said this. Now, they are careful not to say ``because they are noncitizens,'' but that is the reason. That is the only reason you would be removed through this framework is if they are noncitizens. And so when they say over and over again this is going to disenfranchise people, it is going to take away their vote--well, yeah, if you are a noncitizen. But if you are not, it is not going to. And so this process that they go through in defending the status quo and in saying that Armageddon will be upon us if we require people to show up with a photo ID when they vote, to show that they are citizens when they register to vote, and that the States are going to share their data on their voter registration files with the Department of Homeland Security just to make sure that they are, in fact, not voting in U.S. elections as noncitizens--when they object that strongly to it, it makes you wonder why they are so upset. And I think the question answers itself. It speaks for itself when they freak out over something like this. They have no problem with any of the other myriad areas in which voter ID is required--or photo ID is required. In fact, in the last Congress, when President Biden was still in office and when the Democrats had the majority in this Chamber--we are talking just a little over a year ago--every Democrat in the Senate then joined in and supported legislation that contained a voter ID element. So the voter ID component of it, most of them have said they are OK with it. Then when we tried to offer that one up and pass it by unanimous consent at the motion of our friend and distinguished colleague, the junior Senator from Ohio, who has got probably more knowledge of how elections work and State election systems operate than any other Member of the House or Senate--past, present, or future--this guy is sort of the--he is the Einstein of election systems. So he offered that up, accepting at face value our Democratic colleagues' repeated insistence that they don't have a problem with voter ID requirements, and it still drew an objection. Now, it drew an objection that made no sense because the objection articulated had nothing to do with voter ID. At least that is how I heard it. So that was kind of an issue. All right. Next argument: This one came specifically from the junior Senator from Rhode Island who, if I have this right, falsely claimed that the Supreme Court of the United States has said that it is unconstitutional to ask a registering voter for proof of citizenship. Now, if I misunderstood that, I hope and expect to be corrected, but I don't think I did. I think that was the argument. And if that was the argument, that argument is a lie. It is absolutely false. It is not only guilty of being false; it is innocent of being true. The Supreme Court ruling to which he is referring is this case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. It was wrongly decided, but it is conclusive nonetheless. The majority opinion reached this conclusion. It did not say it is unconstitutional to ask a registering voter for proof of citizenship--far from it. It said that based on the text of the 1993 NVRA, as passed by Congress, that the text, as a matter of statutory interpretation, preempts, prohibits any State using the NVRA form at a DMV from asking any driver's license applicant simultaneously registering to vote to also establish citizenship. That is a statutory conclusion--one that we are free to change. It is not a constitutional mandate. It is far from a constitutional mandate. Now, if that is what my friend and colleague the distinguished junior Senator from Rhode Island meant to say, then he is just plain wrong. But by saying that, he is suggesting that we are powerless, absent a constitutional amendment, from requiring any registering voter to provide proof of citizenship, which would make no sense, by the way, I mean, given how many times you are required elsewhere in Federal law-- to say nothing of State law but even just in Federal law--to establish who you are and that you are a U.S. citizen. Now, for example, you have to do that on the I-9 every time you start a new job. Every American has to do that or you can't start the job. You also have to do it when you apply for a passport. And there are related issues of proof that you have to do in many, many other circumstances. If you want to buy a firearm and you go into a federally licensed firearms dealer, you have to provide a photo ID. You then have to go through a background check. You have to show who you are. To this the Democrats say: Oh, but this is a constitutionally protected right. You have a constitutionally protected right to vote. True. There are multiple provisions of the U.S. Constitution that in different ways protect your right to vote. Yes, it is constitutionally protected. So too are a whole lot of other things. So too is your right to travel, and yet your right to travel is not unqualified. If you want to travel in and out of the United States, then you are going to have to get a passport. If you want to travel between two States or even two cities through commercial air travel, you are, at a minimum, going to have to show a driver's license. Yet your right to travel is constitutionally protected; the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected, as is the right to vote. So the fact that something is constitutionally protected doesn't mean that there are and can be no guardrails around that to make sure that you are a person who is allowed to exercise the constitutionally protected right in question. That never has been the case, and it never will be the case. You still don't escape the need to establish who you are and that you have that right. Next comes the argument made repeatedly by both the junior Senator from Rhode Island and the senior Senator from Rhode Island that this will somehow disenfranchise women. This has to be one of the dumbest arguments that I have ever heard, not just in connection with this bill, the SAVE America Act, but with any bill ever debated in the 15\1/ 2\ years I have been in the U.S. Senate. I find it utterly offensive to suggest that women just can't possibly be expected to get their stuff together enough to establish who they are and that they are citizens; or, as the argument goes, women who get married and change their name upon getting married are never ever going to be able to prove who they are after they change their name because, after all, their parents couldn't have known what their married name would be when they were born, so we just can't pass this law. This is really, really dumb. I mean, first of all, we have a lot of women serving in the U.S. Senate, every one of whom had to prove their citizenship, had to establish their election certificate, and many of whom have been married and changed their name in connection with that. And it is not just the women of the U.S. Senate; it is all women anywhere. And I know a lot of women. I have five sisters. My wife also has five sisters. Between us, that is 10 sisters. That is a lot of sisters. Every damn one of them knows how to establish who they are and that they are entitled to vote. This is not a problem. And they are all married, and they all have married names that were different than the name listed on their birth certificate. It is not a problem. It is not just my family that is like that. I would imagine that the Presiding Officer's family is the same way. Women are no less capable than men of establishing who they are and supplying the necessary documentation. Now, of course, what they say is: But what if they did--what if they did get married and what if they could find all the other pieces of documentation--maybe their maiden name is still on their passport, if they have one. And their maiden name would obviously be used on their birth certificate. Well, that is not a problem either, for the same reason that it is not a problem if you don't have any documentation. It is best if you have the normal documentation because it is going to save the State governments a whole lot of trouble under this bill. It makes it a lot easier for them if you just show up with the right documentation, which most people have. But if you don't, that is OK. We have made that OK too. You just have to do an attestation, a short paragraph outlining who you are, when and where you were born, how you became a citizen, whether you were a citizen as of the moment of your birth by virtue of the circumstances surrounding your birth, or whether you were naturalized, and, if so, when, where, and how. It is not hard. You could write that out. Any American could write out that information in probably less than 2 minutes. I know I could. Whether or not it would be fully legible is a different question. I might need 3 minutes to make sure that my handwriting is neat enough to be read, and even then it is a jump ball. It is an open question, but I am pretty sure I would be OK. Every single time we bring this up, they refuse to acknowledge the language in the statute, in the bill. Page 12, line 22 and the text that follows from it makes very clear that if you are missing any of that documentation--let's say you are a married woman whose birth certificate and whose passport and whose other documentation uses only your maiden name and not your married name and you can't find your marriage certificate. By the way, if you can find it, that is conclusive proof of the name change. You don't have to worry about it at all. But let's say you can't find the marriage certificate and you have everything else. Then you swear out a brief affidavit: I got married on July such and such of such and such a year. And I married so-and-so. His name is Jones. My maiden name was Smith, so I changed it from Smith to Jones. You are done. That is it. From that moment forward, whether you are missing one document or all documents, you fill out the affidavit, you hand it over to the State election official. They will ask any follow- up questions they need, and from that moment forward, the burden is off your shoulders; the burden is shifted to the State authorities, whose job it is to confirm or refute your citizenship or lack thereof. States, remember, have access to all kinds of information: birth certificates issued in that State. I believe many, if not most, if not all States, have reciprocal arrangements with other States where they can confirm or refute information on each other's databases about birth and death records and so forth. This is not hard. Yet they refuse to acknowledge that language. They just go on over and over again saying: You are going to disenfranchise women. Look, the American people don't buy it, and the American people know that when you raise bull-crap arguments over and over and over again, you are not taking the American people seriously, especially when you insult their intelligence and competence by saying that vast swaths of people--and I have heard everything under the book. You name it. I have heard it stated with regard to rural Americans as opposed to more urban Americans--or suburban Americans, people of certain ethnic or racial backgrounds, men, women, old people, young people. They try to otherize just about everybody imaginable and say that certain subgroups will somehow be disenfranchised, disadvantaged. This is all nonsense, and it all ignores the same central feature in the bill that makes this tremendously easy. All right. The next argument that they both make: fees. You have to pay fees somehow to vote. This gets back to their poll tax argument. Utter lie built on paranoid fantasy, conceived in hell by the devil himself, to make these arguments over and over again to scare people. This really has to stop at some point or another. At times, they start to argue against the photo ID point minimally, and then they remember that many, if not most of them, at one point or another--including some in the last few days--have said they are OK with photo ID. And so they don't argue with that one too much. But at the same time, they don't own up to the fact that every Democrat in here in the last Congress was, I believe, a cosponsor of legislation that contained an ID requirement. Now, it was a little bit different than this one. The biggest difference was that it wasn't quite as tight, but there was a type of ID requirement in that bill. It is not that different. Now, they kept arguing also that this would disproportionately burden citizen voters, that it would be citizens that really would have to worry and that this would end up resulting in the disenfranchisement of lots and lots of citizens. The senior Senator from Rhode Island even went so far as to say a couple of things. I had to listen carefully when he started to say this because I thought he was joking at first or I hoped I was misunderstanding him. He started to theorize back to this point that ``the orange man bad,'' so none of this can happen. We hate Trump. We can't trust Trump or anybody in his administration. Therefore, we are going to just say that all of it is unacceptable. He was saying that if this law passes, we can expect that the Trump administration might just willy-nilly cancel the voter registration files of anyone they felt like canceling. If somebody looked like they might not be a Trump voter or something bothered them about this or that person, they might just willy-nilly say: When in doubt, throw them out. The senior Senator from Rhode Island even went a step further, in a way that pained me to hear because it is so absurd. He said it is even something we should have to worry about, that the Trump administration could go in and just cancel all the voter registration files in an entire State. This is nonsense. Not only is that absurd--to think that they would do that, to think they could get away with it--it is utterly at odds with the text of the legislation. Nothing in the legislation would allow them to do that under any circumstance, other than where, having received the data from the States, they run it through their database, and they identify people: These appear to be noncitizens. They, then, notify the States: These appear to be noncitizens, voters 1 through 5,000--whatever, however many there are. Even at that point, they are not removed. The State then does its job of going back through, and if the State believes that the Federal authorities got it wrong, they can push back on that. The U.S. Government under this regime wouldn't have the authority to just go in and say: He is gone. She is gone. Get rid of this file. Get rid of that file. They can flag things for the States, and it would be up to the States, ultimately, to remove them. But it is a collaborative, iterative process. It is not one in which they could go in and just say, ``This guy bothers me; get rid of him,'' or cancel all the voter registrations in an entire State. I mean, let's be realistic. That is not realistic, and it is absurd to argue because it is utterly false that this bill, if it were signed into law, would have that effect. It is just a lie. OK. Next, the senior Senator from Rhode Island had a real doozy with this one. He said: You know--after doubting whether any of this occurs--let's not bicker and argue about who might be registered to vote as a noncitizen. It probably doesn't happen ever. If it does, it is only a little. Well, that is cold comfort to anyone in a jurisdiction that has ever experienced what happens when there is a close election and somebody wins by just a handful of votes. It is cold comfort to say: Well, there are only a few noncitizens fraudulently voting. But separate and apart from that, he was saying: The best way that we can handle this is just enforce existing law. Do you know how absurd that is? Do you know how sophomoric, shallow, simple-minded that is--not to mention how reckless and utterly dishonest that is? Let's work that through for a minute. What does that mean, ``enforce existing law''? This is like the candidates who run for existing office that say: Well, I know how I will balance the Federal budget. Just eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. Oh, gosh, we didn't think about that before. The difficulty lies in identifying it. You have to be able to identify the waste, fraud, and abuse, which we should do a better job of doing that we do. It is one of the reasons why we have systems like DOGE and why we have things like rescissions packages. I wish we did them more often and more aggressively, but it is why we have them. It is not as easy as just saying: Let's just do it. It reminds me of a movie. There has been a remake of it that I don't think was as good. The original movie was called ``Meatballs''--you know, the one that came out in the 1970s, I think. It stars Bill Murray. Bill Murray is this camp counselor, and in the camp Olympics, they were going up against Camp North Star. Camp North Star had a lot of almost professionally trained athletes. Bill Murray, the camp counselor character, just kept reminding people that they had their own coaches, their other personal masseuse on board. And they were really worried about going into the camp Olympics against the rival camp, a bunch of rich kids at Camp North Star--I think is what it was called. The one young man was about to compete in the high jump, and he went up to Bill Murray and he said: Do you have advice for me just before I make this jump? Bill Murray looked at him and he said: Yes. He got this very introspective look on his face, and he said: Try to jump very, very high. That is kind of what happens when you hear someone say, ``Oh, it is easy--waste, fraud, and abuse''; or ``It is easy; let's just enforce existing law.'' So this was his argument. It was that we can just enforce existing law because existing law, including but not limited to laws codified in 18 U.S.C. 1015, prohibit noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. So let's just enforce it. That is the whole darn point. That is the whole reason why Chip Roy and I wrote the SAVE America Act in the first place. It is the whole reason we had to, because our existing laws, as interpreted and as implemented, make it impossible--impossible--to find out where this is happening. We can't enforce existing law, at least not existing law within States that, No. 1, refuse voluntarily to come forward and share their voter registration file data with DHS to run it through the SAVE database, which I think roughly half of the States, blue States in particular, are refusing to do. And those States include especially the small handful of States that openly, brazenly admit that they allow noncitizens to register to vote to participate in certain local elections, even though they are noncitizens. So with all those States, including the handful of States that allow--expressly allow--noncitizens to vote and then offer no explanation as to how they keep them separate from those who are able to participate in elections for Federal office, they expect us to just, oh, enforce the law. Now, Rhode Island is a blue State. I will check to make sure, but I will bet $5--a lot of money where I come from--that Rhode Island is one of those States that defiantly refuses to share their voter registration data. So how in the heck are we supposed to enforce the law when they make it impossible to enforce the law? It is unknown, and it is unknowable. This is like--I guess it is like the ancient Egyptians telling the children of Israel that they had to make bricks without straw. It can't be done, but they are just fine with that, just as the ancient Egyptians weren't all that concerned about the working conditions, the health, or the pragmatics behind their slaves. Apparently, our Democrat colleagues are not all that concerned about noncitizens voting. All right, one more movie quote while we are on the topic: ``Shrek'' is one of the great cinematic masterpieces of the last 40, 50 years; half-century--``Shrek.'' There is a character named Lord Farquaad. Lord Farquaad is not what you would call a nice guy. Lord Farquaad is a despot. He is a tyrant. He is a fascist, and he is talking to his soldiers as he is about to send them into battle. He says: Now, I realize that in this battle some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make. It seems like some of our Democrat Senators are approaching this with an analogous attitude. I realize if we do nothing, if we do not pass the SAVE America Act, we could have thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of noncitizens currently registered to vote in this country who will end up voting in Federal elections, and in some instances might even decide the outcome of elections. But that is a sacrifice we are willing to make. Why? It benefits them. That old Latin phrase, cui bono--who benefits? They do. They benefit from the status quo in which it is impossible to enforce existing law. So, no, Mr. Senator from Rhode Island, don't talk to me about the fact that we don't need this because all we have to do is enforce the law. It can't be done. You know that, and you are all too content with that. So knock it off. The senior Senator from Rhode Island goes on to say that they will just use it to purge voter rolls. Well, yes, that is the idea, to purge voter rolls of illegal voters, of noncitizens, not U.S. citizens. Nothing in the law would authorize that. If somebody tried to do it, not only would they lose in court, but they would be fired from their job, and they might even be imprisoned. I mean, this is serious business, and they are treating it as if they could just make up the facts and make up the law. They are entitled to their opinions. They are not entitled to their own facts. Those things they want us to accept as facts are just damned lies. All right, there were several references made to my home State of Utah, talking about how relatively clean Utah's voter registration rolls are--clean of noncitizens--great, yes. Do you know why? My State is not one of those that refuses to clean up its voter registration files. Now, I don't know whether we know the sum total of all those who might have been registered to vote or whether they have been able to review all those. I don't know. I am not going speak to that. But I will say that in the 18 months of the Biden Presidency, Utah had more incoming illegal immigrant traffic into the State than any other State in the Union, measured on a per capita basis. So even though, over time, yes, we probably have pretty clean voter registration files, there is no telling whether that is still the case today. There is no telling whether that could change between now and this November's election, especially when people figure out that, hey, no citizen, no problem. Just go into a DMV, fill out a form, check the box, sign your name, and, all of a sudden, you are a registered voter. Next, federalism: This is one of my favorite arguments that they make, and they make it over and over and over again. Both Senators from Rhode Island made the federalism argument today. They talk about the fact that--part of what they say is true--the U.S. Government is a government of limited powers. James Madison, in Federalist 45, described this government, the one we operate, the one for which we make laws, as a government with powers that Madison described as ``few and defined.'' And the powers reserved to the States are ``numerous and indefinite.'' Unlike the States, which are governments of general jurisdiction--they can legislate on anything just because. Anything that is not prohibited to the States, either by the U.S. Constitution or by their State constitution, they can do it. We are not the same. This government is not the same. We have to have a specific reason to legislate, a reason that falls within Congress' limited enumerated powers, most of which--not all of which--can be found in one part of the Constitution that too often goes overlooked, article I, section 8. But there are a handful of other scattered authorities throughout the Constitution, including the one that is most relevant here, and that is the one found in article I, section 4, clause 1 of the Constitution, that gives us the authority to establish rules and regulations specific to the election of Federal officials, namely U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives. That same provision, article I, section 4, clause 1, says, in the first instance, that the States will conduct those elections. And that is true. It also says the States will establish the rules governing the ``Time, Places, and Manner'' of those elections. And that is true. But then it also says, in the very same sentence, that Congress may at any time impose its own rules and regulations, not regarding elections generally but specifically Federal elections--Federal elections for U.S. House and Senate races. And so, we have that authority. That authority is being exercised here. There is not a single credible argument that the SAVE America Act falls outside that authority--not one. And it is very amusing. I talked about this a little bit last night. It is amusing to me that my Democratic colleagues in the Senate are making a federalism argument claiming that our authority is too limited--so limited that we don't have the power to enact this. I am surprised by that for two independent reasons. Reason No. 1: Generally speaking, they don't like federalism. They are not fans of it. Ever since at least the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration-- arguably it goes back to the Woodrow Wilson administration--the Democratic Party has not been the champion of federalism, and that is really, really putting it mildly. It is a little bit like saying that Jack Daniels and Jim Beam are not fans of teetotalers or of the temperance movement. I mean, look, these guys go whole hog into federalizing everything, and ever since April 12, 1937, they have had their way most of the time because most things they can now justify. Franklin D. Roosevelt had Democratic supermajorities in both the House and the Senate. He bullied and intimidated the Supreme Court of the United States, which had been knocking down his legislative agenda, and threatened them right after his first reelection in the fall of 1936. Franklin Roosevelt was mad because a lot of the laws that he had pushed through as part of his New Deal program--remember, the villain was the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt was going to be the hero, and his weapon of choice was going to be the New Deal programs dramatically increasing the size, scope, reach, and cost of the Federal Government, putting it in charge of all kinds of things. The Supreme Court, during his first term of office, kept knocking him down, one right after the other. You can't do that, can't do that, can't do that. And they were right. A lot of them were relying on an expansive interpretation of the commerce clause, which is there to give us authority to regulate things or persons moving in interstate commerce, across State lines, as part of interstate commercial transactions or instrumentalities or channels of interstate commerce, interstate airways, waterways, and so forth. Whenever they tried to get too cute with it and say ``Well, it goes beyond that''--anything that is sort of economic-ish and that involves money should do it--the Supreme Court kept knocking it down. So what did Franklin Roosevelt do? I would imagine that he was one of these guys who probably played tee ball only as a little kid, never made it to baseball, and even when he was on tee ball, he was probably on one of those teams where they don't keep score because everyone is a winner. So he never learned how to lose like a gentleman. He got tired of losing and couldn't lose like a gentleman, couldn't accept the Constitution. So what did he do? He threatened to force the retirement of a bunch of the Supreme Court Justices whom he didn't like, whom he had named the ``four horsemen of the apocalypse''--not exactly Mr. Congeniality here--and threatened to pass legislation entitling himself to pack the Supreme Court, to increase it up to a tribunal as big as like 15 people. Now, they had just barely moved into their marble palace across the street about a year earlier--no, it was 2 years earlier to the day. The Supreme Court had always been sort of the anchor tenant of this building or the subtenant--redheaded stepchild, if you will. On April 12, 1935, this beautiful building over here opens its doors for the first time. They had been in there only 2 years when this Court packing plan began in earnest because F.D.R. never learned how to lose like a gentleman and wasn't willing to accept the Constitution as the ultimate outcome. So he just threatened them. He threatened them to the point that enough of the Justices flipped their votes. On April 12, 1937--2 years exactly to the day they had moved into their marble palace--the Supreme Court of the United States rewrote the commerce clause giving Congress newfound power over basically everything. Not only could they regulate things or persons moving in interstate commerce, across interstate lines, as part of interstate commercial transactions, and things involving channels or instrumentalities of interstate commerce, but now they could also regulate anything and everything, any and every activity that, when measured in the aggregate while occurring in one State at one time, had a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Yes, this is legalese. Yes, this is jargon for a very simple concept that just means Congress could now regulate whatever the hell it wants. Every aspect of human existence--labor, manufacturing, agriculture, mining, health, safety, and welfare--even occurring in one State at one time, was now on the table, was now Federal. Democrats championed this the whole time. It was their Court packing plan that forced them to push that through. So my point is this: It is ironic--one could say hypocritical and deeply so--for the party of unlimited Federal power that distorted the vertical protection of federalism and, with it, the horizontal protection of separation of powers--we have never retreated from that position, and as soon as we gave Congress the power to regulate anything and everything--that messed up the vertical protection of federalism--we started messing up the horizontal protection of separation of powers. Because no sooner had we as Senators and Congressmen gotten all this new power that we started saying: Holy crap. I am going to have to work a lot harder, and I am going to have to take a lot more votes that they are going to make a lot of people mad at me. So they stopped making real laws, and they started passing platitudes. It goes something like this: We hereby declare as a Congress that we shall have fair labor standards and practices in this country, and we hereby delegate to the National Labor Relations Board the power to make, interpret, and enforce rules carrying the force of generally applicable Federal law that will guarantee fair labor standards. They do that over and over and over again. This is what happens with their version of limited government. So don't talk to me about federalism. This is an area where we actually have a very specific Federal power, and we have a very narrow, nonabusive, nonabusable grant of Federal power to the Federal Government from the Constitution itself. This is not a federalism problem--not by a mile. That leads to the next argument closely related to that one. The senior Senator from Rhode Island--who was on a roll tonight; I will give him credit for that. The problem is that in an hour and a half, he failed to make even a single correct point without the use of abusing the English language, the law, the Constitution, and common sense. Other than that, it was a great speech. Having sort of exhausted his lame federalism argument, which doesn't work, he then said: Ah, but we have to remember that whatever power is granted under article I, section 4, clause 1 to the U.S. Congress to provide rules and regulations governing the election of Federal lawmakers, that is only for Congress. And you look at the SAVE America Act, and it gives responsibilities to executive branch Agencies. Well, no crap, Sherlock. That is how we do everything. Everything that is delegated to Congress, all Federal powers--when there is a Federal grant of authority in the Constitution, with very few exceptions--like the Commander in Chief power that is given directly to the President, not through the Congress--when the Constitution, throughout article I, section 8--and the same would be true in article I, section 4, clause 4--when Congress is granted a power, it is understood that we make the law, but the execution and implementation of that law is given to someone else. This is not the same as what I was describing a minute ago where the lawmaking power is handed in the first instance over to an executive branch Agency. That is different. And that, by the way, is why we need to pass the REINS Act after we are done passing the SAVE America Act. I know the Presiding Officer is a fan of that legislation, as am I. Because anytime we are making new law under article I, section 7 of the Constitution, you have to pass through this dual gauntlet of article I, section 7. You cannot make a Federal law--meaning you cannot make a rule enforceable by the overpowering, brooding, omnipresence of the U.S. Government--unless you have satisfied this two-part gauntlet: You have the bicameral passage--House and Senate, same text--followed by presentment to the President of the United States for signature, veto, or acquiescence. So this is totally different than that. We are not outsourcing the lawmaking power; we are adopting a single visible, understandable, intelligible principle-based legal standard and then handing over to the Department of Homeland Security for the execution of that standard, which we have made with abundant clarity. So the Senator from Rhode Island says: Ah, but it gives Congress the power to do this, not the Department of Homeland Security or any part of the executive branch of the U.S. Government. This is just nonsense. I have never heard somebody make such an argument. It is wrong. We do have that power. That power doesn't evaporate simply because we ourselves don't implement it. Do you know what is funny here? It would be unconstitutional for us to execute it. Why? Because we don't have the executive power. We have a narrow piece of executive power expressly given to us on our Executive Calendar. On our Executive Calendar, we handle the confirmation of Presidential nominees, and we handle treaty ratification, but that is it. That is the extent of our executive power. It would be unconstitutional for us to make a law and then also put ourselves in charge of executing that same law. That would put us in the position of the lawmakers in our mother country, who don't have separation of powers like we do. They are barbarians; that is why we left them. It is why we don't fly the Union Jack. It is why our dental care here is much better than it is there. It is why our food doesn't suck--because we left them a long time ago because we got tired of them and their hoity-toity butchering of the English language. But we got sick and tired of their lack of adequate separation of powers. So those guys are involved in the execution and implementation of the law. We are not. We can't be. So not only is he not making a good argument, he is making an argument that, taken to its logical conclusion, would be unconstitutional. All right. Mass purges. The senior Senator from Rhode Island, still engaging in his paroxysm of paranoid fantasy, theorizes that somehow the Trump administration--and I am trying to imagine the animated characters running around in his mind's eye as he is saying this. Like, who is it? Is it Steve Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, Stephen Miller? I don't know who it is, but these very Trumpy members of the executive branch who are friends of the President are just going to come in and say: We cancel all of your votes. Mass purges. Let's do this just to be mean. This is absolutely insane. That is not at all--there is nothing in the bill that would allow a mass purge of U.S. citizen lawful voters, and it is never ever going to happen. There was one interesting point that the senior Senator from Rhode Island made shortly after making the argument I just refuted where he said there are zero dollars appropriated for them under this legislation. That is true. Now, if the senior Senator from Rhode Island is suggesting that we could make the bill better by adding an appropriation, well, we can talk about that. I don't believe that is necessary. The reason I don't believe it is necessary is that we already have several legal regimes, several statutory frameworks through which there are Federal dollars already allocated to the States for their role in carrying out these responsibilities under laws like the NVRA and under laws like the Help America Vote Act. Now, if those are inadequate, which I don't think they are, but if they are, then let's have that conversation. By the way, before we get to our next flawed argument raised by the senior Senator from Rhode Island, I have to get back to the federalism argument. I left out a key point of it. In addition to the fact that the Democratic Party is about as into federalism as they are into kosher delis in Tehran--in addition to that, they themselves pushed a bill ironically called the For the People Act in the 117th Congress. Remember, this was that lovely time between January 3, 2021, until exactly noon on January 3, 2023, when the Democrats held the majorities in the House and the Senate and also held the White House. They pushed this bill called the For the People Act which purported to be drawing its authority from article I, section 4, clause 1. Now, not only were there lots, lots, and lots of executive branch Agencies-- like multiple executive branch Agencies and Departments--that were going to be empowered under that, thus eviscerating his own argument, but not one of them expressed a single reservation about that. In fact, every single Senate Democrat here at the time was fully supportive of the SAVE America Act. Not one of them ever, ever suggested they didn't have authority to do that. This article 1, section 4, clause 1 is a thing. Ironically--and we don't need to go too deep into this, but they actually pushed the envelope of article 1, section 4, clause 1 so far that I don't think that could have been upheld as constitutional. I mean, they trampled on all sorts of State sovereign authority matters that went far beyond the realm of just Federal elections. They would have subjected every voting jurisdiction in the United States--it would have rendered every voting jurisdiction in the United States a preclearance jurisdiction. Whether you had ever had a history of racial discrimination or not, if you wanted to change your voting precincts, your legislative district maps, whatever it was, you would have to go and seek a ``Mother May I'' from a political appointee in the Democratic Party at the Department of Justice. It is wildly unconstitutional. They would have changed all kinds of things like voter registration deadlines. It actually strips the State legislatures of their constitutionally derived power to draw congressional district boundaries. So, for them to argue federalism here, give me the biggest break. This makes absolutely no sense. He makes the argument that this bill, the SAVE America Act, is not about election security; it is about disenfranchisement. It is really cheap. It is a really low argument, especially because there is not a single word, not a single syllable, not a single letter in the bill that can justify that. I know that my friend and colleague from Rhode Island must not mean that. I don't know who wrote that speech for him or who told him he had to say that or whether he did it himself. Look, we are all entitled to a mulligan once in a while, and I will give him one here, but that is a doozy. There is literally no truth to it, and that is the hard part about arguments that have zero truth to them. It is that, when they have as little truth to it as that argument, it is kind of hard to refute it. You have to build it up in order to knock it down, and that is hard too. The next point that I needed to refute was really important, and this is where I am reminded of the limitations of my own handwriting. I can't read that one, so I am going to step forward to the next argument. In each instance, both the junior Senator from Rhode Island and the senior Senator from Rhode Island--this being Rhode Island day with the SAVE America Act--they both kept relying back on the fact that it is already illegal. Yes, it is. It is already illegal for a noncitizen to vote, but the fact that something is already illegal doesn't mean that it is self-executing, that it is self-implementing, that it is self- revealing. It is none of those things. Some things are; some things are not. This reminds me of an argument that I had to refute either yesterday or the day before. Somebody said--they compared it to laws governing the running of a stop sign. One of our Democrat colleagues said the other day, in a way that reminded me of what the two Senators from Rhode Island argued today, is that you don't have a law prohibiting people from running a stop sign at an intersection and then say: We now need another law prohibiting the running of a stop sign in a stop sign controlled intersection. They missed the whole point altogether. The way that you could make that argument fair and analogous here would be to say, if you had a law prohibiting the running of a stop sign and then you had another law or maybe the same law was interpreted oddly by some creatively thinking judges as prohibiting the police from monitoring or watching intersections guarded by a stop sign, then, yes, that would be a fair analogy, and, yes, then we would need another law saying: No, it is not illegal for the cops to watch that intersection. Another analogy here that I think is helpful just deals with another instance where you have got to prove who you are. I don't personally drink alcohol, but I know, nonetheless, the way this works is that whether you are a young person or an old, bald person like me, if you go into a liquor store or any other place where alcoholic beverages are sold, you are going to get carded. I know some people profess to being very flattered when they get carded because it makes them feel young when they do that, but my understanding is that you pretty much always have to show your ID when you go in there. They are just not going to take any ifs, ands, or buts. You have to show your ID. This is the same kind of comparison. If we didn't have that law that you had to show your ID when you bought alcohol, then it would be impossible not only to enforce but even to detect violations of laws saying that liquor stores can't sell booze to kids. That is why we have the ID requirement. You have got to establish who you are. Then there are some recordkeeping obligations that go along with that. So this is just really foolish to think for even a second that it is enough to say: It is already illegal. Back to our point earlier of: Oh, I know how we are going to save money. We are just going to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. Great. You can't just say: We are going to do this. Whenever you have a system of laws in place that are being broken, there is a grave risk that, by not enforcing those laws, you will cheapen the rule of law itself, not just the law that is being broken but the dynamic in which we as citizens, in a free Republic, choose voluntarily--most of us, mercifully--to abide by the law. We try to keep the law, and things work better when they do. When people break the law, there are generally consequences. When you live in an environment where the law is just disregarded and cast aside, bad things happen, but it gets infinitely worse--infinitely worse-- whenever, wherever. You not only say: We are going to just disregard it, but you put legal restrictions, legal impediments, in place so as to make it impossible not just to prosecute but even to detect where the laws are happening. Then, on top of that, it gets exponentially worse beyond that. Whereas, here, it is not just any law, but it is the law that determines who is going to make our other laws. This is upstream from everything else. It impacts the legitimacy of this government. It is what is standing between us and untold amounts of not just election fraud but foreign election interference. So we can't pretend that this is academic, that this is a frivolous concern. And I will not indulge for another minute the absurd suggestion that this is about President Trump and his administration wanting to just go in and disenfranchise an entire gender or an entire race or an entire political ideology or a set of party affiliations. Nothing in this law would authorize that. There would be hell to pay if anybody tried for it, and it is absurd to suggest that it is going to happen. But even worse than that absurdity is the absurdity that goes along with saying our elections will be fair and free of fraud when we have had 30 million people living in this country who are not citizens, about 15 million of whom entered the country unlawfully just in 4 of the last 5 years under the open border policies of the Biden administration, where we have got a law that allows anyone, even a noncitizen, to apply in most States--the overwhelming majority of States--just by going into a DMV, checking a box saying, ``I want to register to vote,'' and signing their name, saying, ``Don't worry about it. I am a citizen, and I am otherwise entitled to vote.'' When we tell our own fellow citizens that not only are we not going to enforce that law but that we are going to continue to make it impossible to detect and prosecute and punish violations of that law, heaven help us all. So, no, this is not about a party or a part of a country or this or that subgroup or demographic. This is about one thing; it is about citizenship. Yes, it is already against the law. So let's act like it. Let's allow for the law to be enforced. If we did the same thing with our drug laws, everybody would be taking drugs. It is almost like encouraging people to take drugs if you do it that way. But this is even worse than if you let our drug laws be unenforced, because this one determines who makes the laws. This one determines the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of our government. This, in effect, will disenfranchise Americans who will have their votes diluted and canceled out if we allow persons who are not citizens to vote. We can get this done, and we will get this done. I was here yesterday and the day before that and the day before that and the day before that and the day before that, and I will be here every day until this is passed. I will not stop, and I know the Presiding Officer won't stop either. We are going to stay on this legislation. We will continue to debate. We will debate in the rain on a train, in a box with a fox-- anywhere, everywhere. We will debate this thing, and we will make them speak until they are tired. We will make them speak until every one of their arguments, frivolous or legitimate--I have yet to hear any of the latter, but you know, it could happen--have all been exhausted, and then we will win. At some point, we will move away from the frivolity. At some point, we will stop making arguments rooted in science fiction, paranoid fantasy and move on to what the bill actually says. That is what happens when we are exhausted. That is what happens when people have to actually stand and speak and articulate their concerns with the bill. Sooner or later, you start being able to separate fact from fiction, from paranoid fantasy. And, at that point, that is where the magic happens. We can start to look for where the real points of contact are. If there are amendments to make to this thing, let's make them. Let's make it work as well as possible, but let's get it done. We are not going to quit. We have promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep. We will not sleep until this is done. I yield the floor.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Will the gentleman yield for a question?

Mr. LEE. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Would the gentleman yield for a question?

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. It surprises me in the sense that it seems phenomenally unwise. It would have surprised me earlier in my lifetime. It would have surprised me even earlier in my time here in the U.S. Senate; yet something has happened in recent years that has eroded this longstanding, long-accepted assumption that only citizens vote in our elections. I am not aware of any other country--certainly not any other country that any of us would want to live in, but probably not any other country that we wouldn't want to live in either--that would want to have or that would allow to have noncitizens vote in their elections because an election isn't much of an election if anyone can vote and you don't keep track of who is voting and you don't keep track of whether there are duplicative votes, especially as to what we are focused on here--persons voting who have no right to vote who, by voting, would not only be committing a serious felony offense but, by voting, would also be diluting the votes cast by lawful voters, by actual citizens of that country. There has been a trend more in one party than the other, and you can guess which one. There has been a trend where people say, let's just let everyone vote, and toward thinking of a lot of things like this, like noncitizens voting in elections as being something of a victimless crime or perhaps, at a minimum, as sort of the required cost of doing business. Remember how I said a moment ago how our mantra has been and should continue to be: Let's make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. The Democratic Party has, in recent years, leaned so heavily on ``let's make it easy to vote'' that they often forget or, in some cases defiantly refuse, to finish the sentence. I am talking about hard to cheat. Now, I understand the point. I understand that, perhaps, they are so enthusiastic to just make sure that everyone votes that maybe they don't care that some noncitizens might vote. I think this is very unwise, and it becomes especially untenable--especially indefensible-- when we now have an estimated 30 million-plus noncitizens residing in the United States, 10 to 15 million of whom entered this country illegally between 2021 and 2025 alone. So, yes, that is shocking in some ways that a Democratic lawmaker in a State not too far from where we now stand actually introduced legislation trying to open up the franchise like that because when you do that, that is not a victimless moment. If you were to create that, you would be diluting the votes of lawful citizens. But, again, a State may do that if that State's laws and that State's Constitution allow it. It would be unwise. Nonetheless, by doing that, whenever a State does that, whether for statewide State elections or just for local elections within that State, it creates a problem. It creates what I would think of as more or less a clear and present threat, one that, unless acted upon, will culminate in widespread violation of the law. As I was describing a few minutes ago, for those handful of States that have expressly allowed noncitizen voting in some of their local elections, that means individuals have registered to vote who are not citizens. Once they have registered to vote, they are registered voters. What is to stop them from showing up and saying: ``I am a registered voter, and I would like to vote on election day,'' and they receive a ballot? And the way ballots in most States work, there is a ballot that has Federal elections and State elections and local elections all on the same ballot, the same document or sequence of documents. So when the questions have been asked of those jurisdictions: What, if anything, are you doing to separate out those voter registration files from those voters who are noncitizens but, nonetheless, allowed to vote in local elections in your State, what are you doing to prevent them from voting in Federal elections? Silence has been a response. A refusal to cooperate has been the response. That is chilling. All right. Let's get back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago. They have been making a series of arguments against the citizenship obligation, the citizenship-related provisions of the SAVE America Act. And to repeat, we have made it really easy, far easier than the citizenship documentation requirements associated with new employment. If you are an American citizen and you have ever started a new job anywhere in the United States, you have had to fill out an I-9 form, and with that, you had to comply with a very rigid, specific set of document obligations. You had to establish either a U.S. passport, one that establishes your citizenship as an American citizen, or, alternatively, a U.S. birth certificate and government-issued photo ID or original Social Security card. If you can't do that, you are not going to start your job unless or until you have been able to complete that. Again, we made it a lot easier, very deliberately, to comply with the SAVE America Act. We have a list of other documents that are widely known and recognized by the U.S. Government as establishing citizenship, including a certain subcategory of driver's licenses that, in some States, these enhanced driver's licenses will affirmatively establish citizenship based on the documentation that was required at the time the driver's license was received. We included those. But we also included this provision that makes it really easy for someone who has no documentation at all, is missing some documentation or even all of it. They can do so by an affidavit, an attestation just providing the basic details about how they became a citizen: when and where they were born; whether they were citizens at the time of their birth; and if they weren't citizens at the time of their birth, when and where and how, by what mechanism, they became naturalized citizens. From the moment you do that, you shift the burden onto the State, and it is then the State's job to go and confirm or refute what you have done. Now, if you were lying, they will figure that out. You won't be registered, and you may end up getting in trouble for having lied under oath with that statement. I assume most people wouldn't do that; very few would knowing it is a sworn statement. But if they don't conclude that it is false and conclude that it is true--it would be pretty easy to confirm once you have provided the names, the dates, locations--then you will be registered to vote. No additional documents, in fact, not a single document has to be produced by you, just that basic set of statements. Again, that begins on line 22, page 12, of the legislation we are now debating. And yet over and over and over again I hear from my Democratic colleagues that are arguing against this how this is going to disenfranchise anyone who doesn't have a passport--as many Americans don't--and a passport costs a couple hundred dollars. And they then often make the logical leap, well, this means you are imposing a poll tax, something that has been prohibited by the U.S. Constitution for over 60 years. This simply is not true. There is not a poll tax. There is not a single expense. This doesn't disenfranchise anyone, even if you don't have any documents. And it is far more permissive than what you have to produce every single time you start a new job in the United States of America as a U.S. citizen. Here is another argument that is frequently being raised against the SAVE America Act. This is a fairly broad argument. It is a surprising argument for reasons I am about to explain. The Democrats are waving the flag of federalism, purporting to be the champions--the newly invigorated champions--of State sovereign authority, of the authority of the States within our Federal system. That is what I refer to when I mean ``federalism.'' I am referring to the 10th Amendment, the broad concept of federalism, the idea that Federal Government is as James Madison described in Federalist No. 45, a government with powers that Madison described as ``few and defined.'' And those powers reserved to the States he described as ``numerous and indefinite.'' My Democrat colleagues, each time they bring this up, they use the same term. It is an awkward term. It is an outdated term. It is a misnomer, in my opinion. I don't like it. It is ``States' rights.'' This is a term that conjures images of George Wallace in the Deep South, the Jim Crow South. The Jim Crow policies that the Democratic Party, at the time, insisted upon--racist, oppressive, hateful policies designed to disadvantage Black Americans and to exclude them from many aspects of society, public life, and private life--indefensible. They would often invoke this doctrine of States' rights, which was then and remains now a misnomer because States do not have rights; States have authority. Authority is kind of the opposite of a right. A right, in this context, is something that is a privilege, a protection against authority being misused against you. So they are kind of the yin and the yang. They are polar opposites of each other. They are not the same thing. All right. I got that out of my chest. Now let's move on to the substance of this. We will call this federalism or State sovereign authority. They purport now to be champions of State sovereign authority. This is really interesting. They say that the SAVE America Act--this very straightforward bill that just requires proof of citizenship at the time of voter registration and photo ID at the time you cast a ballot to prove that you are who you claim to be, the same person identified in your voter registration file--they claim that this is somehow incompatible with constitutional principles of federalism; that it is somehow unconstitutional as a Federal takeover of State authority to conduct elections. Now, this argument would be laughable if it weren't so frightening and, frankly, hypocritical. Remember that, in the first place, article I, section 4, clause 1, of the Constitution couldn't be clearer on this point. I don't know how any of these people could even make this argument with a straight face for this reason alone, let alone for the other reasons I am about to identify. But article I, section 4, clause 1 of the Constitution makes a couple things clear. First, they acknowledge--wisely, I believe--that elections would be conducted by States. They didn't want to set up a Federal election authority. It would be cumbersome. It would be unnecessary. It would be unwise--too much consolidation of power, especially because this was always supposed to be a government of limited and enumerated powers. So they said that not only for State elections, which, obviously, State authorities would manage, but also for the election of Federal officials, specifically election of U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives--Members of Congress. Their elections would also be run by State officials. They said that the legislatures of the respective States would have authority to establish the rules and regulations governing those elections, which they themselves would conduct. But my Democrat colleagues conveniently leave out the following phrase in the same provision, in article I, section 4, clause 1, of the Constitution; that phrase being ``but the Congress may at any time . . . make or alter such Regulations,'' meaning those regulations, those rules and regulations governing specifically the State-run elections to choose U.S. Representatives and U.S. Senators. It could not be clearer. So that is all this is. We are using our authority--our very specific, very clear authority--to prescribe those rules and regulations. It is not just in the abstract that this makes sense, not just in that technical, grammatical sense that we have that authority, and that is what we are exercising here. This is exactly the kind of thing that should be--and I believe must be, perhaps can only be--wielded by the Federal sovereign, not by State governments because what we are doing here is to establish citizenship. Remember, we do have the power to say this, and we have, in fact, enacted laws saying that only U.S. citizens may vote. To give meaning to that, to render it enforceable, we have the power to ensure that that law is being complied with. And the U.S. Government is also uniquely in a position to be able to ascertain who may be a citizen and who is not a citizen. No single State is going to be able to ascertain that question, nor is U.S. citizenship itself a creature of State law, as it is of Federal law. It is exactly the reason why we have various government Agencies that are involved in this, and they are managed, more or less, through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which, among other things, runs this database that already exists called the SAVE database that is created for, in addition to whatever else it may cover, this very sort of thing, so that States sharing information with the U.S. Government may cross-tabulate, cross-check, their voter registration files against U.S. citizenship data, uniquely in the hands of the U.S. Government, and easily ascertain who is a citizen and who is not. That is an especially important thing to have, especially considering the fact that we had between 10 to 15 million people come into this country unlawfully just in a 4-year period alone--separate and apart from those who may have already been here, just between 2021 and 2025--10 to 15 million people entering this country unlawfully. And there are an estimated 30 million-plus noncitizens residing in this country in almost every State. Given that almost every State participates in the NVRA, in almost every State, any of those noncitizens--whether they are here legally or illegally--in light of the Supreme Court's ruling in 2013 in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, any one of those people in any NVRA State--which is almost every State of the Union--can go into a DMV, apply for a driver's license, and by checking one box and then signing their name, they may register to vote. So it is really important that we have that ability to do that. This information is uniquely in the hands of the U.S. Government, which is uniquely in a position to define and manage what it means to be a citizen and keep track of who is a citizen and who is not. And yet these blue States continue, defiantly, to refuse to share information. They are actively subverting our ability not only to enforce Federal law but to even know when a violation has taken place or is taking place, and so that is stunning. That is what makes it all the more indefensible for them to oppose this and all the more laughable that they purport to be invoking the doctrine of federalism. They purport to be invoking the 10th Amendment, to be wrapping themselves in the Constitution by saying: This is an outrage; this is a Federal takeover of a State function. No, it is not. It is doubly and triply not a State function. It is a distinctly, decidedly, by designation of the U.S. Constitution, a Federal function. Now, for the reasons why this is not just a laughable argument but it is also hypocritical, just a few years ago, many of the very same Democrats who now occupy this Chamber--in fact, nearly all of them were there at the time--and every single Democrat serving in the United States during the 117th Congress--that is the Congress empaneled on January 3, 2021, serving through January 3, 2023. Remember, that was a moment when the House and the Senate and the White House were all controlled by Democrats. Every single Democrat in the U.S. Senate at that time--which are most of the Democrats who are still here--but every one of them that were here then tried to pass and supported a bill designated in the 117th Congress as H.R. 1, the so-called For the People Act, perhaps the most aggressive, intrusive, and independently aggressively overreaching Federal power grab over elections in American history. Now, that bill was not a modest reform. Unlike the SAVE America Act, it was not there as an exercise of our very clear and very narrow power under article I, section 4, clause 1; nor was it, as the SAVE America Act is, a natural outgrowth of an existing Federal law--the NVRA--nor was it necessitated by a quirk in the judicial interpretation of an existing Federal law--the NVRA--as this is. Remember, that is the only reason we are even here. That is the only reason the SAVE America Act even became necessary, is because of the NVRA and existing Federal law itself imposes obligations on States based on the way it was later interpreted after its enactment. So, in other words, I say to my Democratic colleagues: If you are offended by the SAVE America Act as a supposed Federal overreach, not only is that indefensible as a matter of Federal constitutional law-- either the plain text of the Constitution or any Supreme Court interpretation thereof--but it also presupposes that if you are opposed to this, that you also think the NVRA is itself an unconstitutional Federal takeover of State election authority. Now, if you think that, then we are going to have a very different discussion. But to my knowledge, not one of them has suggested or argued that the NVRA is unconstitutional; and if it is not, there is not a chance in hell that you can make the argument that the SAVE America Act is unconstitutional--not a chance. Back to the For the People Act, H.R. 1 in the 117th Congress, it was an 800-page monstrosity, a blueprint for nationalizing every meaningful aspect of how States run Federal elections--that is, elections for Federal office--most importantly, elections for U.S. Senate and the U.S. House. And Democrats defended it by citing the exact same constitutional authority that they now pretend doesn't exist. That is Congress' power under the elections clause to set uniform rules for Federal contests. Now, let's recall a little bit about what H.R. 1 actually did--I should say what it would have done had it been enacted. Mercifully for all of us, it wasn't. Let's talk about what it did. It didn't just suggest a few changes. It didn't just suggest some curative protections to existing Federal legislation. No, this is an entirely different beast--and beastly, it was. It imposed binding nationwide mandates with Federal court enforcement on matters of sweepingly, stunningly broad application. Among other things, it forced automatic voter registration at every government interaction, overriding State processes, overriding State law. It mandated same-day voter registration everywhere. This is a big issue because States have a broad range of when they deem it appropriate to begin or end--especially end--voter registration prior to any election. Many States consider it reckless and an invitation--a recipe for voter fraud if they allow same-day voter registration. Other States don't. You know, that has long been considered their prerogative to decide, but this would just have decided it for the entire country. It would have required no-excuse absentee voting and minimum periods of early voting no matter what State law said. If some States wanted and previously had always had much more limited pre-election-day voting periods or none at all, it wouldn't matter. It completely eviscerated their authority to make such decisions. It would have stripped State legislatures of their traditional role-- not just their traditional role, but their constitutional role--a role acknowledged in the U.S. Constitution itself and in the respective State constitutions--in drawing legislative district maps, specifically those mentioned in the U.S. Constitution--the congressional maps; and it would have done that by forcing the so-called independent redirecting commissions, taking away the authority that has always belonged to the States and to the State legislatures--as the Constitution--as designed, as the Constitution contemplates and ordains--and forced them to adopt these independent redirecting commissions whether they wanted to or not. It would have severely restricted how States could maintain accurate voter rolls, banning removals based solely on failure to vote, limiting interstate cross-checks, and imposing cumbersome requirements before any cleanup of voter registration files. As if that weren't enough of an insult to federalism, to State sovereign authority, to good government, local self-rule, or any of the other things that we hold dear in our constitutional system, H.R. 1 went even further than that. It would have legalized unlimited ballot harvesting by third parties. It would have barred States from requiring witness signatures or notarization on mail-in ballots and forced them to count ballots received up to 10 days after election day. Now, any of those things in isolation is a powder keg, is a huge, huge policy decision. Efforts to change anything like that in State law in any State legislature would end up being a very significant debate, but this just bulldozed all of it. Particularly, when it comes to ballot harvesting--this is troubling. Ballot harvesting, when coupled with the existence of widespread, universal mail-in ballots, allows for a special kind of mischief, which fortunately is thwarted in many States, like my own, that prohibit ballot harvesting. And where it exists, it causes a massive risk of voter fraud; and yet this would have prohibited the States from banning it--every State. It would have weakened voter ID laws by allowing sworn statements in lieu of actual identification, even if State law would itself have required something more. It would have overridden State felony disenfranchisement rules, gotten rid of bans imposed by States on people voting based on a felony conviction--that, too, has long been considered the unique province of the States. This bulldozed over that. And they would have mandated out-of-precinct ballot counting, preregistered 16- and 17-year-olds to vote, dictated rigid redistricting criteria, banned mid-decade map drawing, and imposed Federal standards for polling equipment, drop boxes, curbside voting, and much, much more. State election officials were even subjected to new Federal restrictions themselves. There were also provisions in there that, as I recall, would have forced every voting jurisdiction, every precinct--local, statewide, or otherwise--to become the effective equivalent of a section 5 preclearance jurisdiction. Let me explain what that means. Under the Voting Rights Act, there are a limited number of voting jurisdictions in the United States with a history of racial discrimination. Those States, under the Voting Rights Act--or those jurisdictions, once they were deemed to have engaged in this, they had to subject changes to their legislative districts to some preclearance requirements, meaning before they could take effect, some Federal officials would have to approve them. This would have taken every jurisdiction of the United States--in the North, in the South, in the East, in the West--regardless of whether they had any tradition, any history at all of any kind of racial or other discrimination and said: All of you, before you make any changes to your district boundaries, whatever, you have got to come to Washington, DC, and receive a ``Mother May I'' permission slip from Uncle Sam. These were not just incentives. These were not just slight modifications. These were commands steamrolling over policies that have long been deemed the province of the States. Now, every Democrat in the U.S. Senate at the time justified every one of them by arguing that Congress could ``provide a complete code for congressional elections,'' thus superseding State law. And they were right in one respect, that at least one provision of the Constitution--article I, section 4, clause 1--gives Congress some power, but they were dead wrong about the wisdom, the legality, the constitutionality of using legislative reforms like that one to turn States and localities into nothing more than administrative subdivisions of the Federal Government subject entirely to the will and the whim of the Federal sovereign. Compared to all of that, the SAVE America Act is the precise opposite of that kind of overreach. It doesn't touch early voting. It doesn't touch ballot deadlines, redistricting, or campaign finance. It doesn't render any district subject--doesn't make any voting district or precinct or State--much less all of them--a preclearance jurisdiction. It doesn't force States to adopt same-day voter registration or independent redirecting commissions, contrary to State constitutions and the U.S. Constitution. It simply enforces what has been Federal law for decades--most importantly, the Federal law that has been on the book for decades and says that only U.S. citizens may vote in Federal elections. It requires basic documentary proof of citizenship at the time of registration with reasonable, very flexible, affordable--and, in fact, free--alternatives to those documentary requirements and a photo ID at the polls, the bare minimum commonsense demands that we make after years of open borders. It even helps States clean up their rolls by directing data sharing with the Department of Homeland Security. If Congress could constitutionally force every State to count out-of- precinct ballots and legalize unlimited ballot harvesting under H.R. 1, it can certainly require proof that voters are actually Americans. Now, of course, it can't do the former. H.R. 1 was blatantly unconstitutional for a whole host of reasons, not to mention its many policy defects. But my point is this: Every Democrat in the U.S. Senate saw no problem--no problem at all--with the constitutionality of H.R. 1. This is the equivalent of straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel. In fact, that comparison is almost an understatement. The difference isn't just in the magnitude, isn't just constitutional; it is also political. (Mr. JOHNSON assumed the Chair.) Democrats cheered Federal preemption when it was sweeping; when it expanded access and, in their view, as they saw it, their voter base; when they saw it as consistent with their own political interests; when they saw it as a chance to secure significant gains in elections. They screamed federalism--or, as they put it, States' rights--the moment the focus shifts to election eligibility and integrity. And they scream it even where, as here, this is plainly well within what the Federal Government is authorized to do and plainly within the same statutory context that already exists, that has existed for decades, and that not one of my Democrat colleagues has called on us to repeal. If the SAVE America Act is somehow unconstitutional as a Federal overreach, then the NVRA is a far worse infraction, and yet you don't hear them saying that because it is not true. This is selective federalism of the very worst kind. The same crowd that tried to nationalize American elections--truly nationalize them--is now engaging in this aggressive pearl-clutching exercise about State authority the instant we try to stop noncitizens from diluting the votes of actual citizens. And, make no mistake, that is what is happening. That is what happens every time a noncitizen casts a vote. This is not a victimless crime. This is not a harmless infraction. This is not the voting equivalent of removing, however recklessly and wantonly and willfully, the ``Do Not Remove'' tags from a mattress. The same crowd that tried to nationalize American elections is now engaging in this awful pearl-clutching about State authority the instant, the second, the millisecond we try to stop noncitizens from diluting the votes of actual American citizens. And the American people aren't buying this, nor should they. Look, the Constitution does not recognize any political parties, and not only that, it certainly doesn't allow one party to federalize elections when it happens to help them and then invoke federalism as a shield when they are about to be held accountable, when people are about to be held accountable, when State officials are about to be held accountable for facilitating the wanton violation of Federal law. So no--no--the SAVE America Act does not violate federalism. It vindicates the sovereign authority of the American people, the true sovereigns of our system, to choose their own government, and it does so with far, far more restraint than Democrats ever showed when the shoe was on the other foot, when they were pushing an 800-page monstrosity that was itself an indefensible Federal takeover of State authority. Congress should pass the SAVE America Act without apology. This hypocrisy has gone on long enough. Their constitutional arguments here do not hold water--not at all, not for an instant. You know, it is interesting that, as we stand here today, the Department of Homeland Security has gone unfunded, thanks to Senate Democrats, for over a month. They have been going without pay. How tragic that is that these individuals, who are working hard--they are having to work hard. They are not wealthy people. If you think of everyone from TSA agents to ICE agents and everybody else in the Department of Homeland Security continuing to have to work, these are not wealthy people. And there are so many of them who, in addition to not being paid, still have to work and have to work doing really hard jobs, sometimes risky jobs. This is not fair. Then what is the parallel between the two? Well, I find it interesting that the same Department that has now been unfunded is the same Department that, among other things, oversees the SAVE database and the offices, the Agencies within the Department of Homeland Security that exist to help ensure election integrity and security, that are there to help States to review their voter registration files and identify those who are not citizens and thus shouldn't be voting. Those same offices, those same personnel themselves remain defunded. During this discussion this afternoon, the Senator from Maryland was speaking about some of these incidents. Even though these things appear to be unrelated--on the one hand, the SAVE America Act and its merits which we have been debating, and on the other hand, funding for the Department of Homeland Security--I sometimes think that they are not very unrelated at all, especially because they are defunding the very entity that could and otherwise would and should--and if we were able to enact the SAVE America Act, ultimately would--help protect our elections, to make sure that they are secure, to make sure that they are free from foreign election interference, which is exactly what happens when we allow foreign nationals, not citizens of the United States, to vote in our elections. She referred to ICE agents, to ICE as a whole, as a ``goon'' squad. She accused ICE of being out there, deployed, and killing people. This is sad. This is tragic. (Mr. MARSHALL assumed the Chair.) Now, keep in mind there are about 22,000 ICE agents. A subset of those--about 6,000 of them--are responsible for apprehending and removing those removable illegal aliens that are in the country, so about 6,000 out of the 22,000. Then it is a much lower subset of the 6,000 that she might be referring to when she accuses ICE, a much broader Agency, of killing people and being a ``goon'' squad. How many of those people were actually involved in any of the activity she has complained about? I don't know the answer, but it is not 6,000. It sure as hell isn't 22,000, and it sure as hell isn't 260,000. That is the total number of employees going unpaid within the Department of Homeland Security. So this is collective punishment at its worst, at its most indefensible. She and her Democrat colleagues stand here today, continue over a month into this shutdown--not concerned, blaming the collective for what she is complaining about with just a few, before investigations are even complete and before we know where, when, to what extent wrongdoing on the part of any agents might have been involved. This is wrong. It is not just wrong, but I sometimes wonder, is this, in fact, a willful attempt to subvert the enforcement of our laws--not just our immigration laws but also our laws that govern our elections, that protect our elections from foreign election interference? As they say in Latin, ``res ipsa loquitur''--the thing speaks for itself. Before I wrap up, I want to thank our Republican leadership in the Senate. I want to thank my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from Wyoming who serves as the Republican whip, and I want to thank my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from South Dakota, the majority leader, Senator John Thune, for their leadership. I want to thank them for keeping us here through this weekend to keep us debating these matters. We have no business going home--not for a weekend, not for a recess. We have no business going home until this is done. We have to get DHS funded. We have to get the SAVE America Act passed. And yes, they are related. For the very same reason we need one, we also need the other. And for this very same reason that they oppose one, they oppose the other. But the fact is, the American people are not with them; they are with us. The American people understand that it is not fair to punish the collective for what may or may not be the wrongdoing of just a few. The American people understand that it is not an act of aggression, certainly not an unconstitutional overreach, certainly not an egregious abuse of power, or anything other than common sense to require people who vote in U.S. elections to be American citizens and to end this barbaric practice to which we have been subjected for far too long and which we are told: Yeah, it is illegal for noncitizens to vote, but you can't do anything about it. They have rendered it unenforceable. We are trying to fix that with a narrowly tailored piece of legislation. Now, if one of them--even one of them--wants to talk about changes that we could make that would make them feel better about it, I am all ears. I have been listening to that for 3 days now--and longer than that, before we got on it. But since we got onto this bill about 3 days ago, I have been listening especially attentively for anyone to make a constructive suggestion from the other side or even an argument that is itself defensible in light of what the SAVE America Act actually does, in light of what Federal law actually says, and in light of what the U.S. Constitution actually allows, authorizes, and says, and I have yet to hear it. Sometimes I wonder what it is that they actually want. Do they actually want our borders to remain open, as they were between 2021 and 2025? Do they, beyond this, actually want noncitizens to continue to be able to vote, even when we know that in some States they are openly allowing or even inviting noncitizens to participate in some local elections, even when they know that there are thousands upon thousands of noncitizen registered voters that have been detected just in the small handful of States that have, on their own, undertaken a review to see who is registered? They have found thousands, and that process is far from complete yet. How many more are there? How long are the American people to be expected to suffer through a system that invites, allows, and perpetuates forces that will undeniably dilute and, by diluting, ultimately deprive them of one of their most sacred rights--their right to vote? Finally, when we talk about constitutional protections of rights, my colleagues say again and again and again that because their right to vote is constitutionally protected--and it is, by multiple amendments, in multiple ways, by the Constitution--that that somehow means that you can't put any reasonable restrictions on it. Well, that is not true. That has never been true. We do have restrictions on them all the time. We also have restrictions on a lot of other constitutionally protected rights, and that doesn't mean that you don't have to prove who you are and that you have the right to do the thing you want to be able to do. We already have to prove our citizenship every time we start a new job with the document requirements that are far more strict than those are here. We already have to divulge all kinds of information that is far more intrusive than anything required here. In fact, on the subject of specifically constitutionally protected rights, the right to bear arms--do you know what you have to do when you want to buy a gun through a federally licensed firearms dealer? You have to provide ID, and you have to show that you are who you say you are. Then they run it through a database to make sure that, in addition to being who you say you are, that you also have the right to exercise the constitutionally protected right that you want to exercise by buying that gun. It is the same exact thing. It is also a constitutionally protected right. And yet we allow it why? Well, because we have laws, and those laws decide how that right may be exercised, and we ban certain persons from wielding that right. For example, if you are an alien illegally or unlawfully present in the United States or you are a convicted felon or you fit into any of the other categories in 18 U.S.C. section 922(g), you are not allowed to purchase, possess, use, or probably even think about a gun. You will be prohibited from doing so. They are apparently OK with that. If they are OK with that--and that is a constitutionally protected right--why aren't they OK with this, when here, when somebody else exercises that right, they are undermining your vote, my vote, the vote of every American citizen? We cannot allow that to happen. I will continue to come back to the Senate Chamber every day--day after day, week after week, month after month--if that is what it takes to get this thing passed, but it will pass. We will not stop until it does.

Mr. LEE. I will yield for a question.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, thank you to my friend and colleague the Senator from Kansas for his observations. It is often helpful to have the diagnosis of an actual medical doctor when prescribing a problem. We have an illness within our election system. Our elections have been rendered infirm or at least very insecure by some of these features that I noted just a few minutes ago, including the fact that the 1993 NVRA, as passed by Congress, has been interpreted the wrong way--but conclusively--by the Supreme Court as prohibiting the States from taking any voter registration file that comes through the NVRA, meaning an application for a driver's license made at a DMV in which the applicant checks a box and signs their name, saying: Yes, I would like to also register to vote with my driver's license application, and I certify with my signature that I am, in fact, a U.S. citizen. Once that is done, there can be no further inquiry according to the Supreme Court's incorrect but conclusive ruling in this 2013 case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. And that, in short, is why we are where we are today. It is most of the reason why we need the SAVE America Act. It is because they said that the State cannot require--even where citizenship is believed to be lacking on the part of one or more applicants, as long as they have used the NVRA form at a DMV, the State can't do anything to follow up on it. As I was noting a minute ago, some of these States do nothing themselves to follow up on the question of citizenship, and many of them--most of the blue States--have refused to share data with the folks at the Department of Homeland Security who run the SAVE database, which is designed to help weed out those who have been incorrectly, fraudulently, mistakenly, or otherwise placed in a voter registration file. Again, if a State wants to allow noncitizens to vote in State elections, they may do so, and some States have allowed that in the context of some of their local elections as has the District of Columbia. I still know of no reason why they would want to do that, but they may do so if their own laws allow it because the Federal Constitution and Federal law doesn't prohibit them from doing so.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I appreciate the insights and enthusiasm offered by my friend and distinguished colleague the Senator from Maryland. I appreciate the right of every Senator to express his or her opinions, his or her thoughtful analysis in the legislative Chamber that we occupy. This is part of what it means to be Americans, and it is a big part of what it means to be a U.S. Senator, to have the privilege to stand here and debate matters that are important to the American people, important to the ongoing health and vitality not only of our elections but also of our system of government, our Constitution, and the ideals embodied in our other great founding document, the Declaration of Independence, whose birthday we are about to celebrate in a few months. Documents don't enjoy the 250th anniversary of their writing very often, but we are about to celebrate that. And on the same day, we will celebrate both the birthday of that document and with it the birthday of our country because that document ushered in the existence of the United States of America as a separate and independent sovereign country. One of the many features of that country from the very day it was created nearly 250 years ago is the concept of popular sovereignty. Now, it is probably too many syllables for most folks to want to use it in one sentence, but of course we all understand that popular sovereignty--well, it sounds like a fancy term--refers to a very simple thing. In this country, the government, the country itself, consists of the people. Those who have the right--the divine right--to govern are the people themselves, the citizens themselves. That, from day one, has been the concept. That was different than things were in our mother country. In our mother country, we didn't have--we had elements of popular sovereignty that had evolved over the years, but it was very different than it is here. For that to mean something, we do have to protect the right to vote. And for the right to vote to mean anything, you also have to have fair and free elections. Now, when we have elections, we have a common understanding that I don't think anyone here disagrees with or at least wouldn't articulate their disagreement in public. There is a very widespread agreement that those who vote need to meet the legal requirements to vote. And one of the most fundamental laws that we have is that in order to vote in U.S. elections, you have to be a U.S. citizen. To my knowledge, this has never been controversial in the United States of America. And in fact, it is not controversial to this day, even in this Chamber. I think every one of us here, if asked, would agree: Yes, only U.S. citizens should vote in U.S. elections. It is against the law to do otherwise, and in fact, if someone casts a vote in a U.S. election who is not a U.S. citizen, he or she has committed a pretty grave felony offense against the United States. So the question then becomes: If that is such a key element to who we are as a people, to the functioning of our government, to the concept of popular sovereignty that has been embodied in our system of government--first in the Declaration of Independence, later in the Constitution, and in our laws ever since then--then what do we have to do to protect that if it plays such an important role as it does? Well, there is this old expression that if everyone is family, no one is. There is a corollary to that: If everything is urgent, nothing is. When you apply a label too broadly, the label itself loses meaning. When you grant too many people the privileges, the incidents of citizenship--when those granted it include people who are noncitizens, then that is making everyone family, even if they are actually not. That, in turn, erodes what it means to be an American. It dilutes each lawful vote cast by an actual U.S. citizen. Now, we just heard a laundry list of complaints, very, very similar to the laundry list of complaints that we have heard over the last 36, 48 hours--I guess, we are going on 72 hours since we turned to this bill just a few days ago. Almost every argument we have heard against this from across the aisle has included some of these same elements, and we heard some more of those today from my friend and distinguished colleague the Senator from Maryland. Among those arguments that she made today just a few moments ago had to do with--there were some arguments that had to do with the fact that this bill, as she described it, would somehow take away the rights of some American citizens to vote and that it would result in disenfranchising American citizens. I wish to state at the outset, emphatically, that this is not true. This was neither the intention of the SAVE America Act nor would it be the effect of the SAVE America Act. This legislation, once it becomes law, will not disenfranchise a single American citizen, not a single one. The only people who will be prevented from voting are those who are not citizens, those who are not allowed to vote in our system of government, and those who, by voting, if they were to vote, would be committing a very serious Federal felony criminal offense and with good reason. So we have to be clear about what this does. This does not achieve, as she put it, erect barriers--barriers that would stop U.S. citizens from voting. Remember what this does. We have the twin objectives that are upstream from everything that we are doing. We want to make it easy to vote, and we want to make it hard to cheat. To do that, we have two principal elements in the SAVE America Act. The first element would require voters to bring a government-issued photo ID with them to the polling place on the day of voting to show who they are, to demonstrate that they are who they claim to be and that they are the same person referenced in their voter registration file. That is important for a number of reasons, including the fact that you don't want somebody voting in somebody else's name, and you certainly don't want somebody voting who is not supposed to be voting at all. There are some people in the United States who might be citizens who are prohibited from voting for reasons having to do with criminal convictions, for example, or those who have renounced their U.S. citizenship. You wouldn't want that to happen. You wouldn't want a noncitizen voting, and you wouldn't want one person who might be a citizen with voting rights voting in somebody else's name--perhaps in an effort to cast multiple votes in the same election by impersonating another or otherwise. So that is a very simple principle. That feature of the bill--having to bring a government-issued photo ID to the polling location on the day of voting to show that they are who they claim to be--is not controversial. It is certainly not controversial among the American people--not among Democrats, not among Republicans, not among members of any ethnic group, racial minority, gender, any part of the country. This is noncontroversial throughout the United States. It is apparently even noncontroversial in this Chamber, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican. Over the last few days, we have heard Democrat after Democrat--perhaps not all of them but many of them-- including the minority leader himself, indicate that they are just fine with voter ID requirements. Yet last night, when the junior Senator from Ohio attempted to pass by unanimous consent a provision limited to the voter ID requirements of the SAVE America Act, it drew an objection from the Democrats. Now, when that objection was raised, the argument that I heard, that I recall, didn't have anything to do with objections to voter ID; they had to do with other things elsewhere in the SAVE America Act. The second component of the SAVE America Act, of course, is a requirement that at the time a voter newly registers to vote, he or she must establish that he or she is a citizen of the United States. An important point to remember here is that no one will be required to reregister. If you are already registered to vote in the United States, you don't have to go back and do it again unless and until you have some event that requires you to register again. Let's suppose, for example, that you move from California to Utah. Well, then, yeah, you would need to reregister in your new place of residence. But nobody who is currently registered to vote would have to reregister unless or until they move or until something else might require registration, and nothing in this bill would require that. So let's keep that in mind. There are a number of arguments that keep being raised, primarily about the proof of citizenship requirements within the SAVE America Act. I would note here that in the citizenship component of the SAVE America Act, there are two basic components within that. One component deals with the obligation of the registering voter at the time of voter registration, and the other imposes obligations on State governments to coordinate and share information and data with the Federal Government as they undertake regular reviews of State voter registration files just to make sure that people who are registered to vote are, in fact, U.S. citizens. Why is that necessary? Well, currently there are a whole lot of States--and they tend to be States that might colloquially be described as blue, meaning that they are run by Democratic Governors and/or have Democratic-dominated State legislatures--that are refusing to cooperate, to coordinate, to share data with the Department of Homeland Security and the entities within the Department of Homeland Security responsible for maintaining the SAVE database--an already existing database designed to help identify issues like this--like noncitizens who may have crept into voter registration files--and get rid of them. But with all those blue States refusing to cooperate, to coordinate, to enter into a memorandum of understanding pertaining to the sharing of information, of data, it is a really vexing problem because it raises all kinds of concerns. How are we supposed to know when the law is violated, when a noncitizen has registered to vote, if the Federal Government, which is ultimately the piece within our government system that has the records and the ability to ascertain citizenship--how are you ever going to expect that we can ensure that our laws prohibiting noncitizen voting in U.S. elections are being complied with? Now, a few minutes ago, my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from New Mexico made an argument on this point. He made a parallel reference by analogy to what might happen if somebody were saying ``We don't need additional laws confirming that it is against the law to run a stop sign if it is already against the law'' and saying that this is akin to passing another law making doubly sure that people don't run stop signs. I understand the point, but it would be a fair argument or at least a fairer argument if the argument runs something like this: If in his hypothetical there were a system in place that legally and practically prevented police from monitoring tracked activities at intersections guarded by a stop sign, then, yes, that might be a fair, parallel reference, because that is exactly what we are dealing with, status quo, under a 1993 law called the NVRA--a law that, 20 years after its enactment, was interpreted by the Supreme Court--wrongly but conclusively, and that ruling remains in effect to this very day-- concluding that the State governments are prohibited--even where they suspect a registering voter is a noncitizen, they may not do anything to follow up on that person's citizenship. They may not request any proof of that person's citizenship even if they believe that it is suspect or lacking. So that makes it analogous to this hypothetical of a supplemental law that would require or at least allow observation of the intersection guarded by a stop sign. If he is going to make that analogy, then that is how you make it fair, because that is essentially what is happening. That is directly analogous to what is happening here. It is as though we have laws saying that you may not run a stop sign, but State and local police are prohibited from observing traffic at any intersection guarded by a stop sign and may not issue traffic tickets even if they believe those things might be occurring because they are not allowed to watch that intersection. That is what is going on here. But it is even worse than that because their own State governments are contributing to the violation of the laws, to ignoring it, because they refuse to share information; they refuse to hand over their data. This is especially troubling for so many reasons, including and especially the fact that in a handful of States--I believe it is four or five jurisdictions, maybe four States and the District of Columbia-- they allow noncitizen voting in some of their local elections. Now, I don't know why any jurisdiction would want to allow this. I don't know why any State would want to allow any local election within that State to include noncitizen voting. But if their State laws and their State constitution contain nothing to prohibit that, then that is their choice because there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution or in Federal law that would prohibit them from doing that. Nonetheless, once they do that, it raises all kinds of questions that really do need to be addressed. For example, if they are voting, if you have noncitizens legally voting in some elections in four or five States and the District of Columbia, then that means they are registering to vote. They have voter registration files. Those States are asked: What are you doing with those voter registration files to make sure they are not cross-pollinating, that the same registered voters who are noncitizens are not also participating in Federal elections? And they are not sharing their information. They are not answering that question, which is a really, really important question. Their refusal to answer that question or to share data makes the need for this even more pressing. Now, when we look at all of this, one of the many arguments that the Democrats appear to be raising over and over again--there are two of them that are especially common that I think need to be addressed head- on here. One of the arguments raised over and over again is that if we require registering voters to provide at the time of voter registration proof of citizenship, then that is necessarily going to disenfranchise a lot of people. Now, one number they throw around is something like 21 million Americans will be disenfranchised, will be unable to vote. Well, that by itself is not true. It is not supported. This is based on some studies indicating--based on surveys, they extrapolate that there are about 21 million Americans who don't necessarily have that requisite documentation or they don't know where it is at the moment or something to that effect. Remember, by the way, any and every time any American citizen takes a new job, starts a new job as an employee for an employer on American soil or anywhere within the jurisdiction of the United States, they have to fill out an I-9 form. The I-9 form requires them to provide, before they may start that job, proof of U.S. citizenship either supplied by a U.S. passport establishing U.S. citizenship or, alternatively, an original, certified birth certificate accompanied by a government-issued photo ID and/or an original Social Security card. If you don't have those things, you can't start the job unless and until you can provide that documentation. Now, those things would suffice under the SAVE America Act voter registration provisions requiring proof of citizenship, but that is not all that would suffice. We wanted to make it as flexible as it could possibly be, lest there be any credible argument that this would impose an undue hardship, an undue burden. One could argue, of course, that even just requiring the same documentation every American has to provide whenever they start a new job would be fair, and maybe it would be, but we wanted to make it even easier to comply with that. We want to encourage those who are U.S. citizens to be able to vote. If you can legally vote, you should, and you shouldn't have these impediments. So we added a list of other documents that you could use. Certain other ID cards that have been established and recognized within the U.S. Government as establishing citizenship could do it. Then we provided a catchall--a catchall that not one of my Democrat colleagues has even acknowledged even though they have been in the room when I have raised the argument, when I have cited it, when I noted what it does. Some of the people hearing the argument over and over again still refuse even to acknowledge that it exists when they claim that unless you have a U.S. passport, you are going to be disenfranchised. Some of them will say that a passport will cost a couple of hundred dollars, so it is a poll tax; it is expensive; it is going to disenfranchise all these people. They ignore this provision. The provision begins at the text on line 22 of page 12 of the SAVE America Act as passed by the House of Representatives, which is the legislation pending before us and that we are now debating. They ignore this every single time. They ignore it over and over and over again, to the point of being not only disingenuous but dishonest. These are, in fact, dishonest arguments because they overlook that. This doesn't disenfranchise anyone. You need not shell out a nickel, a dime, a quarter, not even a penny or a fraction of a penny. You need not spend anything. You need not waste any time digging through, oh, piles of documents. If you can't find them and if you never had those documents to begin with--your house burned down or your dog ate them, whatever--not a problem. Why? Well, because we allowed them by a simple affidavit to provide an attestation. It is a personal narrative of, here is why I am a citizen--either based on the fact that I was born in such and such a city in the United States on such a date, or I was not born a U.S. citizen but I was later naturalized. Here is where I was born. Here is when I was naturalized. Here is the path I took to naturalization. Either way, once you submit that--and that could be a brief paragraph or maybe a few sentences to describe those critical facts--you hand it over to the State election official, and the burden then shifts to the State to confirm or refute. Unless they can refute the facts that you allege, you are a registered voter, and there is no need for you to worry about it. So this is absolute nonsense to say that you will be disenfranchised if you don't have your documents or if you can't afford a passport or whatever it is. This is just an absolute, total lie. Look, in these more serene moments within the U.S. Senate, when things seem calm--and they are, in some respects, calm--it is not a time for us to assume that the arguments aren't real, that they aren't being made aggressively. This is not a time for drinking a pina colada. This is not a time for ignoring the endogenous and exogenous pressures that we face from every direction. Speaking of endogenous pressures, I see the presence of my friend and distinguished colleague the great Senator from the State of Kansas, and he has got a message for us. I am going to interrupt my remarks and yield, with the permission of the Chair, to Senator Marshall, until the conclusion of his remarks, when I will continue mine.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, in response to the question from the Senator from Ohio, the junior Senator from Ohio--not to be confused with the very handsome senior Senator from Ohio--came to the floor yesterday. Now, the junior Senator from Ohio comes to this job with a unique background, a unique set of knowledge born of experience as the longtime chief elections officer of the State of Ohio. As he looks at the SAVE America Act, he sees that there are two main components. Component 1 deals with voter ID, where you just show up with a photo ID on the day of election to prove that you are who you say you are, the same person listed on your voter registration file. Component 2 deals with establishing citizenship at the time of voter registration. About 48 hours ago, a lot of our Democratic colleagues started stating publicly and privately, here on the Senate floor and outside of this Chamber, that they would be just fine if this were just a voter ID bill. And so the junior Senator from Ohio had this great idea. He said: Look, why don't we create a separate bill file. We will take the exact same text from component 1--that is the part that deals just with photo ID, photo ID to be shown by the voter on the day of voting, at the voting place, to show that the voter is, in fact, the same person listed on the voter registration file. After all, the Democrats have said they are just fine with the voter ID component. So he gave a speech in support of it. I backed him up in a parallel speech. Then he offered it up, offered to pass it by what we call live UC, which is a mechanism by which you ask unanimous consent of all Senators to pass something. It seemed like a very good idea given the amount of bipartisan consensus surrounding the voter ID provision. We were watching with bated breath, very much anticipating the answer. And, curiously, it drew an objection from the Democrats, articulated by the Senator from Oregon. But here was the interesting thing that I would say to my friend and colleague, the distinguished senior Senator from Ohio. At the time the Democrat objection was raised, the basis of the objection, as I heard it, was related entirely to component 2 that has only to do with proof of citizenship at the time of voter registration. So I don't know. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe this was an accident. Maybe he didn't mean to object. I hope that we will continue to do those things. Perhaps tomorrow or in the days to come, we will try that again--because it drew an objection, but the objection didn't have any explanation as to why it would be unreasonable for someone to show up on the day of voting just to make sure that somebody else isn't impersonating you, that you are the same person you claim to be and the same person on your voter registration file. I hope that that answers satisfactorily the question asked by the senior Senator from Ohio.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask consent to answer the question through the Chair.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, we have begun what will be our third day of debating the SAVE America Act, just over 48 hours ago. We voted to proceed to this bill, and we have been debating it for a couple of days, now entering our third 24-hour period of debates. I want to make a few observations to some of the arguments that I have made and respond to some of them; in particular, respond to some of the arguments that I have heard made just in the last couple of hours. We have heard a number of arguments. Nearly all of them that come from the other side of the aisle deal with something that is either easily addressed in ways that would not require any change to the legislation before us, or, more commonly--in fact, almost entirely-- what we are hearing are arguments that overlook or even blatantly mischaracterize key features of the legislation. The distinguished Senator from Colorado who spoke just a little while ago, made a number of accusations against the legislation. Now, they are not materially different from some of the other arguments that have been made this evening, but they were a little bit more strident coming from the Senator from Colorado than they have been from some others. He repeatedly referred to this legislation, in ways described it using adjectives like ``shameful,'' a lot of characterizations of the legislation as being somehow evil or malign. But as important as anything, he continued to repeat characterizations of the bill that are just lies. And I wish I didn't have to use that term. It is a very blunt term, but these are lies. It is as though he is staring straight into the noonday Sun and, while looking at the Sun with a cloudless sky, saying: It is midnight. There is no Sun visible. A lot of this--not all of it, but a lot of it--traces back, in one way or another, to this refrain about how this law is alternatively either Jim Crow 2.0; that it disenfranchises women; that it disenfranchises racial minorities, persons of color; that it disenfranchises 20, 21 million people; that it disenfranchises anyone who lacks any documentation, anyone who, after getting married, goes through a name change if the marriage certificate can't be found along with the other documents. Arguments that you would have to get a passport in order to vote, having to shell out a couple hundred dollars, which is about what a passport costs. I think it is $185 without any expedited fees, more than that otherwise. On that basis, these arguments often culminated in the point that this is somehow a poll tax because if you have to spend a couple hundred bucks getting a passport or otherwise procuring documents, without which you couldn't register to vote, according to them, then you are disenfranchised; therefore, this is a poll tax. Poll taxes were outlawed by constitutional amendment over 60 years ago, and therefore this is bad. There are a lot of other arguments, but let's just stop right there and let me address--I think I can address nearly all, if not all, of those arguments by referring to one section of the bill that I have oft repeated, oft cited, oft quoted. And yet no matter how many times I cite it, paraphrase it, quote it, or refer my colleagues across the aisle to its provisions, they seem to ignore it. Many of the same people have continued to repeat this lie, even after they have been in the room here in the Senate Chamber when I have made the argument, and here is the argument that overcomes most, if not all, of the immediately aforementioned arguments. This legislation doesn't require you to have any of the documents that they reference. Ideally, you should have them. And, in fact, most Americans do have them, and most Americans are required to use them, from time to time, in other contexts. Perhaps the most common of those contexts is in the employment context. When you start a new job--whenever any American citizen starts a new job with a new employer in the United States--you have to fill out a form called the I-9. The I-9 requires you to establish your U.S. citizenship. Now, if you are not a U.S. citizen, then you don't have to produce that because you have to produce something else. You have got to produce a visa and establish the link between the visa that you have, your authorization to work, and your authorization to work in that particular job. So that is par for the course if you are not a U.S. citizen because you have got to establish a very specific type of work permit or an authorization based on your visa. But if you are an American citizen, you still have to pony up with documents every time you begin new employment as a new employee with a new employer in the United States. You have to prove you are a citizen, and you have to do it in fairly precise ways. It prescribes a couple of methods that you can use to establish your U.S. citizenship. Method one, which is the simpler one: You show up with a U.S. passport that establishes your citizenship, and that one document can satisfy the entire obligation--if you have one. A lot of Americans have them, but a lot of them don't. Not everyone travels outside the United States. If you don't travel outside the United States, you are not necessarily going to need a passport. Why go through the expense and hassle of getting one if you don't travel? That is why a lot of people don't have them. And that is one of the reasons why I find it so reckless when people are making the claim that you would have to have one, or even the indirect suggestion that anyone without a passport who is not willing to shell out a couple hundred bucks to get a passport and go through the hassle and the waiting period to get one might be disenfranchised, because that is not the only means by which you can establish your U.S. citizenship--not under the SAVE America Act, certainly, and also not under the I-9. But under the I-9, you can also prove your citizenship by coming up with an original copy of your birth certificate--the original certified copy of your U.S. birth certificate--and then a government-issued photo ID. And in some contexts, the original Social Security card can also be acceptable along with the original certified copy of your birth certificate. And that is about it. So anybody who has ever had a job in this country who is a U.S. citizen has had to do that. Like most Americans, I have had a number of jobs in my career, and so I have had to fill out the I-9 many times. I don't always have those documents right with me. I can usually track them down. I am pretty sure my wife knows where they are. They are not things that we utilize every day, but I know that, from time to time, I will need access to them. And I have needed access to them every time I have applied for a new job. There have been other times when I have needed them, including when I have applied for a passport. I have needed them most recently when I renewed my driver's license in Utah. And Utah is moving toward a system of having a driver's license that can establish citizenship. The last time I renewed, they asked me to bring in those documents. I established my citizenship with that. If you don't have those, you can't start a new job. So most Americans, if they don't have those documents at the moment they start a new job, they have to find them. We wanted the SAVE America Act to provide other methods of documenting one's citizenship, recognizing that not everybody has those documents. A lot of people are not going to have a U.S. passport; and those who don't have a U.S. passport might also not have the combination of other documents, including the birth certificate with the State-certified seal on it--not just a photocopy--along with a government-issued photo ID and/or a Social Security card. And so we added a bunch of other things to it. There is a subset of the REAL ID driver's license. Not all REAL ID driver's licenses prove citizenship. Some of them do. It is typically evident on the face of a REAL ID driver's license whether or not that particular driver's license establishes citizenship. That would suffice under this legislation. It would also suffice--in some circumstances, certain forms of Tribal ID could be used, insofar as they establish citizenship. But we wanted to go even further than that, recognizing that some people might not have any of these forms. And we didn't want to add to the expense, to the burden, to the hassle, to the delay, to the deterrent effect from voting that it might have if you had to procure or find documents that you had either lost or you never had to begin with; or your house burned down or dog ate them or your crazy Aunt Madge took them and took them to the dump and lit them on fire or whatever she did with them; or you just don't believe in documents or you don't care about them or you never had them to begin with. Whatever your reason, if you are a U.S. citizen, you need to be able to register to vote, and that ought not be that hard. So we created an alternative mechanism. Now, mysteriously--magically--my friends across the aisle, my Democratic colleagues in the Senate, refuse defiantly to acknowledge that this provision even exists. They refuse, and they continue. They persist undaunted, undeterred by the fact that they are making false arguments--fake arguments--without a scintilla of truth to them, to the effect that this is a poll tax, to the effect that they are going to have to shell out 200 bucks to vote, to the effect that this is going to deter people, dissuade them from voting. It is going to create a chilling effect--dogs and cats living together in the streets, stuff right out of the Book of Revelation, end-of-the-world stuff. This is nonsense. It is beneath the dignity of the U.S. Senate for them to continue this lie. Every time they make this lie, every time they engage in that fraudulent, argumentative activity, I would point out that there is a very simple provision that takes care of all of this--that reveals it, exposes it as a lie--and it can be found in the text beginning at page 12, line 22 of the legislation that we have been considering over the last 48 hours. It makes very clear: Even if you do not have a single shred of documentation as to your citizenship--you can't find it, it burned down, whatever it is--all you have to do is swear an affidavit. Now, the context of the affidavit--the contents of the affidavit-- might depend, might vary a little bit, depending on whether you are a natural-born or naturalized citizen. Let me explain what those terms mean, in case anyone wonders. A natural-born citizen is a citizen who is a citizen immediately upon his or her birth by virtue of the circumstances surrounding that person's birth, typically meaning that if you are born in the United States--or if you are not born in the United States but you are born to U.S. citizen parents abroad, such that you are entitled to U.S. citizenship under U.S. law as of the moment of your birth by virtue of the circumstances surrounding your birth--you are a citizen. So if you are a natural-born citizen, you can write out the affidavit that way: My name is such-and-such. I was born in this or that location, on or about my birthday--and whatever other facts might be relevant to that that could guide the State election officials in verifying--enabling them to confirm or refute, as the case may be, the legitimacy or the falsity of the matter as to which they are attesting in the sworn affidavit made under penalty of perjury. At this moment, once somebody fills this out under the SAVE America Act, the burden shifts. The burden no longer belongs to the registering voter. That burden is lifted off the shoulders of the registering voter and placed onto the State. States, you see, have access to all kinds of documents. Original documents, in many cases, and large databases of documents in other cases. The State is in a very good position to track down the details of the affidavit and easily confirm or refute what the person says. They can go in then and say: Oh, yes, it looks like this person by this name was born on this date to the parents by these names; and, yes, they are a citizen. Alternatively, if they are not natural-born citizens, meaning they weren't citizens automatically as of the moment of their birth by virtue of the circumstances surrounding their birth, but they later became citizens--we call those naturalized citizens. An affidavit for a naturalized citizen would be a little bit different: I was born in Yemen or Greece or Hungary or wherever it was. You probably want to name the city, the birth date, the names of your parents, their nationalities, and at some point, you would want to mention the date: I became a U.S. citizen on or about such and such a date. I took the oath of citizenship on or about such and such a date, was sworn in by this or that judge, or whoever it was who did it--the basic facts surrounding how and when and under what circumstances you became a citizen. And, there again, the burden shifts to the State. If you are not lying, the State will quickly figure that out. And if you are lying, the State will quickly figure that out too. Now, most people who go to the trouble of swearing out an affidavit and providing those details--again, the affidavit wouldn't take more than a few minutes to write out. You could write it out by pen or by pencil. I suppose if you can't write, you can dictate it to somebody else and you can make your mark attesting to it, making it your statement. I suppose, because the States will have some flexibility in deciding exactly how each procedure will work within that State--maybe some States will allow them to do it through smoke signals, sky writing, sign language, whatever form of communication might be in order in the moment. But the point is, they can make a sworn statement shifting the burden to the State. Not a single document beyond that attestation is required from that moment--not from the would-be voter. It shifts to the State. And unless you are lying, you will be registered to vote after that. Not a single dollar, not a single dime, not a single nickel or a single penny or a fraction of a penny has to be expended by the registering voter in that moment. And so this is just a lie, but it is a damnable lie because it is a lie that has been repeated over and over and over again in this Chamber so many times, and it has been repeated by people, some of whom have been in the Chamber when I have made this point, where I have cited chapter and verse within the legislation that we are now considering, explaining the extent to which the arguments they are making are false. And yet, sure enough, the next Democrat that gets up to speak, speaks the same lie over and over and over again, as if by repeating the same lie often enough it somehow becomes true. That is not how the world works. It is certainly not how the world's greatest deliberative legislative body works. You don't make something that is false true by repeating it over and over and over again. This one isn't even a matter of interpretation. There is no ambiguity on this one. There is no absolute requirement for anyone to produce any document. There are a number of documents listed which, if you produce them, will conclusively establish your citizenship. But even if you don't have them, there are other ways of doing it that won't cost you a dime, that won't require you to have even a single slip of paper with them. So there is that argument. On the one hand, I could say I am tired of refuting it, but that is not quite it. I don't mind refuting it. I actually kind of enjoy it because the more they make this argument, the more they beclown themselves, the more they diminish their own arguments. If they have legitimate arguments against this bill, bring them forward. I want to hear them. Those are not hollow words. I want to hear whatever legitimate arguments they have got so that we can fix them because we, as Americans, can do hard things, and if there are features of this bill that are unfair that could be changed, I want to change them. Do you know why? Well, it is because I believe we need to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. We can achieve both. If we focus obsessively only on the former--on making it easy to vote--we will inevitably fail in our task as to the latter point. Hyperfocusing on making it easy to vote while neglecting the all-important task of making it hard to cheat will make it so easy to vote that people who are not supposed to vote will end up voting. This is where a number of my colleagues mischaracterized the words of the President of the United States, maligning his words, taking them out of context, and attributing to him some sinister motive. He uttered words to the effect that we have to make sure that the right people are voting. Now, he is not saying that only Republicans can vote or only people who voted for Trump can vote. It is paranoid fantasy to suggest that. In context, it is clear that what he is saying is ``the right people to vote'' mean the people who are actually eligible to vote, the people who are not prohibited from voting in U.S. elections by a U.S. law under penalty of felony prosecution. That is what he is talking about there. And yet in their delusional desire to malign and mischaracterize not only the President of the United States but this legislation, which he supports, they are attributing to him things that he did not say. There is another bad argument. I don't know whether this one falls into the same category as that series of lies that I just refuted. I don't know that I would call this next one a lie, but it is a really, really bad argument. It is demonstrably a failing argument. They make the point that this somehow intrudes upon the sovereign authority of the States--although, for most of them, that is not how they are putting it. They are saying this is an infringement on States' rights. I really don't like that expression. It is a misnomer, to begin with. It harkens back to a really unfortunate era in U.S. history. It includes the Jim Crow era, another gross mischaracterization, another horrible argument that my Democratic colleagues have been making about this bill. Why they would ever want to conjure memories of the Jim Crow era is beyond me, especially given that they were the party of Jim Crow. It was the Democratic Party that subjected so many millions of Americans, over so many decades, to a truly evil and oppressive, hateful regime that excluded them from public life, that excluded them from the benefits of American citizenship over many, many decades. That was their party. I don't bring that up to accuse Democrat Members of this body of engaging in that. It was different generations, not alive today. None of my colleagues here were part of that legacy, part of that particular Democratic Party, but I don't know why they would want to drag their own party through the mud based on its racist past, based on its longstanding Ku Klux Klan-affiliated, Ku Klux Klan-enabled reign of terror against African Americans. And yet they do so anyway, and they do so in a way that is patently untrue and unfair, calling this Jim Crow. There is nothing about this that is Jim Crow. There is nothing about this that is racist, that is racially charged; nothing about this that is sexist. There is not even a good argument as to a supposed disparate impact that this could have. It is just patently false. Anyway, back to their argument about States' rights. One of many reasons I hate that expression is that it conjures images of George Wallace. It conjures images of those who distorted the Constitution to engage in all kinds of horrible things, including Jim Crow policies, over many decades. More fundamentally, it is a misnomer. States don't have rights. States aren't people. People have rights; States have authority. Authority is used. Rights are possessed by people to render them protected from abusive State authority. So in that respect a right, which is held by a person, is kind of the polar opposite; it is the inverse. A right is to State authority what anti-matter is to matter. If you want to call them rights, let's just call it federalism or State sovereign authority or the exclusive province of the States or whatever you want to call it. So, now that we have that matter of nomenclature resolved, let's move on to the substance of what they are saying. They are saying, in effect, that the authority of the States over elections--over all elections--is exclusive; it is sacred; it is not to be intruded upon ever by Federal authority and that, if we do that, we are thwarting the Constitution, ignoring and trampling the 10th Amendment, the principles of federalism that even preceded the 10th Amendment, that were implicit in the text of the original Constitution and made with greater clarity when the 10th Amendment was added, along with the other Bill of Rights, initial 10 amendments, in 1791. Their argument doesn't stand up--not at all. Do you know why? Do you know how we know that? Well, that is because of article I, section 4, clause 1. Article I, section 4, clause 1. On the one hand, it makes clear that there is an assumption, before you even read that one, that States, of course, will be in charge of conducting elections for State and local offices. Why wouldn't they be? They always would be. They always have been. They always will be. That is their exclusive domain. They can do whatever they want on those elections. They have to have a republican form of government; that is about the only restriction on State and local offices, except where the Constitution specifies elsewhere. But with respect to Federal elections, yeah, article I, section 4 does, in fact, give the States some authority in conducting Federal elections. And, yeah, they weren't too keen on the idea of there being a single Federal election authority that would be in charge of running all Federal elections. It wouldn't have made sense at the founding, and even if it had made sense at the founding, I think they would have found that thought horrifying, just as I do and most of us do today. It is not what we are doing here. It is not what we want. It certainly wouldn't be allowed under article I, section 4. And yet they are speaking as though that is what we are doing, and that is not at all what we are doing. Article I, section 4 says that, yeah, the States will conduct these elections for U.S. Senators and U.S. Congressmen and they will establish the rules and regulations concerning those elections that they will conduct. Then comes this line which my colleagues conveniently omit, make no reference to, and pretend does not exist in this context, just like they ignore the text beginning on line 22 of page 12 of the legislation we are now debating. Here is what that language says: [B]ut the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations. Meaning such regulations, such laws governing specifically the election of Federal officers who are elected; namely, Representatives and Senators. We have that power. We can supplement those. We can alter those. We can prescribe our own. Why? Well, because we are the sole sovereign lawmaking organ of the Federal sovereign government, and so it makes sense that they put this authority in article I, section 4. So this is well within our authority. This doesn't trample on, conflict with, undermine, contradict, or otherwise work against the sovereign authority of the States. And certainly nothing about the SAVE America Act undermines that. It is entirely consistent with it. In fact, I have long believed that federalism--that is, the vertical protection built into the Constitution, one of the twin structural protections--you know, the whole Constitution is about limiting government. It is about prescribing the structure and the form, affirmatively prohibiting the government from doing certain things; in some instances prohibiting the Federal Government from doing some things or the States from doing others. In some instances, it prohibits government, generally--whether State, Federal, or local--from doing certain things. Separate and apart from that you have got these core structural protections. One operates vertically--on a vertical axis, if you will-- and we call that federalism. That is your relationship between the Federal Government on the one hand and the States on the other. The Federal Government is depicted--when we depict this graphically--is above, on top of, the States because where the Federal Government has authority, it is above the States and localities. But its authority is limited. James Madison described this relationship in Federalist 45 when he said the powers of the Federal Government are few and defined and those reserved to the States are numerous and indefinite. You might imagine it as sort of a pyramid-shaped structure. It is broad at the base and narrow at the top. But at the top is the Federal Government. It is in charge of only a few basic things designated as Federal by the U.S. Constitution. The Federal Government's actions and laws passed by the Congress of the United States into law trump inconsistent State law. They control wherever, whenever the Federal Government has authority to act. That is the relationship we call federalism. The horizontal protection operates within the Federal Government itself, saying that within the Federal Government we have three distinct branches. We have one that makes the laws. That is Congress, the legislative branch. We have another branch headed by the President. That is the executive branch, whose job it is to execute, implement, enforce the laws made by Congress. And then the third branch headed by the Supreme Court, whose job it is to interpret the laws--not just in the abstract, not to render advisory opinions--they don't have that power--not to answer esoteric, legal, or constitutional questions in the abstract--they don't have that power--but to resolve actual cases and controversies, meaning disputes, between two or more parties where they disagree as to a particular point, a particular interpretation of the law--of Federal law, to be specific--whether that be statutory or constitutional. Anyway, back to federalism. The point is, to understand federalism appropriately, you can't assume that either the Federal Government may always dominate the States nor that the States may always dominate the Federal. Each has to operate within its own sphere. And just as it is a bad thing for the Federal Government to act where it should not, trampling the just authority of the States and their political subdivisions--the local governments--it is every bit as repugnant to the constitutional structure for the Federal Government not to act where it is empowered to act and where it is morally compelled to act. It is no less offensive to the principles of federalism whether you are ignoring the constitutional protections in one direction or the other. They are both bad. In this circumstance, it would be bad to assume that the U.S. Congress, as my Democratic colleagues are arguing, somehow lacks the authority to tell the States that in conducting elections--not elections generally but specifically elections for Federal office, those for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House races--that the Congress of the United States can have no say in that, in how that happens. That would be lawless indeed. Not only would it be lawless; it would be inconsistent with how we have always handled these things. There are a lot of laws on the books. There are four or five or six principal laws that tightly govern the States' conduct of elections and the relationship between the Federal Government and the States and the way they conduct elections. There are myriad others that relate to or modify or impose restrictions on the conduct by the States of Federal elections. So it is not just that we have the authority in the abstract under the Constitution. It is also that the Congress has repeatedly exercised that authority in a number of laws, including the Federal criminal prohibition imposing a felony offense for anyone who is not a citizen of the United States who casts a vote in a Federal election. That is a felony criminal offense. So if that is lawful--and no one here has questioned the constitutionality of that law. And given that no one has questioned the constitutionality of that law, I find it puzzling indeed that they challenge the constitutionality of a law that is designed to make sure that that law is not rendered dead letter; that it is not rendered vestigial, irrelevant, moot, unenforceable, undetectable, or otherwise nonoperative. That is exactly what is happening here, that particular provision of law prohibiting and criminalizing noncitizen voting in U.S. elections. It is, in fact, largely vestigial and inoperative and unenforceable because it is undetectable--unless we pass the SAVE America Act or something akin to it, something that would do something similar to it. Another law passed by Congress, also treading on and intruding into in some ways, if you want to see it that way, the State's conduct in Federal elections within their State, the 1993 NVRA--especially the way it was interpreted by the Supreme Court in 2013 in a case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona--made this one necessary. In other words, the whole reason why the SAVE America Act is even in existence, the whole reason we are here having this debate, the whole reason I wrote this law a couple years ago with my House counterpart Chip Roy of Texas--he and I authored this together because we put all these pieces of the puzzle together. A lot of people had heard about that ruling in 2013. They heard about NVRA. They were aware of some of the other developments that have made this boil up, you know, kind of past the boiling point in recent years. We put them all together and realized: Oh my goodness, our Federal elections are in trouble unless we close this loophole that has come into existence over the years because of the Supreme Court's interpretation of the NVRA and a number of other factors and immigration patterns and the way the States are responding to some of those changes. So isn't that ironic. Not one of them has argued that the NVRA is unconstitutional--not one of them. Not one of them has argued that the Federal criminal ban on noncitizen voting in Federal elections is unconstitutional, constitutionally problematic, inconsistent with the principles of federalism--not one of them. Not one of them has argued that the Help America Vote Act of 2005-- no, that wasn't 2005. That was earlier. Not one of them has argued that that is unconstitutional. I don't think I have heard them refer to the Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional or any other Federal statute governing the conduct of Federal elections. Not one of them has been characterized as unconstitutional. Why is that? And why do they characterize this as unconstitutional or as problematic under principles of federalism? That is curious, isn't it? Makes you wonder. Maybe this isn't really about federalism, just as it is not really about Jim Crow, just as it is not really about misogyny, just as it is not really about Jim Crow 2.0 racism or people who live in rural communities or people who have a strange aversion to carrying documents around with them--whatever it is. No, it is not about any of those things. They will have to tell us what the real reason is, but it makes you wonder: Who benefits? Who benefits from a system that makes it really, really easy to vote and really, really easy to cheat? Who benefits from a system that freely allows noncitizens to walk into just about any DMV in just about any State in America and, with a couple of strokes of a pen while applying for a driver's license, say: Yeah. By the way, I want to register to vote too. All you have to do while applying for a driver's license is check a box saying ``I want to register to vote'' and sign your name at the bottom saying, ``Yeah, it is OK for me to vote. I am a citizen and otherwise able to vote.'' Who benefits from that? Could that be the real reason? There has got to be a real reason, or maybe it is a category of real reasons because it sure as hell isn't about federalism, and it sure as hell isn't about racism or misogyny or Jim Crow or any of these bullcrap arguments. I hate to say that word in this Chamber, but it is true. These are contrivances. They are pretextual arguments, and they are damned lies, every last one of them. This is appropriate for Federal authority. It just is. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The real stunning thing about this is that the same people in this very Chamber who have the audacity to argue that this is somehow incompatible with federalism, these are the same people who between 2021 and 2023 supported a bill in that Congress commonly known as H.R. 1. Do you want to know what H.R. 1 did? H.R. 1 did exactly what they are now falsely accusing us of doing in this bill, in the SAVE America Act. It was a wholesale Federal takeover that, as I recall, every last Democrat in this Chamber who was serving at the time who is still here today supported. It would have, among other things, subjected every voting jurisdiction in the United States to preclearance, meaning that every time they made any change to their election laws, any change to their precincts, legislative districts, any of those things, they would have to go to Washington, DC, bow before some bureaucratic pinhead Democratic political appointee at the Department of Justice, kiss the ring, and wait to receive preclearance, approval for a State law or a local law making any changes to their election laws. And that was just the beginning. That thing went on and on and on so much so that it would have flipped on its head what James Madison described about federalism in Federalist 45. Remember when he said that the powers of the Federal Government are few and defined and that those reserved to the States are numerous and indefinite? This would have turned that completely upside down in the field of elections and said that the powers of the Federal Government are numerous and indefinite and that those reserved to the States are few and defined--and, by the way, exercised only at will, only at the sufferance of the benevolent Federal sovereign. This is wrong. They should be ashamed of themselves for making this argument. And it is cover for something else. It is cover for the fact that they don't have a legitimate argument, so they have to make up stuff that isn't true, and I am sick of it--now, not sick of it in the sense that I am going to stop for even a second calling them out on it. I am just getting started. I am having fun--fun in the sense that I am peeling back the layers of the onion, revealing their arguments to be disingenuous, false, and utterly indefensible. If they have real arguments, bring them forward. I would love to hear them. I would love nothing more than to hear one real argument about this bill that isn't built on a lie, isn't built on a distortion of this legislation, on a distortion of American history, on a distortion of the motives of the Members of this body whom they constantly defame. I would love it. Do you know why? Because at that point, we would come back and we would make changes to the law. We would make changes because all we want to do is make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. And if they can point out an actual, real problem with it, we could fix it. Yet we haven't heard any of that, not from that side of the aisle. The first legitimate set of arguments or potentially legitimate set of arguments that gives us something to work with--somebody who has some concerns with it--have come from a Republican Senator, my friend and colleague from Alaska, Senator Murkowski. Now, I disagree with her ultimate take on the bill, her opposition to it, but I understand now what some of her arguments are, and I am confident we can work through this. I am confident, first of all, that we can work through her concerns even under the existing text, and I hope--I hope--that we can bring her along, that she can get to a point where she is comfortable voting for this legislation as is. But even if we can't, I am also confident that, if necessary, we can make changes to that that will get her comfortable with this bill text. Some of her concerns relate not to the bill text, not to the bill we are now considering, but to a substitute amendment or perhaps other amendments that may have been filed but that we have yet to consider, that have yet to be called up, that may or may not be considered, may or may not be adopted once they are called up, if they are called up. We will deal with those in time, but don't attribute those to the bill we are now debating because they are not in there. The concerns she raised with the actual legislation, with the actual House-passed legislative vehicle that came over here 48 hours ago in the form of a message that we voted to proceed to--she identified some actual concerns there that we can work with. Again, I think we can get her comfortable with it. I think there are things that the State of Alaska could do even under the existing legislative text that could make Senator Murkowski comfortable. But even if we can't get there, I am willing to consider and explore, as needed, even some changes if that is what it takes to bring her along. Why? Because she has raised actual arguments that are rooted in fact rather than paranoid fantasy, rooted in reality rather than lies, rooted in genuine concern for the well-being of her constituents rather than cheap political points. And she is not lying, and I appreciate that about her. We have yet to hear any of those arguments from the other side. We have yet to hear any reasonable suggestion as to the other side and how the other side views that we could do this, we just have to go about it a different way. Now, starting yesterday, we started hearing something new from some of our Democratic colleagues, something that I found mildly encouraging and still find somewhat encouraging. Some of them have started to say: You know what, maybe voter ID laws aren't such a bad thing. Maybe we could live with those. It is a good thing because voter ID laws are overwhelmingly popular. I don't care if you are a Republican or a Democrat; if you live in the North, the South, the East, the West, the Midwest, the dead center of the country, wherever; whether you are a Democrat or a Republican; you are Black or White or some other race; you are male or female; you are liberal or you are conservative--it doesn't matter. If you meet any of those characteristics, regardless of what your background is, overwhelmingly--like by the odds of anywhere from 7 to 3 to 9 to 1--you are going to be in support of voter ID laws. So they have started to acknowledge: Yeah, maybe we could do that part. Well, great. We still need the citizenship stuff, but if they are OK with voter ID laws, let's get that done. Now, in response to that, my friend and colleague from the State of Ohio Senator Husted came to the floor just an hour or two ago and offered what I thought was a very reasonable accommodation--an accommodation in the form of a good-faith gesture; an olive branch, if you will--to the Democrats saying: Hey, you all have started to say you could live with voter ID laws. Let's take the voter ID language out of this bill, offer it up as a freestanding piece of legislation--not always a fan of doing that in every case. Sometimes you need everything to pass in one piece. For various reasons, it needs to happen together. This isn't one of those. We can pass that alone. I would do it right now. Shoot, if my colleagues will agree to it, we could pass it right now. That is what Jon Husted tried to do just a couple of hours ago. Jon Husted is a smart guy. Jon Husted knows more about elections and how to run them than probably not just any Member of the Senate here today but probably any Senator who has ever served in our 239-year history as an institution. He came and he said: Let's try to pass this. We had a chance an hour or two ago to do that. Well, that drew an objection from the Democrats. Why? They have all been saying: Hey, we are OK with voter ID laws; it is that citizenship stuff we don't want to deal with. The question of ``why'' is another matter. We will get back to that in a minute. So we said: Let's do it. Let's go. Let's freaking go. Let's get this thing passed right now, and then we can move on to the other stuff. I am not going to give up on the other stuff because we need that too. I am open to negotiation if people have ways of making it better. But let's get this done right now. He offered it up, and it drew an objection from the Democrats. What did they say about it? They made arguments about a completely different set of provisions that had nothing to do with voter ID. It was the strangest thing I have ever seen. I don't know what was going on there, but anybody who saw that objection, if you paid careful attention, it had not a darn thing to do with what he was offering. They were objecting to completely different provisions that he wasn't offering at the time. So we are going to have to do that again sometime soon, hopefully in the next 24 hours or less. Let's try to do that again. Maybe this time, they will realize what we are actually approaching. Let's get that done, and then we can move on and deal with the rest of the provisions dealing with citizenship. If they have qualms about any particular provision, again, I am all ears. Not only am I willing to hear it, I am eager to hear it. I want to hear what the actual reason is insofar as there are real reasons other than: We like the status quo. We want people to have the option of voting as noncitizens if they are noncitizens, if they want to break the law and risk getting caught, because we know they won't get caught because it is impossible to get caught under this regime. The 1993 NVRA passed by this body, as interpreted wrongly but conclusively by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2013, as affected by immigration trends resulting in 30 million-plus noncitizens residing in this country today--10 to 15 million of whom came into this country unlawfully between 2021 and 2025 alone--have all brought us to that point. There is another feature that makes it really, really dark, really, really scary, and it is this. In some States, States have started allowing noncitizens to vote. It starts out small, as it has with those States, a handful of four or five States. And in some cases some of those States, often blue States, not red, are saying: It is OK. Some of our local elections, you don't need to be a citizen to vote. There is, of course, nothing in the U.S. Constitution that says they can't do that. There is nothing in Federal law that I am aware of that says they can't do that, as long as it is with something other than a Federal election. I think it is crazy. I think it is absolutely nuts. I don't know why you would ever let a noncitizen vote in any election inside the United States, but if they want to do it and their State constitution or their State law allows it, States are allowed to do dumb things. This is a dumb thing, but they are allowed to do that. But here is the scary part. The scary part is that those same jurisdictions just quietly refuse, along with most nearly all blue States--that is, States run by Democrat Governors and/or Democrat-run legislatures--they refuse to share information. They refuse to cooperate with Federal authorities, the same Federal authorities who have been directed under existing law to maintain databases like the SAVE database that is designed to keep track of who is a citizen and who is not and voter registrations and things like that. These jurisdictions, these blue State jurisdictions, including and especially those that allow noncitizens to vote in their local elections, are defiantly refusing to share their information, pursuant to a memorandum of understanding or otherwise, with Federal authorities whose job it is to keep track of these things. That is kind of scary if you think about it because there are reasonable questions that ought to be asked that aren't being asked and must be asked about the fact that if you are registering noncitizens to vote in those local elections where noncitizens in those jurisdictions are allowed to vote, however misguidedly, it must mean that they are registered. Once they are registered, how exactly is it that you separate out those who are registered to vote as noncitizens in local elections, and how do you prevent those same registered voters from then gaining access to a ballot in a Federal election? They have gone mum. They have become mute. They refuse to cooperate. They have stonewalled. They have shut out the Federal authorities. They won't tell them their methodology. They won't tell them what they do. They won't show them their voter rolls. That is kind of scary. That shows a level of awareness of their known risk that perhaps just maybe to some of these people is not a risk. To some of them maybe it is not a bug; it is a feature. What if it is part of their strategy for winning elections? Might that explain why almost no blue State is willing to give them the time of day? Now, sure, they can wrap themselves in the flag--I don't know which flag it is, it is not the American flag, in some sort of flag-- and say: We don't want to share information because privacy, because America, because data security. What does that even mean? I mean, first of all, you have got this brooding omnipresence of a government, which I will be the first to admit has way too much information about all of us all the time. It is spooky. These guys can track down stuff your mother did in second grade. They have got information already on every economic transaction that you have ever engaged in, tax data, the banking transaction information, too, all the information that the Federal Government collects from any Agency. If you travel, they know where and when you have entered and exited the United States, all kinds of data. And this is before we get into what happens under FISA section 702 with the so- called incidental collection where you happen to be talking to somebody who, unbeknownst to you, is an agent of a foreign power, and all of a sudden what you thought were private communications are being swept up and loaded onto Federal databases that can be searched by your name, knowing that you are a U.S. citizen, knowing that a particular phone number is yours. So, yeah, the Federal Government has got a lot of data. It is spooky. I don't like it. But why all of a sudden are they wrapping themselves in the flag and saying: Yeah, we don't want the Federal Government having any ability to review data on our voter files. Why? Why are they all of a sudden concerned about that? Have we ever had a lapse in the SAVE database of something that resulted in the release of personally identifiable information? Not to my knowledge. If there were, we would find it. And if there were, it would pale in comparison to other data breaches we have had through all kinds of Federal Agencies. And we are talking about voter registration files that they are wanting to examine and have access to for one purpose and one purpose alone. It is not to track down voters and ask them relentlessly whom they are going to vote for. It is not even for a nefarious purpose, even one that can be speculated on that is the supposed motivation for this thing. I don't even know what it is they are freaking out on, but more to the point is the very legitimate reason why they need this information. Why? Because we have Federal laws and those Federal laws prohibit noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. And we have a system in place that prohibits any noncitizens--any of the 30 million or so, at least the subset of 30 million or so noncitizens residing in this country--it prohibits them from voting. That is all they are trying to get to is to make sure the people that are not allowed to vote are not, in fact, registering to vote or voting. Why are they so freaked out about that? Now, don't get me wrong. I love the impulse to protect privacy. That is not what this is about or they would say so. If it were the case, there would be something about this particular regime, about the SAVE database that would give us some indication that this is a genuine privacy risk. It is not. And I haven't even heard any of them try to make the case that it is because it is not. They like the status quo for some reason. Can't get into their heads, but I do have to wonder, Who benefits from the status quo? Who benefits if noncitizens are voting in U.S. elections? Is that what they are really afraid of--losing an edge? Now, sometimes the mask slips a little bit, and I wonder if some have maybe admitted to more than they intended to. I have heard a number of my Democratic colleagues over the last 48 hours say things like the following--not just the last 48 hours but in the last few weeks as people have been speaking publicly and in here about their concerns about the legislation. Some of them have uttered words to the effect that: This might exclude more people who tend to vote as Democrats. Could that be the reason? They are worried about noncitizens overwhelmingly voting as Democrats, that they will lose votes that way? Surely, that is not the reason they are concerned about that, is it? Let's hope not. I mean, I would hope that neither party and no Member of this body would want their party to win elections that way by having noncitizens vote. And yet if that is not their reason, they are throwing up an awful lot of dust and dirt and smoke. A bunch of arguments that are just bad in some instances, illogical in others, and more often than not, false and demonstrably false. Could that be why? That is kind of scary. It is one of the reasons why I am growing increasingly suspicious. Usually in this body we have a lot of disagreements. And I have got good friends at every point across the political spectrum in this body, within my own party, across on the other side, some of the people--I really like most personally, some of the people I work with a lot legislatively and agree with them on a lot of things and some are people that I don't agree with on a lot of issues and a number of them are across the aisle and Members of the other party. And most of the time, even when we are debating on issues where I know there is genuinely deep-seated, honest disagreement on matters of policy, even if I don't agree with them and even if they cut more or less along party lines, I can nearly always at least understand their argument, and I can see what the countervailing point is. I can usually articulate it, even if I don't share their ultimate conclusion, what their concerns are. I can't do that here because I have yet to hear a single compelling or even credible argument from the other side on this. The only person I have heard today or in the last 48 hours speak on this floor who is currently opposed to this bill came from the senior Senator from Alaska who raised some observations that, while I don't share her conclusion, I understand where she is going, and I am earnestly desirous to engage in further conversation with her to see if we can close that gap. I think there are ways that this could be implemented, even with the current text, that could satisfy her concerns, which are legitimate. And if we can't do that with the current text to her satisfaction, I would love to be able to, and I think we could accommodate her concerns through some modest legislative changes to the existing text. We will see where that goes, and I am optimistic about that. But with the exception of the arguments she has raised, I have yet to hear any credible argument about this bill. What I have heard are arguments made over and over and over again that bear no resemblance to existing Federal law, that are indefensible when compared to the actual legislative text that we are considering, to the legislative and historical backdrop against which we are evaluating that legislative text, and so that does make me wonder why. You know, years ago, maybe 20 years ago or so, as on many occasions, I was planning on watching a Supreme Court argument, and as I sometimes do, I read the briefs before the argument. I was not a litigant in the case, but I was interested in the case. I read the briefs, and I came to a pretty firm conclusion, as sometimes happens, as to who was more likely to win the case at the end of the day. When I attended the oral argument the next day, the oral argument didn't go quite as I expected. I had a pretty--I was quite convinced before the argument that, based on the briefs, I believe it was the petitioner--the petitioner is the party who is trying to get the lower court ruling reversed before the Supreme Court--I believe it was the petitioner who I decided was almost certainly going to lose. The lawyer representing the petitioner--who was one of the more venerated members of the Supreme Court bar, a seasoned practitioner who had argued many, many times before the High Court, one of the best lawyers in America, certainly in the realm of appellate and Supreme Court litigation--his argument surprised me, as did the outcome of the case. The reason the argument surprised me is that unlike every other argument I had ever seen or heard about that lawyer arguing, this one strayed pretty far from the arguments raised in the brief. Usually, you can't get away with this. I was surprised when he did get away with it, but he got up there. I don't know how else to describe it other than to say that it reminded me of a sort of ``who is on first, what is on second'' routine. He threw out arguments that, to me at least, appeared to be designed only to confuse the members of the Court, which is hard to do because now, as was the case then, these are not just nine people wearing robes, but they are nine of the smartest legal minds in the entire country. They are bright. They are not easily distracted. But this lawyer was so good, he got up there, and with 30 minutes of ``who is on first, what is on second,'' got them so confused that somehow he managed to win the case. I wonder if that is what is going on here. There is that old saying: If the law is against you, pound the facts; if the facts are against you, you pound the law; when they are both against you, pound the table. The other side is pounding the table. They are pounding the table because they have got nothing. At least they have got nothing in terms of an argument they can make credibly and with a straight face. So instead what do they do? They pound the table while making arguments that are utterly indefensible. I ask the question, Why? Who does that? Now, these are not untalented statesmen. They are not novice lawmakers. My Democrat colleagues are some of the most seasoned rhetoricians and legal minds and legislators that this country has ever known, both in cases where I have agreed with them and where I have disagreed with them, sometimes sticking with where most Members of my party agree and sometimes departing from them to join with them. I have seen them make arguments, and they are darn good at it when they have them. This one is different. They are not making good arguments, and that tells me one thing: They don't have them. So they grab for whatever is there, hoping to kick up enough dust to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt to a degree sufficient to take away from what is otherwise an 85- 15 issue of Americans who overwhelmingly support this legislation and the policies underlying it. Well, I can't prove it in the sense that I can't peer into the mind of any other individual, let alone 47 of them, but at the same time, I don't have any other rational explanation for it. These are smart people. When they have good arguments, they raise them. They are not making them here. They are lying. They are distorting. They are overlooking. They are ignoring reasons that are plain--in black and white. They ignore them even after they hear them from my own mouth while they have been in the same room. They ignore them. What does that tell you? They are pounding the table. They are kicking up dust because they have not got anything else. That should tell us something. It is an honor to live in this country. It is an honor to be a U.S. citizen. This is often referred to--and I fundamentally believe that it is--as the greatest civilization that human history has ever recorded. We are honored and privileged to live in a day and age with so many blessings and so many benefits, and those blessings and benefits wouldn't exist but for the fact that we are a nation of laws. We are far from perfect. We honor our commitments, our Constitution, our Declaration of Independence, and our system of laws imperfectly, but we aspire toward that which is good. We aspire toward law and order, and generally speaking, that runs the spectrum whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or something in between. But we can lose that. It is not guaranteed to us. You can't pass it in the bloodstream. Unless we fight for and defend the principles of the American Revolution with every generation--and those of us with the responsibility to safeguard the Constitution, unless we look out for it--we can lose it. The expression is: If everyone is family, no one is. If everyone is a citizen, no one is. If everyone has the benefits of citizenship even in the absence of actual citizenship, you are going to have problems. In previous eras, maybe this wasn't as much of a problem--before we had 30-million-plus noncitizens in the United States, 10 to 15 million of whom came in illegally in a 4-year period alone. Especially now, when as many people are here under these circumstances--when we couldn't have made it easier if we had tried for people to register to vote and, in fact, vote as noncitizens even though Federal law prohibits it--we have made it impossible to detect it. When you make it impossible to detect it, you make it even more impossible to prove it, to prosecute it, and to convict upon it. Shame on us, if in knowing what is happening, we do nothing. The American people know better. The American people expect more. They understand that bad things happen when we settle. So, no. Don't settle for lawlessness. Expect the rule of law. Don't settle for just letting anyone vote in Federal elections. Expect that U.S. citizenship means something and that we will fight for your right to exercise that privilege and that prerogative of the vote without allowing others to steal and dilute it. Don't settle for open borders. Expect enforcement. Don't settle for a system that openly encourages, allows, tolerates, and facilitates those bent on foreign election interference in America. Expect lawmakers who will defend the sovereign prerogatives of the United States of America. I personally believe that Almighty God has protected this land, blessing us with these great security barriers in the form of a vast ocean to our east and another vast ocean to our west and friendly countries to our north and south. We have been richly blessed not just with those things but with navigable waterways, easily travelable interstate highways, interstate airways--something our Founding Fathers couldn't have dreamed of. We have been blessed by all of these things--the interconnectedness that comes from the opportunity that is given, rather uniquely, to Americans. It is a place that is somewhat unique. Almost anywhere in the world, you can live really well if you are wealthy, but America is somewhat unique in that, if you are born here or even if you are born somewhere else and you come in here penniless, naked, afraid, hungry, thirsty, you have the reasonable hope and expectation that, if you are reasonably capable, if you work hard and you play by the rules, one day, you can retire comfortably or, in some cases, wealthy. That is something special, and that ``something'' depends upon the rule of law, and it depends upon our willingness to look out for those who are citizens of the United States. We don't do this out of malice for those who are not citizens. We do this out of love for those who are. You see, it matters when you are a citizen. It matters that much that we are willing to undertake this fight. I am willing to continue this fight as long as it takes. I will keep coming back to the Senate floor day after day, week after week, month after month if it takes that long--and, yes, I intend to do that. We will stay on this bill as long as it takes to get it passed. I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep. I will stop at nothing until this is done.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. You yielded.

Mr. LEE. I am asking a question, sir. Are you not willing--

Mr. LEE. If you read the text at the beginning on page 12, line 22, which makes clear--

Mr. LEE. No. No. It is not one. It is many. I am going to focus on--

Mr. LEE.--inaccuracy on the bill.

Mr. LEE. Will the gentleman yield for a question?

Mr. LEE. Madam President, I want to thank my friend and distinguished colleague, the Senator from Ohio, for his observations, for his insights on this. This is one of many true talents we have in the Senate. He is particularly well qualified in this area, given his experience in the State of Ohio with mastering the election laws of that State and the Federal election laws that overlap with State election laws. I am not sure there is anyone in the Senate, currently or who has ever served here, who has a greater knowledge of these laws and the ways that they intersect. For the same reasons articulated by the Senator from Ohio, I think this is an exceptionally good idea. It is not every bill where it makes sense to separate out a provision, try to pass that provision on its own, separate from the rest of the text of the bill, but this is one of those instances where it makes sense. Don't get me wrong. Neither I nor the Senator from Ohio are suggesting that we still don't need the rest of the SAVE America Act. That is not our point. The point is that these are separately divisible such that they could be enacted separately, and insofar as there is a greater degree of consensus with regard to the voter ID component of the SAVE America Act than there are with regard to the citizenship components, it makes sense for us to get this done now. Let's pass it. Let's pass it right now. Let's pass it unanimous consent. Let's make this law, and then we can proceed back to deal with the rest of the issues within the SAVE America Act. This is what progress looks like. This is what consensus building looks like. And I thank my friend from Ohio for raising this. Look, no matter how you feel about the rest of the provisions of the bill, it is not too much to ask somebody to show who they are when they show up on voting day. That provision is very simple. Let's get this passed. Let's get it done right now.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I appreciate the passion and the remarks provided by my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from Delaware. I do feel the need to respond to a couple of things, and a couple of things that were said previous to that by the Senator from Michigan. With regard to the Senator from Delaware, there are a number of claims made that are very serious; and because they are very serious, they need to be responded to immediately. She used terms like ``poll tax,'' ``Jim Crow 2.0,'' talking about adding costs as if we are charging someone to be able to have ballot access to be able to vote, which would be a poll tax. We ended that some 60 years ago by a constitutional amendment. This is not that. Not only are we not charging someone to vote, but we are not charging someone to register to vote; nor are the documentary requirements in place anything that would cost any individual any money at all. It would not cost them a single penny because even if you don't have every document that you need in order to establish citizenship, something that is already required by a whole host of other laws--familiar to most Americans would be in the labor and employment context, where every time you start a new job as an American citizen, in the United States as an employee, you have to fill out an I-9 form, and you have to provide a very specific set of documents to establish citizenship. You may do so with a U.S. passport establishing citizenship. If you don't have a U.S. passport, you may do so with a birth certificate, together with a photo ID. A Social Security card can also come into play, but it is a fairly limited set. What we have established in this bill is far more flexible than that. We have added a bunch of other documents. We tried to be as expansive and as inclusive as humanly possible in order to do that. And then we provided a failsafe--a failsafe that I have yet to hear any of my colleagues across the aisle refer to when making these very aggressive accusations that this is a poll tax, that this is Jim Crow 2.0, or that this is going to disenfranchise women or people of particular racial minorities. It is just not true. They are ignoring the existence of the provision that begins on line 22, page 12, of the bill and continues onto the next page, which says that if for any reason or no reason at all you don't have the necessary documents--any of them or all of them; you have none of them--you can still handle this by an affidavit that you can write out, thus putting the burden on the State to confirm or refute the underlying facts establishing your citizenship, whether citizenship through natural born citizen status, by virtue of the circumstances at your birth, at the time of your birth, making you a citizen or the circumstances that led to your naturalization; you were a naturalized citizen. That does not cost anyone a single dollar, and it puts the burden on the State to track down the necessary background so that the State can certify you. So these arguments are not only missing the point; they become aggressively wrong to the point of just being flatout false, demonstrably false. So we can hear this over and over and over again, but it doesn't change the fact that, in the bill, nobody is charged a thing to vote-- not one person. And so when we hear about this being costly, that just isn't true. Likewise, another comment was made by my colleague from Delaware referring to a vote-by-mail provision, referring to some more sweeping changes that are made in a separate amendment that are not part of this bill right now. This bill has two principal provisions. One deals with establishing proof of citizenship at the time of voter registration. The other deals with photo ID at the time of voting. This one doesn't do that. Yes, one or more amendments have been filed that would expand that to include some significant restrictions on mail-in balloting. That is not what is being debated on the floor right now. I have no objection to anybody wanting to raise those now, given that the amendments have been filed and there has been some talk of this. But just to be clear, the bill on the floor doesn't contain those. I also need to respond to a couple of the more egregious points that were made by the preceding Senator, the Senator from Michigan. Among other things, she repeated some of the same false accusations that this would somehow disenfranchise married women. It absolutely, emphatically, would not. In addition to making it very easy for someone who has all the other documentation but maybe doesn't have a marriage certificate backing up the name change or maybe they are missing all of them, again, you go back to page 12, line 22. Any person, whether they have changed their name or are missing some of their documentation or all of it, may establish it by affidavit, putting the burden back on the State elections official. The Senator from Michigan also made some curious claims with regard to the Constitution, with regard to federalism and the relationship between States and the Federal Government. Among other things, she insisted that the Founding Fathers--those who wrote the Constitution, those who ratified it--were emphatic about the fact that they did not want, as she put it, the Federal Government running elections. Well, there is some truth to that, but her ultimate conclusion is 180 degrees opposite of what the Constitution says and what they did and what the words say, though it is very important for us to do this to make sure that we are talking about the same things. So if you go to the Constitution--go to article I, section 4, clause 1. It doesn't talk about them because it doesn't need to talk about them, the States conducting their own elections for State offices. That goes without saying that the States are in charge of that. But it does talk--in article I, section 4, clause 1--about the fact that the State governments will be in charge of setting up rules and regulations governing the conduct of elections for Federal officials. And it also says, right after that, in the very same sentence, ``but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations,'' and that is what we are doing here. Because these involve Federal offices, we have the authority to set important terms and conditions specifically for Federal offices. It is not that we are encroaching on any constitutional power; this is our power. It may lay dormant insofar as we choose not to exercise it. But it is not currently dormant. In fact, we legislated on a number of occasions; and there are at least four or five, maybe six major pieces of existing Federal law that deal specifically with the States' conduct of Federal elections, separate and apart from another very serious Federal criminal penalty that makes it a felony for a noncitizen to vote in a U.S. election. So in all these respects, the Congress can, it may, it is expressly authorized to legislate, and it has indeed legislated. Among other things, it legislated with the NVRA, passed in 1993. It is the NVRA specifically and the manner in which it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court and implemented that necessitates these provisions--specifically, the citizenship provisions--of the SAVE America Act because but for the Supreme Court's ruling in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona in 2013, a case decided some 20 years after the NVRA was enacted by Congress in 1993, the Court in that case said the States may not even inquire into someone's citizenship, may not require proof of it even where they suspect that some voters might be noncitizens. Now, that interpretation was wrong. It was contrary to the text, to the structure, to the original public meaning of that statute. It was wrong, but it is nonetheless conclusive. It is a majority opinion of the Supreme Court. It hasn't been overturned. And that is why this is necessary. So to call this a federalism problem, to call this an overreach by the U.S. Government into the exclusive domain of the States, is literally not true. Why? Well, because in the first place, the Constitution itself makes it Federal, and it is necessarily Federal. I would add to that that that is even more important here because this bleeds into another one of the Federal Government's exclusive powers and exclusive abilities; namely, the ability to identify and ascertain the citizenship of any American citizen. That is not the role of the States, nor do the States have the comprehensive databases that the Federal Government does have. The Federal Government has the ability, conclusively, to determine whether or not somebody is a citizen. The States do not, and that is yet another important reason for us to make that determination. It is also relevant that this is where we get into trouble with a number of these blue States--the Democrat Governors and Democrat legislature States--that are refusing even to talk to the Federal authorities who run the SAVE database within the Department of Homeland Security. Remember, it is against the law for a noncitizen to vote in a Federal election, and that is why we have these laws and these systems and this database, the SAVE database, already set up. Yet a number of these blue States--a whole lot of them--are refusing even to talk to Federal authorities, even to share with them what, if anything, that they are doing to make sure that noncitizens are not voting in U.S. elections. This has become a problem of especially great concern in recent years given that, in some States--a handful of at least four or five States and the District of Columbia--now have in place systems where, in some local elections within their State's jurisdiction, noncitizens are openly, by State law, allowed to vote in those elections. Therefore, when they register to vote, they have a voter registration file. Basic questions have been asked of them: How do you differentiate those who are noncitizens who have registered to vote in your State, and how do you make sure that they don't get ballots to vote in a Federal election; for example, for a U.S. House of Representatives race or a U.S. Senate race? They have refused to answer the question. They have refused to cooperate. They have hidden these details. These are important details, details that we have constitutional authority, a moral obligation, and a legal obligation to look into to make sure that our laws are faithfully executed, and they refuse utterly to cooperate. If that is not chilling, I don't know what is. My friend and colleague from Michigan also implied that there is a--I don't know--some sort of de minimus, marginal concern, in her State and every other State, about noncitizens registering to vote. Oh, it happens every once in a while. Somebody gets in there. We remove them. But let's remember--I looked up some articles on this. I have one right here from a publication called the Michigan Bridge. One of the ways that they found a handful of noncitizens registered to vote was in a sort of haphazard way. They found 15 just by doing something very simple. They compared a list of people who had gone into court after being summoned for jury duty. Jury duty, remember, typically turns on what they call the wheel, a random selection from among registered voters in the jurisdiction. You are called up if you are a registered voter, randomly, to serve on jury duty. Periodically, in Michigan and in many other States, people will show up for jury duty. There are all kinds of tricks that people use to try to avoid jury duty if they don't want to. This one may or may not be a trick in some circumstances, and in many circumstances it wasn't. People were truthfully saying: I am not a citizen; therefore, I may not, must not, cannot, will not serve as a juror. So somebody came up with the idea: Let's compare a list of--I don't know--250 or so who happened to have made that argument; then they compared them against Michigan's voter registration database. And they found that at least 15 of those individuals were noncitizens who had registered to vote. That is a far cry from saying that there are only 15 noncitizens registered to vote in the State of Michigan, when you consider the haphazard, random way in which they found this out. It would suggest not only that there could be more but that there likely are a lot more because most people aren't getting called in for jury duty, and most who are aren't necessarily invoking this defense of: I can't serve; I won't serve; I may not serve because I am not a U.S. citizen. Finally, with regard to the federalism point, I find it very curious that this argument continues to surface, and it surfaces, in particular, from our Democratic colleagues. And the reason I say that is that, all of a sudden, they are very concerned about federalism, about maintaining the sanctity of the distinction between that which is State authority and that which is Federal. That is important to me. I focus on a few things more than that. I think the core structural provisions of the Constitution--the vertical protection that we call federalism and the horizontal protection that we call separation of powers--are as important as any other feature in the Constitution. And when we deviate from those, we cause all kinds of ripples downstream. So I am very sensitive to these issues. I want to avoid any semblance of trampling on States' sovereign authority. This, sir, is not that--and especially when we hear this from those who, just a few years ago, during the Congress that ranged between January 3, 2021, and January 3, 2023, in which both Chambers of Congress were controlled by Democrats and we had a Democratic President, President Biden. During that time, they supported legislation known as H.R. 1. Now, if you want to see a Federal takeover of elections, H.R. 1 was that. It was vast. It was sweeping. It covered all sorts of things that the Federal Government has no business taking over in elections. Among other things, it would have designated every single voting jurisdiction in the entire United States of America, regardless of what part of the country they were in, regardless of what, if any, history they may have had with past de facto or de jure discrimination or segregation of their State, subjected them all to preclearance; meaning, anytime they passed any law affecting the way votes were cast, precincts were drawn or otherwise, they would have to go to a Democratic political appointee inside the Department of Justice to seek a ``Mother, may I,'' an advance blessing from the Federal sovereign, before they could make those changes. That is a violation of federalism, and that is something that, last I checked, every Democrat who now serves in the Senate who was here at the time supported. So I am sorry. I am surprised that they would make a federalism argument now in reference to a bill that focuses solely, exclusively on powers that the Federal Government does, in fact, have. And in fact, the only reason this bill is necessary is because of existing Federal law--the way it has been interpreted and the way that it is being implemented. That is the only reason we need any of this. That is not a federalism problem; that is inappropriate exercise of Federal power. We do just as much violence to federalism when we deny to the Federal sovereign the ability to exercise Federal power as we do when we do the same to the States.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I appreciate the passion that my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from the State of Nevada puts into her job, into scrutinizing legislation. I appreciate the concerns she has expressed. Now, if I believed all of the things that she said, well, just about any of the things that she said, I would be concerned too. Fortunately, for all of us, the things that she is saying about this bill are either, in some instances, incomplete, leaving out material information to complete the picture, resulting in a much different impact than has been suggested or, in other cases, they are completely wrong. Go back to a few first principles about what the bill actually does. There are two basic precepts in the bill, and the fundamental purpose of them is to make it easy to vote and harder to cheat. We do that through two principled mechanisms in the bill: One requires proof of citizenship upon voter registration, and the other requires voter ID at the time and place of voting. Now, as to the citizenship component, contrary to what was being suggested briefly for a moment, you know, I would almost like to believe from some of her remarks that this would require Americans en masse to go and immediately reregister. Perhaps I misunderstood her on that part, if I did, my apologies, but just so that there is no ambiguity at all, so that we are very clear on what it is that it does and what it is that it does not do, it doesn't require mass reregistration. If you have already registered to vote, there is nothing about that that is going to invalidate your voter registration. If you move to another State or otherwise have to register to vote as you would if you have to move, for example, from one State to another, then you will have to register at that point. But there is nothing about your existing registration that is going to be nullified just because this bill becomes law. And on the point of the proof of citizenship, there has been a lot of misunderstanding, some of it in good faith. Although the bill itself has just been characterized by my friend and colleague from Nevada as ``beyond bad faith'' and ``vile,'' those are pretty sweeping accusations, and I don't ever make those lightly on any piece of legislation. If I do, I am prepared to back them up. Those can't be backed up here. There is nothing about this that is in bad faith. There is nothing about this that is vile. This is dealing with a very commonsense problem, a problem that has been many decades in the making--decades in the making ever since, in some ways, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, NVRA, in 1993, the motor voter law. At the time, it was understood that we could allow participating States--which nearly all States participate--to set up a process whereby voters could, while applying for a driver's license at the local DMV, also register to vote. After all, it involves some of the same information to establish who you are, whether you apply for a driver's license and also when you register to vote. There are some things that have happened since then that have changed the landscape. One of them has been that 20 years after the enactment of the NVRA, the Supreme Court, in a case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, concluded that the NVRA preempts out the States ability to even request any type of documentation or other proof of citizenship. Even if they are aware of circumstances suggesting that some would-be voters are, in fact, not citizens, they are prohibited from doing so. Remember, all you have to do under the NVRA form is sign your name after checking a box, saying: Yes, I would like simultaneously to register to vote. So, if the States are then prohibited from even inquiring into citizenship--attempting to document it, to prove it, or otherwise--then there is no way to make this happen. As a result of that, it leaves open this open, gaping wound. We now have an estimated 30 million-plus noncitizens residing in this country. That leads to another development that is relevant to this. Over the years, there were differences of opinion between the States as to whether, to what extent, and in what circumstances to offer driver's licenses to noncitizens. In some cases, they would issue them to noncitizens as long as they were lawfully here. In other cases, they wouldn't issue them to any. Over the years, it has evolved to the point where, in nearly every State, you can get a driver's license as a noncitizen; and in 19 States, plus the District of Columbia, you can get a driver's license even if you are in the United States unlawfully. So, in light of that fact and in light of the Supreme Court ruling in 2013 saying that the States, even if they have reason to believe some voters are not eligible because they are not citizens--and they can't look into it further because the NVRA, supposedly, preempted them out. As wrong as I think that ruling was as a matter of statutory interpretation, it is conclusive, and it stands to this day. Then you add to that the fact that we had an estimated 10 to 15 million people enter the country unlawfully between 2021 and 2025. When you add all that up together--and it becomes even more startling--you realize that, in several States, they made a decision to allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections. In those cases, there is still voter registration that goes into that, and those States, along with the most blue States in America, have refused to enter into any kind of memorandum of understanding or otherwise cooperate or enter into a cooperative agreement with Federal Agencies to ascertain whether, to what extent, and under what circumstances there might be noncitizens registered to vote in their States, nor have they been willing to cooperate with the Federal authorities who manage the so-called SAVE database within the Department of Homeland Security. They haven't been willing to show them any methodology or any techniques that they use in those particular States that allow some noncitizen voting to occur in local elections. They have done nothing to show how it is that they separate out those voter registration files from the voter registration files of those who are eligible to vote in Federal elections. This creates a genuine vulnerability, one that we couldn't, in good faith, just overlook and pretend doesn't exist. Let me just say that, insofar as people find concerns with the methods that we have allowed you to use when establishing your citizenship at the time of voter registration, if we have left out some form of documentation that should have been included to make this easier, let us know. I would love to consider that. But the truth is, we were very inclusive with it. One important thing to keep in mind is that this is not the only circumstance in which Americans are routinely required to establish their citizenship. Perhaps the most familiar one on the books currently exists in the context of labor and employment. Every time any American starts a new job with a new employer inside the United States, he or she is required to fill out a form called the I-9. When you fill out the I-9, if you are an American, then you have to prove that you are a citizen. It is a pretty rigid, fairly inflexible standard. One technique involves showing a U.S. passport establishing citizenship. Another involves a combination of a birth certificate, a photo ID, a Social Security card, et cetera, but that is about it. That is about as far as the options go. There are additional options that we have worked into the SAVE America Act, including, for example, that subset of Real ID driver's licenses. Not all Real ID driver's licenses establish citizenship. Some of them do; some of them don't. If you happen to have one of those that establishes that, you can accept that. Certain Tribal membership cards are also eligible because they establish citizenship. Not all of them do. We try to identify those that do. But most importantly--and this is the part that often goes overlooked--when we hear comments from the other side of the aisle in this Chamber, it is that there is a catchall provision dealing with all of these circumstances and any deficit that we may have left out. It also deals with the problem of those who maybe can't find some other documentation. Let's say, if you are someone who has gotten married and you have changed your name after getting married and you have got the rest of your documents but you can't find your marriage certificate, we have got you taken care of. The same provision in the same part of the bill also deals with individuals who may have lost all of their documentation either because it was eaten by their dog or maybe their house burned down yesterday and all of their documents are missing or because they never had them to begin with or their crazy Aunt Madge, for no reason at all, scooped up all the documents, took them to the landfill, disposed of them, and nobody can find them--or maybe you just never had them to begin with for whatever reason. These things happen. This bill doesn't cast any judgment about these people. This bill doesn't desire, in any way, shape, or form, to disenfranchise those people or to make them ineligible to register to vote. In fact, it makes it incredibly easy. The provision to which I am referring to often goes overlooked. More or less, universally, it goes overlooked from across the aisle. It starts on page 12 of the House-passed SAVE America Act, which we are debating right now. The bill on the table, at page 12, line 22, and following through the text going on to the next page, makes clear that, even if you are missing some of your documentation or even all of it-- regardless of the reason--and you want to register to vote, you can still do so by writing out an affidavit. It establishes a process whereby a stock affidavit structure could be recommended by a committee that has long existed to help facilitate some of these election issues. Each State would then fine-tune the process that they would utilize in their State whereby the would-be voter writes out a sworn statement, under penalty of perjury, outlining the circumstances that give them citizenship--meaning, if they were born in the United States or are otherwise natural born citizens of the United States--perhaps if they were born outside but to U.S. citizen parents residing abroad at the moment--and were at the moment of their birth, by virtue of the circumstances of their birth, entitled to birthright citizenship as of the moment of their birth, then they are natural born citizens. They can establish those basic facts. Then the burden falls upon the State to confirm or refute the truthfulness of those things. States have access to databases by which they can compare and contrast what the voter says in the affidavit, saying: Yes, I don't have my documents, but I am a citizen, and here is why and here are the relevant dates or date ranges to consider. It becomes the State's burden. No American citizen need shell out a single dollar. This is one of the other arguments that I frequently hear raised: that not every American has a passport. Well, yes, that is true. They also go on to say: Well, a passport costs money--about 200 bucks. That is also true. Nobody should have to go out and get a passport just to vote. If they have got one, great--it makes it easy to establish citizenship--but you don't need to have one. You don't have to shell out a single dime to register to vote under this bill, nor do you have to go out and get duplicate documents or be left out in the cold because you can't find your documents or they never existed or you never had them or your house burned down. Whatever the case, this is taken care of; but this, too, was ignored by my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from Nevada. This question is startling because we hear over and over again how people are going to be left out in the cold. Yet every American who has ever had a job as an employee with an American company in the United States of America has had to establish their citizenship under standards using documents that are far less forgiving, far more rigid, far less flexible than what we allow here. Now, look, it is theoretically possible--not likely but theoretically possible--that there are other ways of establishing citizenship not yet contemplated in this bill that would still do the job. If so, bring those ideas forward. Help us improve the bill. We would be happy to do it. I think we have made it as easy as we possibly could have. I would love to hear those ideas, but that is not what we are hearing. They are, instead, wanting to engage in scaremongering tactics in order to make people fear that they are suddenly going to be disenfranchised; that they are suddenly going to face what some are really disingenuously calling a poll tax and dishonestly suggesting that this will cost anyone money. There is not a reason for anyone to shell out a single dime, a single nickel, a single penny--or fraction thereof--in order to register to vote. So, when we look at the proof of citizenship, it is simply not fair to point to any one of these documents in isolation and explain the reasons that some people might not have them, might never have had them, might have lost them, and why it is such a travesty that people will be disenfranchised without them unless they either spend money or spend days or weeks hunting down all the relevant documentation because there are other, easier ways to establish that. If you have got ways of making it even easier, while satisfying this demand that we make sure that only those who are citizens are voting, let's bring them forward. It is curious, moreover, in getting back to the States--not just the States in which they currently allow lawful votes to be cast in some local elections by known admitted noncitizens. But beyond that, there is a wide range of States, mostly with Democrat Governors and/or Democrat legislatures, that are refusing to cooperate at all with Federal authorities to share anything about their voter registration files, to share the information to make sure that those voting in Federal elections are, in fact, U.S. citizens. Now, look, this is part of the cooperative federalism model that is built into the Constitution itself. There are certain responsibilities that belong to the U.S. Government, and it is as equally important to respect those powers that are distinctively, unavoidably, necessarily, and by the text and structure of the Constitution, Federal. It is important to keep those in Federal hands just as it is important to reserve to the States the powers that are reserved to the States, not under Federal and not prohibited to the States by the Constitution. Both are equally important to federalism, and bad things happen when we disrespect either. Under article I of the Constitution, we have the power--it is our authority, and I believe it is our duty--to set basic terms and conditions relevant specifically to these Federal elections--elections for the U.S. House of Representatives and elections to the U.S. Senate. Those are, after all, Federal races. And which government is it--the State or local level?--that ascertains and has records sufficient to establish, confirm, or refute citizenship? Well, it is this government. In fact, one of the very first provisions of article I, section 8 of the Constitution--outlining Federal power by outlining the powers granted to Congress--involves laws dealing with, you know, immigration, naturalization, and citizenship. It is this government that is the only Government of the United States--no one State has the capacity to do that--to establish or refute the existence of citizenship. So why are so many States that happen to be run by the Democratic Party refusing entirely to cooperate--to enter into memoranda of understanding or otherwise cooperate--with Federal Agencies whose job it is to go through and figure out who is and who is not a citizen for the purpose of voting in Federal elections? That, too, is another reason we need the SAVE America Act. It is because this is chaos if we don't do that. If we don't do that, then our laws are dead letter. Our law is saying that only U.S. citizens may vote, and if a non-U.S. citizen votes in a Federal election, he or she has committed a serious felony offense. People often will point to the dearth, the paucity, the rarity of instances in which voter fraud--particularly voter fraud based on noncitizen voting--has been detected, charged, fully prosecuted, and resulted in a conviction. Yes, these are few. These are very, very few overall that have happened, and there are reasons it is very few. When you have a system of laws in place, it makes it very easy to register to vote even for those who might not be citizens, and it makes it impossible for a State to even inquire, even where actual doubts exist, as to someone's citizenship. You make it almost impossible to detect and very, very difficult to prosecute. Voting is, moreover, something that happens in a finite time and place. Most of the time, by the time it all happens, the matter is moot, and so it can be difficult to move on. This is why sometimes I will compare this to when people say that we don't need to put these procedures in place because it is already against the law for noncitizens to vote and therefore they don't vote and that is why it is so rare. That is a little bit like saying we don't need laws that require liquor stores to make people show ID before they buy alcohol because we already have laws prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages to children. If we didn't have ID laws or record keeping requirements in place for such things, that, too, would be very, very difficult--close to impossible--to detect and enforce and prosecute and result in convictions. So, look, this debate will continue. I look forward to hearing any contributions, any suggestions as to how we could make it better, more inclusive. But the status quo in which we simply pretend that this does not happen is untenable. We already know, based on the handful of States that have started their own investigations, that there are thousands just in the last year or two alone. We learned of thousands of voter registration files that have existed that have involved noncitizens. With as many noncitizens as have entered this country recently and the development of our laws, it would be folly, it would be morally irresponsible for us to assume this does not happen. But let's keep our debate focused on truth, on facts, on what the bill actually says and not on what it doesn't say.