Mike Lee

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I appreciate the insight offered by my friend and colleague, the distinguished senior Senator of the State of California. He is someone I enjoy working with on multiple committees. He is a brilliant scholar and statesman, and I appreciate his arguments today. Now, I want to point out what we didn't hear in his argument. At no point do we have any effort to address the merits of this legislation, the merits of voter ID laws. Instead, what we have heard from Senate Democrats so far this year on this issue has been: This isn't necessary. We don't need it. It is needless as voter fraud doesn't happen. That has, of course, been proven very much false in recent months. Then they moved on to arguments like: Well, requiring voter ID laws would harm rural Americans or urban Americans. And then one day it is: It will harm older Americans. Another day, it is younger Americans. At times, they called them racist or sexist, which is odd because arguing that women are less likely to have and be able to produce a photo ID or that members of this or that race are able to do that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't comport with our common experience, with our common understanding. People of all races, people of both sexes, people in rural America and urban America and suburban America and everything in between, they have photo IDs because in this day and age, you have to have photo IDs. That is what they have been arguing so far this year. Now, today, what we did hear, most of what we just heard from my friend and colleague, one of the U.S. Senate's most gifted minds, was: Well, it is too late--too late. You can't change the rules midstream because early voting has already happened. Well, this is convenient after they have argued over and over and over again: We don't need this and it is wrong and it is racist and it is sexist. Now, the argument has shifted to: Well, it is too late. Sorry. You lose. So they have secured the delay and gotten us now to the point where we are just weeks before the election. Early voting is already commencing in certain parts of the country. And now the argument is: Sorry. Too late. So I would love to find out from my colleague from California, does this mean he would be willing to accept this legislation, to pass it, to pass it today, right now, if only we included a delayed implementation clause such that the effective date would occur at some point after this November's midterm election? I would love to know that, and I am hoping, at the conclusion of my brief remarks now, that he will tell us that. Then he moves on and asks the question: What is really going on, having never made any argument against the merits of this legislation. He makes it about time, and then he moves on and tries to attribute ill motives to me, to Senator Husted, to Senate Republicans, and to the Trump administration for supporting this; ill motives founded on sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt, creating chaos in the elections, dogs and cats living out in the streets, a scene right out of the Book of Revelation. This doesn't make any sense, especially given that we could remedy that if only he would agree to just a simple delayed implementation measure. And even if we didn't, what is the worst case scenario if we passed this right now and the House of Representatives passed it tomorrow with an immediate effective date? The worst thing that can happen is that people show up on election day and they are asked to pull out a document that they produce several times a month; in many cases, several times a week; or, in some cases, several times each day every day. It is not that big of a deal; in fact, our election security depends on it and, frankly, should require it. Finally, then my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from California tries yet again to distract attention away from this knowing, understanding perhaps, that this is supported by 83-84 percent of all Americans--Democrat, Independent, and everything in between. And it seems it is almost right out of ``Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure,'' where they are confronting an enemy, and not knowing what else to do, they say: Look, it is the Goodyear Blimp. And while the guy they are arguing with turns to look for the Goodyear Blimp, which is not, in fact, there, they run in the other direction. He then tries to make it about tariffs and asks that instead of this, we consider and we pass this bill S. 5390, which I saw for the first time only minutes ago, that has absolutely nothing to do with anything addressed by this legislation I am trying to pass here today, nothing to do with election security. Fine, let's talk about tariffs on another occasion, but that is not what we are talking about here. This is a distraction. It is a distraction away from something that the American people expect and demand us to do something about. So for these reasons, I cannot, I will not, I must not agree to those terms that we are just going to set this aside and move on to and pass this tariff bill that has nothing to do with election security. On that basis, I object and hope that my friend and colleague will tell us whether he is willing to agree to this legislation with delayed implementation mechanisms.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, American voters deserve to have an election system that they can trust. Fair, safe, secure elections are a key hallmark of any society's ability to be able to claim the status of democratic self-rule. If you don't have safe, secure, independent, reliable elections, you have a widespread set of problems that will cascade and ultimately constrain liberty. Americans intuitively understand this. But at the moment, our elections are far less secure than they should be. Why? Well, because so much of it operates on the honor system. Now, an honor system is great. It works well if you are dealing with a smaller group of people, a closed-loop system in which everyone knows everyone else. And the honor system works well also if you don't have a real risk of somebody claiming to be someone they are not and if they don't have the ability to inflict harm on those who play by the rules. It is one of many reasons why there are a whole host of activities that, in our common experience, necessarily require someone to prove that they are who they claim to be. You experience this anytime you go to the bank, when you go to the doctor, to the pharmacy, when you are picking up theater tickets at will call--all kinds of circumstances. And, you know, one of the more familiar ones for Americans who routinely travel by plane is that when going through TSA, you have to prove who you are as well. If you leave the country, whether by land or by sea or by air or some other means, you are likely going to need a passport when you leave the country and when you come back into the country. These are all just a few--many circumstances in which it matters whether you are who you claim to be, so much so that it is important that you do more than just say: Trust me. I am who I claim to be. In the context of voting, sometimes we will refer to this as self- attestation, which is just a fancy way of saying it is the honor system: Trust me. I am who I claim to be. But, look, with good reason, it is not sufficient, self-attestation. ``Trust me. I am who I claim to be'' isn't enough when you board a commercial flight, when you purchase alcohol, or even when you attend the Democratic National Convention. Those are just a few of the circumstances where they don't allow you to operate on the honor system because they know that it matters whether you are who you claim to be. Now, even for something as simple and relatively low stakes as obtaining the coveted never-ending pasta pass from the Olive Garden-- even there, they don't allow the honor system. Even there, you have got to produce ID to show that you are who you claim to be. It should not be any easier for someone to get away with voter fraud at a polling location on voting day than it is to cheat the Olive Garden through its never-ending pasta pass--and yet that is exactly where we are today. We allow the honor system. Even though we have laws that prohibit things like noncitizen voting, those laws have been rendered difficult--essentially impossible--to enforce, as against those who would abuse self-attestation in countless circumstances. Those are being revealed; those are becoming known. That thing that they claim never happens--voter fraud or noncitizen voting-- just keeps happening over and over and over again--especially for something that many like to claim never happens. Well, it does, and we need to take steps to prevent it from happening. That is why I introduced the SAVE America Act. The SAVE America Act has two fundamental objectives--two very basic unassailable objectives: Let's make it easy to vote and let's make it hard to cheat. We have got to have both of those. The SAVE America Act does that through two different mechanisms: One, it requires, at the time of a new voter registration, for you to establish that you are, in fact, a U.S. citizen. And, second, it requires that on election day, at the time of voting, you show up with a photo ID--with a photo identification--so that you can prove that you are who you claim to be. Both of these things would make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. You have to have both of them. If you just make it easy to vote and don't make it hard to cheat, you are going to have that much more incentive and opportunity for someone to cheat, and we don't want that in this country. Americans overwhelmingly support voter ID laws for that reason. We are talking 83 percent of Americans, give or take a percentage point or two, depending on the poll. But Americans, by a margin of more than 4 to 1, favor voter ID laws, and we need one here. Now, with the SAVE America Act, we have heard some objections; we have heard some arguments. Nearly all of those arguments focus on the first component of the SAVE America Act. And at times when the SAVE America Act has been the pending business before the Senate floor, as it was just a few months ago, the arguments that we heard--probably somewhere between 95 and 99 percent of the arguments--coming from Democrats against the SAVE America Act were focused on the voter registration component: having to establish proof of citizenship beyond self-attestation at the time of a new voter registration. Now, those arguments were ill-founded. In every single circumstance, they were founded in something that resulted from a mischaracterization of law, a mischaracterization of fact, or, in many circumstances, both. They were not well founded, but they were often and strongly expressed. It is one of the reasons why my friend and colleague, the Senator from Ohio, Senator Jon Husted and I were talking one day, a few months ago, and decided: Let's try an experiment. Let's see what would happen. Given that nearly every one of their arguments coming from the other side of the aisle against the SAVE America Act is focused not on the voter ID component but, rather, on the voter-registration proof-of- citizenship component, let's run with something. Let's introduce something that would just contain the voter ID component of the SAVE America Act--this, after all, would help us figure out where the weaknesses are, what can pass and what can't pass--given that they almost never have argued against voter ID while opposing the SAVE America Act. And, in fact, many, if not most, of my Democrat colleagues in the U.S. Senate, at one point or another, in the very recent past-- many of them this year, in fact--have said that they support voter ID laws. So let's introduce something that just focuses on the voter ID component of the SAVE America Act. Now, this bill--and, again, this overall approach--is one that Americans overwhelmingly support. We are talking 83, 84 percent of all Americans--Democrat, Republican, Independent, everybody mixed in. They support this. Why? Well, because it is good common sense. Everybody understands it. There are myriad circumstances in which it matters whether you are who you claim to be, and nowhere is that more important to the proper functioning of our constitutional Republic than it is in the context of voting and having secure elections. We have also seen that the need for these things has been enhanced dramatically in recent years, not only with the flood of noncitizens entering this country--we have now got, I think, between 30 and 35 million noncitizens residing in this country. It is now easier than ever for them, especially in light of the Supreme Court's botched interpretation of the National Voter Registration Act. Over the strong dissent of Justice Alito, the Supreme Court essentially told the States that absent new Federal legislation--legislation in the form of the SAVE America Act--self-attestation is essentially sufficient in that circumstance. So Americans overwhelmingly accept this. This is a rare issue. Now, bipartisanship is not itself all that rare, but bipartisanship to this degree--we are talking 83, 84 percent of all Americans agreeing with something like this--is significant. That doesn't happen every day. What is even more unusual, though, is when you have an issue where 83, 84 percent of all Americans strongly support a position, as they do in the case of voter ID laws, but then that overwhelming support doesn't match what elected Federal lawmakers believe. So it is not 83 or 84 percent that Members of this body support that. No, it is much closer to 50-50, and it breaks down almost perfectly along partisan lines. So there is a real disparity here. Americans overwhelmingly support voter ID, but in this body, it is a different matchup. But, look, what we have done is we have taken the least controversial part of the SAVE America Act, put it into this legislation sponsored by Senator Jon Husted, drawn from my bill, the SAVE America Act, just the voter ID component, the most popular form of it--the argument that very, very few Democrats have focused on when opposing the SAVE America Act--and let's push this forward. It is also significant that my friend and colleague Senator Husted was himself a former top elections official in the State of Ohio. He understands the importance of voter ID and wants to move that forward, and I applaud and congratulate him for his many efforts in support of the SAVE America Act and this narrower subset of this, which he has introduced. It is unthinkable, really, that any lawmaker--Democrat, Republican, or otherwise--would oppose something like this. And you have to wonder why--why oppose it? Why oppose it any more than you would claim that it would be unfair that you can't withdraw money from a bank account without ID or you can't board an aircraft without a photo ID? This approach, the self-attestation approach--the ``trust me, bro'' approach--does not, should not, must not be allowed to work in the context of our sacred elections. It is not good for America to not have these laws in place. It is especially bad for America when, in some States--including and especially the State of California--not only do they not require voter ID, but, as I understand it, they have a law in place that imposes a penalty--I believe it is a criminal penalty--if you even ask someone about an ID on election day at a voting place. This is crazy. It is upside down. It is backward. So we need a Federal voter ID law, and we can pass one right now. We can pass one right now, and we must. To that end, Mr. President, notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 547, S. 5271; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. LEE

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

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, if the motion for the Senate to adjourn with pro forma sessions scheduled until September 14 would have been a recorded rollcall vote, I would have voted no.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand adjourned until 10 a.m. on Thursday, July 30; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, morning business be closed, and the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of Executive Calendar No. 6, S. Res. 817, with no amendments or motions in relation to the executive resolution in order; further, that notwithstanding rule XXII, Senator Murray or her designee be authorized to return the Senate to legislative session for the purpose of making a motion to proceed to Calendar No. 533, S.J. Res. 199, and the Senate vote on the motion to proceed at 11:30 a.m.; further, that if Senator Gillibrand or her designee makes a motion to discharge S.J. Res. 181, while the Senate is in legislative session, the Senate vote on the motion to discharge immediately following disposition of S.J. Res. 199, and the Senate resume executive session; further, that at 1:45 p.m., the Senate vote on adoption of the resolution; finally, if S. Res. 817 is adopted, that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the Senate resume legislative session.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 818, which is at the desk.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate resume legislative session and be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, we see a lot of debates around here on a lot of different topics--too many topics, in my view, given the fact that the Federal Government is a government enterprise with narrow responsibilities. In Federalist 45, James Madison described the powers of the Federal Government as few and defined while describing those reserved to the States as numerous and indefinite. We are in charge of national defense, weights and measures, trademarks, copyrights and patents, regulating trade or commerce between the States with foreign nations and with Tribes, bankruptcy laws, intellectual property laws, coastal roads, declaring war, granting letters of marque and reprisal, serving as the sole sovereign lawmaking authority for what we now call the District of Columbia, the city where we stand today. That is about it. There are a few other powers, but the lion's share of it can be found somewhere in that list of relatively limited authorities that I just described. We venture sometimes too far afield from those powers, and that is one of the reasons why a lot of things come up. My point in reciting all this is that in all the debates we see, which probably range further than they should, we see some things that are weighty and some things that are more on the trivial side. Just to cite one random hypothetical, one minute, you could see something debated and maybe passed on this floor recognizing, I don't know, National Sofa Care Week or something like that that goes by sort of with a yawn, and then the next moment, we will be debating something more weighty, something more significant and more definitely relevant to the U.S. Government's powers. Under article I, sections 4 and 5, this legislation that we have been discussing this evening, H.R. 7008, deals with a couple of core powers that Congress has, one of them involving the regulation of behavior and activities on the part of Members of Congress, Members of the House and the Senate. In the second instance, you have the regulation of the casting of ballots for Federal elections--for elections for Federal office, elections for the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. We certainly have authority to act in both of those two areas. There is not a lot of dispute--in other words, there is a lot of bipartisan consensus over the fact that it is time to restrict stock buying and selling on the part of Members of Congress. It is stunning, however, that the voter ID component of H.R. 7008 is at all controversial. This one should be a no-brainer. For the American people, it is a no-brainer. Democratic voters--71 percent favor voter ID requirements. When you add Republicans--so Democrat voters and Republican voters combined--you take it up to 83, 84 percent. If you poll Republican voters alone, we are talking in the mid- to high-90 percentile range for people who support voter ID requirements. The reason for this is simple. This is obvious. It is intuitive. It is just as we have to prove who we are everywhere else we go where who you are matters and whether you are who you claim to be can make a big difference. Americans intuitively understand that whatever mild inconvenience might accompany having to provide documentation for who you are, when most of the time, that can be done with a simple card like a driver's license, for example, a passport, something like that, something showing who you are that is issued by the government--we have come to accept as a society that that is just sort of the cost of living in our country. That is part of what it takes because if we didn't do that, the alternative would be bad. You don't want to show up to your bank one day and discover that somebody else impersonating you, falsely claiming to be you, came in and withdrew all of your money. You don't want that. We don't allow people to board aircraft without a photo ID, and the reason is there are all kinds of things that can happen in the sky that are dangerous, and you don't want to make it too easy for somebody claiming to be who they are not to board an aircraft and then carry out, you know, crimes of one sort or another--acts of terrorism, perhaps. These are just a couple examples of the myriad instances in which we have to prove who we are. It is not an undue burden; it is a momentary detour from what we would otherwise be doing. Most of the time, most people, when they show up to vote, already have their wallet with them, and in their wallet, they presumably have a driver's license or another form of government-issued photo ID, so why not require them to show that? We saw tonight my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from California, contorting himself into a pretzel trying to explain why it is we can't pass this bill. To be clear, his objection, as far I can tell, didn't relate nearly as much to anything else in the bill other than the voter ID provision. That is the concern. The question is, Why is it that when 70 percent of Democrat voters and 83, 84 percent of all voters, Democrat and Republican combined--why is it that my Democrat colleagues are so adamantly opposed to this? Why do they care? Why do they want the status quo? I am always reluctant to speak on someone else's behalf because what they say--No. 1, I don't have the ability to read minds, but sometimes, what they say can give us an indication. We have had Democratic politician after Democratic politician part from their own Democratic voter base, which overwhelmingly supports voter ID, time and time and time again, showing up and saying: Oh, we don't want voter ID. Why? Now, they actually say this: We believe this would shut out a lot of our voters. What? Is that an admission that a lot of their voters aren't who they claim to be? that a lot of their voters perhaps aren't U.S. citizens and aren't eligible to vote? This ought to be concerning to everyone. It ought to be concerning especially to Democrat voters, especially in States that have elected a Democrat Senator who is now opposing any and every sort of voter ID requirement. A few months ago when we had the SAVE America Act on the floor for, I don't know, 10 blessed days--should have been longer, but it was on the floor for about 10 days. During that time, I was on the floor a lot responding to arguments that they made, and I think I heard every single argument they made. The overwhelming majority of them--and I mean probably 95-plus percent of the arguments they made against the SAVE America Act-- weren't even against the voter ID provisions of the SAVE America Act. Overwhelmingly, they were instead about the proof of citizenship issue. In fact, many of them, Democratic Senator after Democratic Senator, intimated one way or another that they are OK with voter ID requirements. So why are they opposing it? You have to ask yourself that question. In Latin, there is a word for this: ``Cui bono?'' Who benefits? Who benefits from people being able to show up and claim to be someone they are not or from someone showing up who is not entitled to vote because they are not a U.S. citizen? Who benefits from that? I can tell you it is not Republicans. Why? Well, you don't see a single Republican politician making the ridiculous, absurd arguments against voter ID and citizenship verification that these guys are making. Who benefits from illegal voting? Their words seem to suggest that they are benefiting. This issue isn't going away. The SAVE America Act isn't going away. Voter ID requirement demands aren't going away. I will be back. I will be back day after day, week after week, until this passes because the American people deserve to go to bed every night knowing that their government is run by people they themselves elected, not foreign nationals. They don't want a government that has been chosen with significant foreign influence in our elections. There was a time when the Democrats in this august Chamber--a time not so very long ago indeed--spoke of little else other than their fear of foreign election interference. If we don't face the real challenge as to foreign election interference right now, as long as we are not passing the SAVE America Act or its key components, it would appear that those who are against this are just fine now with foreign election interference. The American people shouldn't be because, again, it is not free. When somebody else votes who is not who they claim to be, when somebody else votes claiming to be a citizen and they are not a citizen, it robs hard-working Americans, actual American citizens, of their most sacred, their most fundamental right: their right to vote. No. No. We can't look the other way, nor do we, in my view, have any business taking a 6-week recess until such time as we have done everything humanly possible to get these reforms put into law. The American people deserve better than this. Most of them don't have that luxury of doing that. Now, I know it is a time-honored Senate tradition. I know it is a tradition that has its roots back to long before the advent of modern air-conditioning and to a time when Washington, DC--you know, it is typically not the most pleasant weather in Washington, and this Chamber, I am sure, became suffocatingly hot and muggy, so for a long time, we had that August recess. Well, we have air-conditioning now. We can handle it. It is true we frequently do take a recess in August, but it is not written in stone anywhere, it is not written in law anywhere that we have to do that. I would be fine doing that if we had gotten our work done. I would be fine doing that if we knew how our government was going to be funded past September 30. Right now, we have no idea. So when the government remains unfunded and we have no idea how we are going to secure an election system that, quite frankly, is recklessly, criminally insecure--we have no business leaving this Chamber for 6 weeks when we have no idea how we are going to take care of any of that. These problems are not going to solve themselves while we are gone. I remember 15 years ago when I was first sworn in. I was younger then. I had a full head of hair. I was only 39 years old. I was the youngest Member of the Senate when I got sworn in. Right after I got sworn in, we were walking one evening around the Capitol. I was showing it to my family. My daughter Eliza was 10 years old at the time. She pointed to one of the little doors out in the hallway just outside the Senate Chamber. It is a door that is maybe 18 inches tall at the most. I later learned that it was installed when they built this wing of the Capitol in the late 1850s. That was their source of water. They had a pipe in there. The custodial staff at the time used it to get water so that they could clean the floors. I didn't know that at the time. As we were walking around, my 10-year-old daughter Eliza asked me: Dad, what is that door for? Not knowing how to answer, I just said the first thing that came to mind. I said: Well, that is for the House elves. The House elves live in there. Of course, there are no House elves here, but sometimes, we act as if we are relying on the House elves to not only clean the Capitol but also clean up the messes that we make and that we leave undealt with, unaddressed legislatively while we are gone. The cavalry is not coming. We are the cavalry. The House elves aren't going to show up and do our work for us if we retreat into the sunset for 6 weeks. We have to do this. We had an opportunity tonight to make a meaningful dent in our election security problem. And it is tragic that the Democrats chose not to let this reasonable measure pass into law--a measure that 71 percent of their voters and 83 percent of all American voters support. They can't handle it--apparently because they benefit too much when people vote illegally. Shame on them for taking that position, but shame on us if we leave before the job is done. Lastly, far too much gets said around here about, Oh, we can't do X, Y, or Z because we don't have 60 votes. I get that that is said. That cannot become our anthem. That is an absurd suggestion. Now, I know it takes 60 votes to invoke cloture, but, you know, long before there even was a cloture rule--there has only been a cloture rule for 109 years. Before that time, we still had the filibuster, just no cloture. Remember, a cloture vote is just one way of breaking the filibuster. If a supermajority of Senators--under the current rule, three-fifths, 60 votes in the Senate--if 60 Senators want to force debate to come to a close even if some Senators want to continue debating, then the Senate can do so, but that is not the exclusive means by which you can break a filibuster. Other techniques are available--techniques that were available for nearly 150 years before the first cloture rule was even adopted in 1917. If you can't break a filibuster and you don't have 60 votes to bring debate to a close using cloture, you can put legislation on the floor, and you can debate it, and you can require any Senator wishing to filibuster to continue to show up and continue to speak to prolong debate. The filibuster is about speaking; it is about debating; it is not about perpetually forestalling the passing of legislation until you have 60 votes for it. Passage in this Chamber, with rare exceptions not relevant here, is set at a simple majority, at 51 votes. And if the Vice President is with you, you can do it at 50 votes. The Vice President supplies the tie-breaking vote of 51, and then it is passed. We could do that. We should be putting this measure on the Senate floor. We should be debating it for weeks on end, if necessary, cutting into weekends and long-scheduled recess time, if necessary, making clear we are going to keep debating it until it passes, and making clear that the minute those filibustering it fail to show up and continue to speak, we will call the question, and we will pass it with a simple majority. We could do that. We should do that. It takes time, yes. But time is on our side. We have got weeks in which to do this. We should do that. Now, if we don't want to do that, there are other mechanisms available to us. We could continue to attach it to other must-pass vehicles. We could also push something in the form of budget reconciliation. Now, that is a little trickier. You could bypass the need for cloture with budget reconciliation, but it has to be budgetary, and it has to meet a whole bunch of requirements. It has to be budgetary, which means it needs to manage changes in mandatory outlays or revenues; and it can't, among other things, have budgetary features that are merely incidental to policy changes. But there are ways that we could capture some of the benefits of the SAVE America Act through reconciliation. But my point is just to say there are multiple ways of skinning this cat. I don't care nearly as much which way to skin it. I would personally prefer to bring it up on the floor and debate it until it passes. I think that is the cleanest way of doing it. But I am not a purist on that. I don't insist it be my way or the highway. I am just saying we do have to do it. We can't pretend this isn't here. This will not disappear simply because we leave. The cavalry is not coming. We are the cavalry. There are no house elves who will come and fix our election security problems. So let's get this done. And for the love of all that is sacred and holy, let's not go on a 6-week recess with all of this undone. The American people deserve better.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I would like to address the Senate today regarding a bill that has been passed by the House of Representatives known as H.R. 7008. H.R. 7008 performs two badly needed functions to restore faith and integrity in our system of government: Firstly, it bans Members of Congress from using their unique access and knowledge to profit through stock market speculation; secondly, it requires something very simple, a voter ID. You have got to show an ID when you pick up something at will call if you are there to pick up tickets to the theater, if you are picking up a prescription at the pharmacy, if you are going to the bank, if you are boarding an airplane--you are doing all kinds of things that are part of Americans' day-to-day experience where it matters whether you are who you claim to be, you have got to show an ID. We should require nothing less when it comes to the exercise of one of the most fundamental rights that Americans have; that is, their right to vote. You see, when someone else votes in your place, they displace your vote. They offset your vote. If they are double voting, if they are voting when they are not allowed to vote because they are not a citizen or otherwise, if they do something foolish and they try to go and vote, they will be caught if they are asked to produce an ID at the balloting place. So this bill accomplishes both of these things. And like I say, both of them would do a lot to restore faith, confidence, and integrity in our system of government. Dealing specifically with the voter ID requirement in this legislation, this is a very straightforward requirement. When you show up to vote, you just have to show an ID, just like you do at the bank, just like you do at the pharmacy or the doctor's office or the bank or when boarding an airplane. And if you vote by mail, then that is easy to accommodate. You just include a simple photocopy of your photo ID. Now, we have gone to great lengths to make sure that everyone is taken care of here, to make sure that there is not a single U.S. citizen that would be disadvantaged or unable to vote if we were to pass this. So for those who, let's say, for whatever reason, don't have access to a photocopier and they want to vote by mail, well, we have taken that into consideration. The bill requires States to provide the public to free access to photocopy machines so they can make a photocopy of their photo ID and send it in with their mail-in ballot if that is what they are using in their State. Now, it is interesting. Right now the headquarters of the Democratic Party here in Washington, DC, displays a sign very prominently, and that sign makes clear that 100 percent of the visitors to the Democratic Party's headquarters have to show a photo ID when they enter. Now, if they have to do that--and we know they have to do that when attending the Democratic National Convention to enter the convention hall, much less participate as a voting member of the Democratic National Convention. You have to prove who you are, and you have to show that you have the right to be there and the right to participate. So far be it from us to second guess the Democratic Party in deciding people need to prove who they are to enter their convention hall or their party headquarters. We should have voters do the same thing. And Democrats are smart in doing that because, after all, they don't want somebody showing up to their convention. I mean, good heavens, what if a Republican showed up to their Democratic National Convention and tried to skew the results of their convention by pretending to be a Democrat--a Democrat delegate no less. That wouldn't be fair. So they are absolutely right to require photo ID and to require delegates to present their convention credentials so that they can show that they are who they claim to be and that they have the right to participate at their own convention. Americans at every corner of our country and at every point along the political idealogical spectrum in this country agree that this makes sense to do, specifically in the context--not just of needing to produce ID where it matters whether you are who you claim to be, but specifically in the context of voter ID, of having to produce identification at the moment you vote, at the place where you vote. Mr. President, 83 percent of American voters, in total, support voter ID, and that includes a whopping 71 percent of Democrat voters. So this is neither Republican nor Democratic. This is neither liberal nor conservative. This is simply an American issue because we don't want anyone's right to vote to be taken away. We don't want anyone disenfranchised, and that is exactly what happens when you allow someone who is not whom they claim to be, who is not entitled to vote, to show up and cast a vote, and that is wrong. So today we have got a really good opportunity to address these two issues that Americans are deeply concerned about, and I hope we can take advantage of this opportunity. Now, the vote on the House of Representatives' side of this bill-- like I say, it was just passed recently by the House of Representatives--it was bipartisan. You had Republicans overwhelmingly support it, but you also had a number of House Democrats voting with every House Republican in favor of this bill with the clean voter ID requirement attached. So we are going to be talking about this for a little while tonight, and I just want to encourage my Democratic colleagues on this side of the Capitol right here in the U.S. Senate to follow the lead of the wise Democrats who joined every Republican to vote for this in the House of Representatives. We need to get this done. We should get it done. We have the opportunity to get it done tonight, and we will be talking more about that in a moment.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, just a brief comment as we wrap up our conversation for this evening. Moments ago, we heard my friend and colleague, the Senator from Ohio, talk about identifying--the need for people to identify themselves. He talked about the fact that he, on one recent occasion, started looking for his photo ID and couldn't find it. And yet he has one. Even as he stands here today, he has got a pin on his lapel. That pin signifies that he is a U.S. Senator. So that, by itself, identifies who he is. Long before he got here, he had to prove that he was a U.S. citizen and that he was otherwise eligible to run for the U.S. Senate. When he ran for the Senate in the State of Ohio, he had to provide that documentation to the elections personnel there. He had to show up the day he voted and prove who he was. He has had to prove who he was even since he has been elected. He had to produce an election certificate from his State's chief elections authority before he could come here. Then when he started here, he had to produce an ID, as every employee has to provide to the new employer, whatever, starting a new job. And he had to prove to the satisfaction of the Secretary of the Senate that he is, in fact, the same Bernie Moreno who was elected to the U.S. Senate from the State of Ohio. You have to go through all those steps before you get to wear one of these pins. And without being able to wear one of these pins and be sworn in, you can't vote here. And the people who vote for you in most States represented by most Senators--including most Democrat Senators--have also had to show who they are. It is not too late for us to get this done, nor is it too much for us to ask the American people to do that which they have to do every single day--sometimes many times in the same day--to show that they are who they claim to be. Our right to vote, our most sacred incident of U.S. citizenship, requires nothing less.

Mr. LEE. Senator Moreno, which party was the party of Jim Crow?

Mr. LEE. It certainly is possible. And I wonder--I mean, we will have a separate conversation off the floor. I am trying to wonder which words in Spanish they uttered. I am trying to imagine them saying something like: Has this guy lost his mind? After he moved to the United States when he was 8 years old, he has now adopted the ways of North America and he has lost it. Perhaps there is something about the tropical climate of Colombia that causes them to make more sense there, but perhaps you have lost your sense now that you have moved to Ohio? Perhaps the rationale?

Mr. LEE. They wouldn't make that case if they were committed to the rule of law, and yet they have made the case. We have heard them do it. Some of them, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, have said: These are our voters. I don't know whether that was a Freudian slip, but I have heard it made several times where they say: These are our voters who would be at stake here--and then they go on about disenfranchisement. This disenfranchises no one unless it is a noncitizen who is illegally voting based on a fraudulent voter registration.

Mr. LEE. There is a justification. The justification goes something like this: Those people who might be purged from this because they are noncitizens and therefore not legally registered to vote are our voters, meaning Democrat voters.

Mr. LEE. Yes. As Cicero once said on the floor of the Roman Senate: If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice--actually, that wasn't Cicero; it was Rush in the song ``Freewill.'' But the point was made: When you are aware of something and you do nothing about it, that, by itself, is a decision. They have identified that this is an issue. And by suggesting that we move forward while doing nothing about it, that--there is an inexorable, inescapable conclusion that one derives from that, which is: They are just fine with this form of cheating. They are just fine with the very real possibility that up to 278,000 noncitizens, in those 4 States alone that we mentioned--to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands in other States that might be registered to vote illegally-- that those guys are going to vote. They are just fine with that. Let that sink in.

Mr. LEE. I think that is right. There is a part of me that is now tempted to seek to pass by unanimous consent at least that portion of the SAVE America Act that consists of a voter ID law because they themselves have said, over and over again, that they have got no problems with voter ID laws until, of course, they do have a problem with them.

Mr. LEE. Yes.

Mr. LEE. Whether you call it hypocrisy and inconsistency or something else, it can't be reconciled with what they themselves have done. Now, I have got a copy right here of a significant portion of that bill, the bill offered up by the Senate Democrats in 2021 during the 117th Congress--the so-called For the People Act. I mean, what is not to like if you are for the people? And if you are against that, apparently, you are against the people. Maybe we should have thought of that when we named the SAVE America Act. But, regardless, that horse is out of the barn. This is a part of that bill, and it is the specific part of the bill in subtitle 1, section 1709 that requires voter ID. You see, the Democrats themselves had their own voter ID act, their own voter ID legislation. This is not State legislation; this is right here in this Chamber. They wanted to pass their own voter ID law. Now, theirs is a little different than ours. Theirs is a little bit more permissive. They allow all sorts of other things, like--depending on how you read it, you could argue that a library card without your picture on it would even suffice under this. I wouldn't draw it quite like that, but the point is they were going to do something to require voter ID. Even though we might draw the boundaries a little bit differently than they do--and we, in fact, do in ours--they were doing the very same thing that they are now condemning us for doing because, if the SAVE America Act is commandeering a State issue on the part of the Federal Government, then so, too, was the For the People Act. If it is wrong to have--and if it is disenfranchisement to require--voter ID, then theirs does that, too. It is just that ours is well written. Theirs was a little bit sloppy. But, you know, it was a step, maybe, in the right direction. The point is, they have no leg to stand on when claiming that the Federal Government has no business doing this. Why? Well, because, first of all, it flatly contradicts article I, section 4 of the Constitution, which plainly does give us that authority to operate within the space as it relates to Federal elections. And, secondly, this is something they themselves have already done.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to engage in colloquy.

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

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, first of all, the Department of Homeland Security has found tens of thousands of registered noncitizens in the United States. Motion to Waive Pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive all provisions of the applicable budget resolutions. I move to waive all applicable sections of the act and all applicable budget resolutions for purposes of the pending amendment. And I ask for the yeas and nays. Vote on Motion

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, our elections need to be characterized by two things: We need to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. And we need to do that by making sure that people establish their citizenship and, therefore, their eligibility to vote when they register and that they show who they are when they show up on election day. This isn't hard. This isn't unusual. Every country in the entire world--countries you are familiar with, countries you are not; countries as wide ranging as Mexico, Brazil, India, Argentina, Peru, Botswana, Burundi-- they all have voter ID requirements. We do not. We do not want to leave this amount of power sitting on the table so that foreign powers can send forth people who are not eligible to vote in this country and vote anyway. We need to do this. The House of Representatives has passed the SAVE America Act. We now have the opportunity to vote on that same bill, the SAVE America Act, here. This bill will disenfranchise no one. It will make us all more free. It will protect the sanctity, the dignity of your vote. When we allow people who are not allowed to vote to vote we rob Americans of their vote. Let's make it easy to vote, hard to cheat. Let's pass this bill.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 5804 and ask that it be reported by number.