Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. WARNER. Madam President, first of all, I want to thank my friend, the Senator from Minnesota, Ms. Klobuchar, for her leadership and passion on this issue.

This shouldn't be that hard. I know we addressed some of the legislation she has talked about, and also earlier Senator Blumenthal came to the floor as well. I think the theme you are going to hear from all three of us is that while we may have made some progress, the truth is, we are simply not doing enough to secure our election infrastructure.

There is a series of bills that I think are common sense and, if they got to the floor, would get 75 votes and maybe even more.

Over the past few weeks, I have come to the floor a couple of times to try to move by unanimous consent my legislation known as the FIRE Act. I am not going to do that this morning, but I do want to highlight this bill as one more example of commonsense, bipartisan election security legislation that unfortunately is not getting its chance to be debated on the floor of the Senate.

The FIRE Act would simply require Presidential campaigns to do the right thing and report offers of foreign assistance--offers which are already spelled out as illegal--to the FBI. Anyone who says it does anything else, such as limiting contacts with the foreign press or limiting contact with foreign diplomats--somebody said it might eliminate communications with Dreamers--is just flat wrong.

If there are ways to improve the bipartisan legislation, I am wide open to that. I don't know how anyone could be against the idea of putting our country over narrow interests or putting our national security concerns over political advantage. In fact, a new poll last week found that 87 percent of Americans support this idea. The same poll found that an extraordinarily large majority of Americans believe that it is wrong for campaigns to accept foreign assistance and that Congress should pass legislation to secure our elections.

Unfortunately, in the nearly 3 years since we uncovered Russia's attack on our democracy, this body has not held a single vote on stand- alone legislation to protect our election security. It is true that we did approve some additional funding to secure the 2018 midterm elections, and I commend the folks at DHS for the job they did. I am proud of that. But we would be making an enormous mistake if we simply patted ourselves on the back and said that because the Russians or others didn't launch a full-frontal attack in 2018, we are safe on a going-forward basis.

Please, don't take my word for it. Let's look at what Special Prosecutor Bob Mueller said last week. He said that the Russians are continuing to attack virtually every day. The bipartisan Intelligence Committee election security report said that we have made progress, but there is more that needs to be done. Christopher Wray, the Director of the FBI, in recent testimony said this is an ongoing challenge. Dan Coats, for whom I have enormous respect and feel it is unfortunate that he left the position of Director of National Intelligence--and maybe he left because he was willing to continue to speak truth to power--said that our election security system is not secure enough. Even Gina Haspel, the Director of the CIA, has continued to point out that Russia and other foreign influences are trying to attack our democracy.

Candidly, it has been a little bit disappointing that some of my colleagues are trying to turn this into a partisan issue. Securing our democracy is not a Democratic or Republican issue. The absurdity of that is like saying: Well, maybe we should think about protecting our power grid as a partisan issue. We know and have seen evidence of foreign efforts to try to interfere with our power grid. Well, the country steps up and puts security measures in place. Shouldn't we expect the same kind of attention and commonsense approach when we see those same foreign adversaries attack our election infrastructure? I think we do need to take that kind of step and move forward.

Senator Klobuchar already made mention of some of this legislation, and I know my friend the Senator from Georgia is here, so I will try to wrap up.

There was a broad bipartisan group of Senators in the last Congress who introduced the Secure Elections Act--something I was proud to be part of. That bipartisan bill would have provided the additional resources for State and local election officials while still preserving local control of elections. What that legislation would have done was simply say that if local or State election officials want additional help from the Federal Government, they have to meet some basic, de minimis standards. We have to make sure that every polling station in America has a paper ballot backup. We have to make sure that there is appropriate auditing of how we do in our election systems.

I wish the bill would have done more and gone up the food chain to the three private companies that control 90 percent of all of our voter files. Maybe that could be action we could take in the future. If those voter files were hacked into, they wouldn't have to change the vote totals; they simply would have to move people from one voting precinct to another to create chaos on election day.

Senator Klobuchar also mentioned legislation that she, Senator Graham, and I worked on, a bipartisan bill to prevent disinformation-- particularly on the internet--called the Honest Ads Act. It would require the same disclosure rules for political ads on Facebook that are already in place for television, radio, and newsprint.

I am proud to be a cosponsor of another bipartisan bill called the DETER Act, sponsored by Senator Rubio and Senator Van Hollen. They are absolutely right in saying that we need to put in place automatic consequences if Russia or other nations use their 2016 playbook once again to try to interfere in our 2020 elections. Let's warn our adversaries that there will be consequences if they once again try to interfere in our election process.

These are just a few of the largely bipartisan ideas with regard to protecting the United States against foreign attacks on our election systems. I am sure there would be suggestions on how we can improve this legislation. That is fine. That is what we are here to do. Let's debate, vote, and add amendments.

What we should not do is simply pretend this threat is going away. We should not simply assume that because we improved in 2018, we are safe in 2020. We should recognize that local and State election officials need the kind of assistance, paper ballot backup, and the same responsibility that Federal campaign officials in Presidential campaigns ought to have--an affirmative duty to report. Political ads that pop up on Facebook ought to have the same kind of legal requirements that ads on television have. I don't think this is too much to ask. I think the overwhelming majority of Americans expect us to do our job on this issue.

I hope when the Senate reconvenes in September that maybe people can be refreshed by their voters back in their home States, because I am sure that when you go to whatever State and visit with folks and talk about election security, they will say to the Congress and Senate: Do your job and pass commonsense legislation.

Let's make sure our election security is absolutely as safe as it can be as we move into the 2020 elections.

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