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Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I am honored to join my colleague who has led this battle for the vision of the For the People Act that will restore the ``we the people'' democratic republic.

Here we are on the floor of the Senate. It is an institution that once reverberated with great debates on the great issues our Nation faced--issues of war and peace, of civil rights, of healthcare and housing, of education and infrastructure, and of living-wage jobs; issues of equal opportunity and of environmental pollution; issues that affect the fundamental success of each family in America and our collective success as a nation.

Yet, if you are sitting here today and are observing the Senate from the benches up above, you will be hard-pressed to see any of that because those debates are not happening in the U.S. Senate. This Chamber is silent on the great issues that face America.

Before he was the majority leader, the majority leader promised that things would be different under his leadership.

He said:

A Senate majority under my leadership would break sharply from the practices of the Reid era in favor of a far more free-wheeling approach to problem solving. I would work to restore its traditional role as a place where good ideas are generated, debated and voted upon.

Now, one of the fundamental principles is that every Senator should be able to raise any issue and have the chance to defend it, to present it, to see it attacked, to respond to those attacks, and to have the American people see where we stand. But, today, the Senate is not operating in that manner today. The reality is reflected in a different quote by the majority leader from this past year.

He said:

Donald Trump is still in the White House, and as long as I am Majority Leader of the Senate, I get to set the agenda. That's why I call myself the Grim Reaper.

The majority leader is taking great pride in preventing this Chamber from being the legislative body that was envisioned in the Constitution, one in which we examine the issues that the citizens of our States present to us with great concern and ask us to resolve so as to take this Nation forward. Instead, we are deeply mired in the legislative graveyard that the majority leader has been so proud to create.

How about the Bipartisan Background Checks Act? It is now engraved on a tombstone. The Paycheck Fairness Act? Engraved on a tombstone. Violence Against Women? On a tombstone--or how about Save the Internet? Or the Climate Action Now Act?

How about healthcare? Across my State, in rural areas and urban areas, everybody wants the same fair price, even if they have preexisting conditions. That is the fundamental nature of an effective insurance strategy for healthcare, but the Protecting Americans With Preexisting Conditions Act has never been debated on this floor.

The American Dream and Promise Act, the Securing America's Federal Elections Act? How about the Raise the Wage Act? How about the Equality Act that grants every member of our society, LGBTQ Americans, the full opportunity to have the doors of opportunity opened, rather than slammed shut--debated and passed just down the hall, each and every one of these bills, but here, they haven't been debated. The Senate is failing its constitutional responsibility.

In fact, during the last 2 years, there has only been three priorities that have seemed to have arisen in this Chamber. One was the goal of stripping healthcare from 30 million Americans. It failed by the slimmest of margins. A second is to pack the courts with judges who believe in a supercharged amendment to give power to the powerful, rather than power to the people.

The third is a $2 trillion tax cut to enrich the richest Americans. In any chamber that truly represents the people, you don't see the goal of destroying healthcare for 30 million Americans and giving $2 trillion to the richest Americans. But that is what we have seen here, while we fail to see the bills on healthcare, on housing, on education, on infrastructure, on living wage jobs--the fundamentals by which the American families prosper.

Why is it that this Chamber is now a completely owned subsidiary of the most powerful people in this country? It is because of the fundamental corruption of our constitutional system, starting with gerrymandering.

Many of us hear that phrase, ``equal representation,'' and understand we are talking about fundamental fairness of distributed power, but gerrymandering is the opposite of that. The Supreme Court has given complete license to extreme partisan gerrymandering, instead of defending the constitutional vision of equal representation. It is principle in a democracy and in a republic that the citizens choose their legislators, the legislators don't choose their citizens. But that legislation to address that, to create nonpartisan commissions to prevent that gerrymandering, hasn't been debated on the floor of this Chamber.

A second piece of corruption is voter suppression. The Supreme Court opened the doors by gutting the Voting Rights Act, again failing to defend the vision of the Constitution. But have we remedied that here on this floor? Have we addressed that fundamental corruption in which all kinds of tactics are created to prevent people from voting across this country--all kinds of clever ID laws to disempower communities that are minority communities or college communities or poor communities or Native American communities? We have not.

There is perhaps the most vicious form of corruption, the dark money flowing through our campaign systems. Jefferson was very clear that if you have government by the powerful, you end up with laws for the powerful. So you have to have distributed power so that the power of the people results in laws that reflect the will of the people. That is the difference between the vision of our constitutional system here in the United States of America and the system of kingships that dominated Europe.

But because of the corruption of dark money in our campaign system, it has created the concentration of power, the exact opposite of what Jefferson laid out and our Founders laid out in our Constitution. We start our Constitution with those powerful first three words, ``We the people,'' because that is the vision of our Constitution--not ``We the powerful,'' not ``We the privileged.''

So a bill has been crafted, H.R. 1, the For the People Act. My colleague from New Mexico has led this charge to address this fundamental corruption in order to restore the vision our Nation was founded on because, if we restore that foundation, then we would be addressing healthcare on the floor of the Senate, making it more affordable, stopping the price gouging of Americans, the challenges of access in communities across this country.

We would be addressing the shortage of housing that is driving a homeless epidemic in this country, partly because of the economics, the structure of our economy, and partly because of unaddressed mental illness and drug addiction.

We would be addressing education because education is the path to full participation; yet today, we have seen a shrinkage of the opportunities through apprenticeships for working people and through college--affordable college for the dreams taking you in that direction if you weren't previously burdened by a debt the size of a home mortgage. We would be addressing infrastructure and jobs. We would be addressing the environmental challenges our planet faces if we restore the vision of our Constitution.

This For the People Act is the most important piece of legislation because everything else we care about as Americans is going to fail if we let this Chamber be controlled by powerful special interests through this corrupted system. So let's take it on. Let's take on the gerrymandering and the voter suppression and the dark money. Let's have the courage to debate it on this floor because that is what we were elected to do, was to work on the big challenges facing our Nation, and there is perhaps no bigger challenge than this.

Madam President, I yield back to my colleague from New Mexico.

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