Recognition of the Majority Leader

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I am pleased to be here with my colleagues today to emphasize the incredible importance of voting rights as the foundation for our democratic Republic: Senator Klobuchar of Minnesota, who spoke with the perspective of the chair of our Rules Committee and her experience in her State of Minnesota; Senator Durbin, who so understands the challenges from his decades of public service and service in this Chamber; Senator Kaine of Virginia, who brought forth some of the challenges over time that have existed targeting Black Americans; and Senator Schumer, who just took us on a tour through history, bringing us to that point of saying: Let's make sure that our democratic Republic does not perish, that it endures; that that responsibility sits on our shoulders.

Mr. President, there are more than 4,500 words in the Constitution, but the three that matter most are the first three: ``We the People.'' Our Founders printed those words in supersize font, saying this is what it is all about, that we do not take our government's power and authority in America as descended from Kings or the elite or the powerful; that our government takes its authority and power from the people up. And that is accomplished through the ballot box.

We are a nation with a government, as President Lincoln so eloquently said, ``of the people, by the people, and for the people.'' That is why the ballot box is the beating heart of our democracy. It is the ballot box that is the physical manifestation of every American's sacred right to have a voice in their government through their vote because, as Lyndon Johnson told us, ``The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised . . . for breaking down injustice.''

For 245 years, since our Declaration of Independence, through war and depression, through civil strife and terrorist attack, our democracy has persevered. It has weathered storms. Through those storms, it has continued to shine as a beacon of light to the world, as Ronald Reagan so fondly spoke of it, to serve as a beautiful, shining city on the hill.

All the while, through generation after generation, we have worked to expand access to the ballot box, recognizing that the vision of the Constitution wasn't fulfilled until every American had the ability to exercise their right to vote. And for most of our lives in this generation, we haven't really worried about the strength of our democratic institutions.

We have read about Presidents around the world writing a new constitution and throwing the old out without process, of wiping out the clause that limited them to two terms or to one term and continuing on, of shows that were put on in terms of legislative function that was just a cover story for authoritarian power.

But, here, we have thought we have practiced for more than 200 years converting the power of the people into representative democracy and decisions made through the House and the Senate and the President of the United States. We took for granted that they worked because they had worked for generation after generation, election after election, year after year.

But now, in recent years, we have come to realize that we shouldn't have taken the strength of our institutions for granted. We have come to see all too clearly that these institutions are fragile. We have seen the relentless efforts to undermine faith in our institutions. We have seen the attacks on our free press. We have seen the siloing of channels of information into different 24-hour cable news networks, and we have seen the echo chamber of social media.

We have experienced the impact that has occurred attacking the basic right to vote being torn away by the highest Court in the land, to political leaders deliberately lying to and deceiving the American people, and fanning the flames of hate and bigotry, of division and discrimination, for their political gain.

Then, just over a year ago, we saw it culminate in a violent mob of extremists stirred up and unleashed by a man who couldn't face the reality of his electoral loss, and that mob stormed this very building to stop the wheels of democracy from turning.

I was sitting here in this Chamber, and I well remember the agents rushing down the center aisle up to the podium to sweep away the Vice President to safety, wondering why they were running down the aisle because that doesn't happen here in the Senate. We heard the sounds of people outside these doors and wondered what was going on. We saw our Sergeant at Arms team start to lock the doors of this Chamber--all of it in just an extraordinary moment. Then, because we have smartphones, we started to understand what was going on outside of the Capitol and inside of the Capitol.

Later, we learned of the incredibly valiant acts of an officer named Eugene Goodman, who, as the first wave of the mob ascended the staircase that is just outside the Chamber in this direction, proceeded to essentially challenge the leader of that group, shoving him slightly and backing up away--down that hallway to move the mob away from entering the double doors that were closer by, buying more time for the security of this Chamber.

It is hard to believe that men and women in this building were chanting for the death of Nancy Pelosi and the death of the Vice President of the United States of America, calling for him to be hanged.

Because we started to understand the threat, I heard whispered phone calls to loved ones saying: I am OK. I think I am fine.

We saw fear and pain in the eyes of some of our staff, who were simply doing their job to help our democracy function that day.

We know how that day lingers in the hearts of our Capitol Police officers, and I continue to grieve with them for the trauma and loss they endured and to appreciate so much the service they rendered.

The insurrectionists on January 6, 2021, came all too close to stopping democracy in its tracks that day. Here in the Chamber, we were ushered into a safer location, and along with us went the three ballot boxes pictured here.

This is a picture that I took when I was so pleased to see these ballot boxes had traveled with us to safety, because the mob did enter this Chamber, and had these boxes still been here in the well of the Senate, they would have opened them and they would have destroyed those ballots because that was what they were intent on doing, was to destroy the ballots from various States to alter the outcome of the election. They couldn't get to them because they were safe with us.

These boxes were crafted by real artists who work here in the Senate, and there was a new box, a larger box, because some of the States were sending larger certifications of the ballots, the electoral college ballots, from their State.

Well, we were determined to return to the Chamber that evening, to come back here and reclaim this Chamber from the mob, replace these boxes in the well of the Senate, transport them to the House through the rhythm of counting the electoral college votes, and make sure the certification of the election went ahead. And it did. We completed our work, and the House and Senate certified the election results.

The physical attack on our national temple, our revered Capitol Building, was intended to prevent the counting of ballots--the most important act marking the transfer of power from one President to the next.

You know, our leaders in the early phase of our country weren't sure that this system would survive. Would the first President of the United States declare that he would continue beyond the bounds of the Constitution regardless of an election or prevent the election from happening? It was one of the motivations behind supporting George Washington as the first President, because people had faith that he would honor the vision in that Constitution and set the rhythm for the generations that followed. And he did.

So on January 6, 2021, 1 year and 1 day ago, democracy held--barely, but it held. Although it held on that day, the attack on our Federal elections has continued nonstop through the year that has followed.

This is the question we now face. In State after State, Republican legislatures are erecting barriers to the ballot box to make it more difficult for specific groups of Americans to vote-- making it more difficult for Native Americans to vote, for Black Americans to vote, and for college students to vote. It is our responsibility, in the face of these attacks on the right to vote, to say: Hell, no. We will not let any group in America be blocked from voting.

We will guarantee the right of every citizen to exercise the most fundamental act of a citizen in democracy: the act of putting a ballot into a ballot box. That is why we must pass, without delay, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

The 2020 election was free. It was fair. It was secure. In every analysis, in every court hearing, in every recount, in every audit, we have found that the election of 2020 was free and fair and secure. We have seen that proven time and time and time again.

It was the most scrutinized election ever held in this country. It was also the election with the largest turnout ever in this country. More than 159 million Americans cast a ballot. But instead of celebrating the integrity of that election--that beautiful display of democracy, the embodiment of the ``we the people'' Republic--some in our country have spent this past year trying to undermine our Republic, to lie about it, to tear it down, to tear down what so many have worked and fought for, marched and sacrificed for over 245 years. These forces cannot win by the power of their ideas so they want to change the rules. They want to rig the vote.

So how do you do that? Well, the States make laws to make it harder to register to vote. The States make laws to allow those on the voting rolls to be thrown off without them even knowing they have been thrown off, to purge the voting rolls in a discriminatory fashion. You make it harder for early voting. You make it harder to vote by mail, and the consequence of making early voting and vote-by-mail hard is you direct the voting to election day, and on election day, you have a set of time-tested tactics to block the ballot box. What are these tactics?

Well, one, you understaff the precinct voting location so the line is very long in places where you don't want people to vote. In Georgia, in the last election, in those precincts, where the electorate was 80 percent White, the wait time was an average of about 5 minutes. In those precincts where the electorate was 80 percent Black, the wait time was about 50 minutes, or 10 times longer. This did not happen by accident.

What else can be done? You move the location of the precinct voting location so people go to the wrong place in the places where you don't want them to vote. You put them in places where there isn't much parking so they have to walk a long way to get to the polling place. You let the machines malfunction and have no one around to fix them to increase the length of the line. You ban volunteers from giving food and water to the people who are standing in line, hour after hour after hour. You put out text messages saying, ``We are so sorry you missed the vote last week,'' when, in truth, the vote is the next Tuesday coming, but you make people think they missed the vote so they won't show up or you put out messages saying, ``We hope you will vote on this day,'' which is a week after the real vote so people don't show up on election day.

All of these things happen. And when I read about them happening, I think about how important early voting and vote-by-mail are. If you want to look at ballots being stolen--the right to vote being stolen, the corruption of voting--look to these corrupt activities on election day. Those are stealing the votes. That is where the crime is being committed, and that is the crime we need to stop.

Now, in Oregon, we were the first State to have vote-by-mail. And it started with the Republican Party saying: Let's get everybody signed up for absentee ballots because we know we can increase turnout. And then the Democrats said: That is a really good idea. Let's get all our folks to sign up for absentee ballots.

So when I first ran for the State legislature, half the State was voting by absentee ballot, and half was voting at the polls. And then in the next election, the State said: We liked voting by absentee ballot so much, let's give vote-by-mail to everyone. And it was embraced by both parties.

And I remember going door-to-door and people telling me: We really love not having to worry about the challenges of election day--of parking; of weather; I have a bad hip, and I can't stand in line; I have to pick up my children after I get off work, and I won't have time to stand in line.

Why did President Trump attack vote-by-mail? He hated vote-by-mail because it takes away the cheating on election day that he feels can be implemented to benefit Republicans across this country. President Trump is the primary proponent of cheating Americans out of their right to vote.

This Chamber has to act. We are seeing the strategies unfold in State after State. Last year, 440 bills were introduced in multitudinous States aimed at restricting the freedom to vote. Thirty-four of those bills have been passed into law in 19 States, restricting access to the ballot box, threatening the integrity of our elections.

The first week of this new year, 13 bills were filed in Arizona and New Hampshire. Eighty-eight bills were introduced last year that are carrying over into the 2022 legislative session in nine States, including swing States like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

We can see how prevalent the activity is. Now, when we were wrestling with the right to vote in the 1960s, it was primarily a challenge of the Southern United States using strategies targeted at Black Americans. But now, we have a challenge of strategies being enacted across the country targeting Black Americans and Native Americans and young Americans.

So let's take a look at this, at some of the key swing States. Arizona--for over a decade, voters have been mailed a ballot.

Now, currently, if you are an infrequent voter, and you don't vote early in two election cycles, you can be removed from the permanent early voting list--meaning you no longer automatically receive that ballot, meaning that you are expecting it, but you don't get it. When you realize that you have to get to the polls, it may be too late, making it harder for targeted voters to vote by having discriminatory purging of the voting rolls.

Seventy percent of Arizonans are on that permanent early voting list. Eighty percent of Arizona voters cast a ballot by mail in 2020.

It is estimated that under this law, 200,000 voters in the State of Arizona might be removed from the list, and many of them will not realize they have been removed until it is too late.

Think about how significant that is in a State that President Biden won by less than 11,000 votes.

What else in Arizona? You have the power being taken away of the secretary of state to control election litigation, to defend the ballot box, and it is being moved to the attorney general.

Now, why would Arizona move it from the secretary of state, where it has always been, to the attorney general? Well, they are moving it because the secretary of state is a Democrat and the attorney general is a Republican and they want a partisan angle on enforcement of voting laws.

I will tell you one bill that hasn't been enacted that really is something very scary to think about. It says, essentially, that the legislature can revoke the certification of the State's Presidential election by majority vote--meaning the State might vote for one person, but the legislature, which is Republican, could then vote to assign the electors to the person that the legislature wants instead of whom the people of that State want.

That is an incredible--incredible--perversion and shows you how far this conversation is going to create partisan control of the outcome. The election was won fair and square by one person, and the State legislature says: Too bad, we are assigning our electoral votes to the other person.

Florida--Florida has enacted an omnibus election bill. It attacks mail-in voting. It requires voters to continually renew their request for a mail-in ballot. It used to be that that was once every 4 years, but now it is continuous. One-third of Floridians voted by mail in 2018. One-half mailed in their ballots in 2020. An overwhelming majority of those were Democrats. So if you take away vote-by-mail, the thought is you can warp the outcome of the election.

Their omnibus bill puts up restrictions on drop boxes, requiring them to be supervised in person. They make it hard to drop off your ballots. And the goal, of course, is if you make it harder to drop off ballots, maybe that ballot will sit on your kitchen counter and never get filed and never, therefore, have an impact. And Florida, like Georgia, has stopped volunteers from handing out food and water to voters waiting in long lines.

Every time I hear that, I think: Are we not familiar with the story of the good Samaritan who goes down the road, and he sees someone beaten up by the side of the road and goes over to help that individual and gets them to safety and covers the expenses for their lodging and their food? Well, here, good Samaritans are being outlawed from providing food and water to people trapped in line for a long period of time.

That is not just in Florida but in Georgia too. So let's turn to Georgia. They enacted legislation that attacks early voting. It eliminates 5 weeks of early voting in runoff elections--5 weeks. Over 1.3 million people voted in 2021's runoffs in Georgia that brought Senators Warnock and Ossoff here to the Senate. It attacks voting registration.

You can't register to vote when a runoff election is occurring. You have to already have registered for the general election. And why did they do that? Because 70,000 people registered to vote during the 2021 runoffs, and more Democrats than Republicans registered in that period. So, prejudicially, they want to cut that off. They want to virtually eliminate the drop boxes. They are relied on far more in the urban Atlanta metro area than in rural counties. And the law says you can have no more than one drop box for every 100,000 registered voters, meaning that four counties that make up the greater Atlanta metro area will now only have about 20 drop boxes, a reduction to one-fifth of the drop boxes that were there before.

About half of the absentee voters in the Atlanta metro area used those drop boxes. And then it says those drop boxes have to be inside early voting sites, meaning that they are only available during the hours those early voting sites are open. So if you are going to work at 6 a.m., you can't drop off your ballot. And if you are getting home and picking up your kids and getting home past 5 p.m., or whatever the early voting sites close, then you can't vote then either by dropping off your ballot at a ballot box.

Cobb County Elections Director Janine Eveler said, and refers to the boxes:

They are no longer useful. The limited numbers mean you cannot deploy them in significant numbers to reach the voting population.

In Georgia, also, the law gives power to interfere directly with people's votes. The legislature has been given power--the partisan legislature has been given power--over the State election board, and the State election board can replace the local election boards and, thereby, influence how they behave to the benefit of the Republican Party. It also gives ability of an individual to challenge countless numbers of voters' rights to cast a ballot.

To sum up, in Georgia, they are making it harder to get a ballot in the mail. They are making it easier to intimidate voters at the polls, and they are making it easier to rig the results after the votes have been cast.

How about Iowa? Iowa enacted omnibus election legislation that attacks early voting and takes away 9 days of early voting. It reduces it by a third, 29 to 20 days. It attacks in-person voting.

As Senator Klobuchar pointed out, it says you have to close the polls an hour earlier, making it harder for people who work late in the evening to be able to vote. It attacks vote-by-mail.

Let's turn to Montana. Montana has enacted HB 176, which eliminates same-day registration. It has been in place for 15 years. Nearly 8,200 Montanans used that option on election day in 2020--but, prejudicially, wiped out.

SB 169 also, as a matter of fact, requires voters who do not have certain specified IDs to get two forms of ID in order to vote at the polls, making it harder to vote at the polls.

HB 50, also enacted, prohibits the mailing of ballots to new voters who are eligible to vote on election day but are not yet 18, an attack on younger voters. Why? Because younger voters tend to vote more often for the Democratic candidate.

And SB 319 bans voter registration activities on public college campus buildings such as dorms, study halls, and athletic facilities, an absolute attack on the ability of college students to vote. Why? Because they tend to vote more Democratic.

This strategy of deliberately attacking the ability to vote of young Americans, college students, Native Americans, and Black Americans to vote is so wrong. It is unethical. It violates the very premise of our Constitution, which gives every American the right--the equal right--to participate.

New Hampshire--in one new law, the secretary of state is enabled to make up their own system of confirming voter residency so that it is easier to take voters off the rolls. Why is that important? Well, the Republican legislature is going to choose the secretary of state in New Hampshire, and ideas have been floated in regard to ``Let's require residency to be written so that your car has to be registered here if you are a student who is here.'' And students can't afford to reregister the car; so students won't be able to vote--another attack on college students, as an example.

Texas--Texas attacks the drop boxes. The new law eliminates ballot drop boxes for 16 million voters--16 million. The Governor limited counties to just one drop box in 2020. The 4.7 million residents in Harris County, where Houston is located, have to share one drop box for a population equal to the entire population of Louisiana. It stops 127,000 voters in Harris County who availed themselves of curbside voting to avail themselves of curbside voting in the future. The legislature eliminated it.

I think the point should be adequately clear at this moment that in State after State after State, Republican legislators and Republican- controlled legislatures are creating prejudicial laws to block Democratic constituencies--constituencies that tend to favor the Democratic Party--from voting. This is completely unacceptable, and it is up to us to defend the rights of every American to vote.

Now, there are three States where the Republicans control the House and the Senate but not the Governorship: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina. And we know that changes may well happen there in 2 years. Those Governors may be gone. Last year, the Democratic Governor of Wisconsin vetoed six bills that would have severely restricted citizens' ability to vote. So who knows what is going to come next?

Now, some have said: You know, all these measures won't make that big a difference. Don't worry about it.

Well, I can tell you, those who say that are wrong. Let's think about how it would affect this Senate. Let's say those measures could make a 3-percent difference in the outcome of the balloting. If that were the case, then we would have seven Democratic Senators who are here today who would not have been here. It wouldn't be a 50-50 Senate; it would be a 57-43. Senator Ossoff won by 1.2 percent; Senator Peters of Michigan, 1.7 percent; Senator Kelly of Arizona, 2.4 percent; Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, 2.4 percent; Senator Hassan of New Hampshire, 0.1 percent; Senator Cortez Masto, 2.4 percent, Nevada. Seven Senators would not be here today if you changed the outcome by 3 percent. There is a huge difference between a 50-50 Senate and a 57-43.

That is what this is about. It is about the targeting of swing States by Republican legislatures to seize control of this body against the voting will of the citizens of the United States of America.

This is why we have to set minimum standards that guarantee access to ballot, minimum standards for vote-by-mail, minimum standards for early voting, minimum standards for registration, minimum standards so folks are not purged off the voting rolls without their knowledge.

I think about democracy, which we sometimes assume is the path more traveled by countries around the world, and there was a period of a decade or two where we saw the birth of a lot of new democracies. Now, this last decade, we have seen many of them slide into authoritarianism around the world. The truth is, most of the world is not governed by democracies. It is governed by authoritarian governments. Democracy is the road less traveled. It takes incredible vigilance to defend the ability of the citizen to participate.

And here we are at that moment where we have to defend the ability of the citizen to participate. That vigilance, that responsibility, that weight of preserving our ``We the People'' Republic is on our shoulders. So the Freedom to Vote Act needs to be passed to ensure 15 days of early voting; to ensure access to vote-by-mail; to provide relief for voters waiting in long lines; to ensure that poll workers exist in sufficient numbers for the polling places and have adequate training to operate them effectively; to take on gerrymandering through national standards so that the House of Representatives, down this hallway outside this door, reflects the will of the people instead of being rigged for the powerful.

And the bill is needed to take on dark money, money no one knows where it comes from. If you or I donated $100 to a campaign, it is recorded. Everyone knows that we donated that money. But if the billionaire spends tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, it is done in secret, dark money. Americans of every political entity-- Democratic, Republican, Independent--know this is corrupt, know that it shouldn't happen, know that the same things should apply to the billionaire as to the ordinary citizen.

We need to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, and we need to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights bill. That bill restores preclearance. The 1965 bill, the Voting Rights Act, was a preclearance bill. It said that those States that have conducted violations of the rights of citizens to vote can't change election laws without getting them precleared to make sure they are not prejudicial on the basis of race.

The Supreme Court has gutted that. The Supreme Court has operated as a supreme legislature of the land and decided it wanted to legislate out what this body and the House of Representatives passed overwhelmingly in a bipartisan fashion.

The 2013 Shelby County decision opened the floodgates to voter suppression and voter repression with laws like the ones I have been talking about. Preclearance protects us against those corrupt strategies that are yet to come, while the Freedom to Vote Act protects us against the activities that have already occurred. We need to do both.

All of us, Democrats and Republicans, should be working together as the two parties did in 1965, as they did each and every time to renew authorization of the Voting Rights Act, until now.

But, now, under the sway of President Trump, who has become the chief champion of cheating Americans out of their right to vote, they have decided to abandon their responsibility to defend the Constitution.

You know, in July of 1963, about a month after President Kennedy unveiled his Civil Rights Act, Martin Luther King was here in Washington, DC, giving interviews, and his words today still ring true. He said: ``The tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators . . . that want [to keep] . . . people from even voting.''

We thought that was cured in 1965. We have gone decades where we were completely united around defending the right to vote. And, suddenly, we have seen this past year the continuation. The assault on the Capitol to disrupt the counting of electoral votes has been continued as an assault in State after State after State after State to stop Democratic constituencies from exercising their right to vote.

Raphael Warnock, Senator from Georgia, elected by less than 3 percent, said it boils down to this: ``Some people don't want some people to vote.''

Well, if you have sworn an oath to the Constitution, you have sworn an oath to ensure every citizen has a full opportunity to vote.

So much depends on the makeup of this body. Whether you care about voting rights or attacking climate chaos or healthcare or housing, whether you care about living wages and safe conditions for workers, those decisions are affected by the makeup of this body. And the theory of a democratic republic is that if the majority viewpoint is honored, we will work to address those issues that the majority cares about.

And the majority does care about healthcare and housing and good working conditions and clean air and clean water and taking on the warming of this planet. The majority cares about that. If you take and assault the ability of the minority to express their viewpoints, you have destroyed that very premise of our democracy.

And voting rights is different than every other issue. On every other issue, if we go off track, then the citizens can say: What have you done? You lose my support. I am voting for the other party or the other candidate. You promised to take on that challenge, and then you didn't. You have lost my support, and I am exercising my ballot to put in people who will actually address issues we care about.

But voting rights is different because that issue is about whether or not the voters actually can exercise their outrage with us if we veer off track. If you compromise voting, then the voters no longer have the ability to throw you out--throw the bums out--and bring fresh voices to bear on the issues they care about. That is why this is so important.

I am going to pivot to a little bit of history because for us to be able to vote on voting rights in this Chamber, we have a problem, and the problem is, the current rule of the Senate requires 60 votes to allow us to get to a final vote, a final majority vote.

In essence, we have become a Chamber where policies cannot be passed except by 60 votes of support. Many think, Isn't this the way the Senate was designed? Isn't this the way that our Founders envisioned the Senate? Didn't they talk about the Senate being a cooling saucer-- an expression attributed to President Washington that historians say he never said, but still it captures the understanding of this Chamber-- that is, that this Chamber would be a little more steady than the House would because we would have longer terms, 6-year terms instead of 2- year terms?

Now, it was debated that maybe 12-year terms, maybe lifetime appointments to the Senate, but in the end, the Founders settled on 6- year terms to make this Chamber a little less rash to some current trend that might be ill-considered than the Chamber down the hall. That is the cooling saucer.

The Founders said that because Senators will have a larger territory than House members, they will have more diverse constituents. They won't just have a city or just a rural area; they will probably have both and have to be thinking about how laws affect the farm, the ranch, the suburb, the city, the manufacturing, all the different aspects of our economy. So Senators will have a broader view. That is the cooling saucer.

Then the Founders threw in something else and said: Furthermore, we are going to say Senators will be elected indirectly by State legislatures, not by the people. Again, give them a little more insulation from citizens being very upset about something that hasn't been well thought through.

But never, ever, ever did our Founders want this Chamber to have a supermajority barrier, and we know this so clearly because they said so. When they were writing the Constitution, they were operating under the Confederation Congress, and the Confederation Congress required a supermajority, and it was paralyzed. It couldn't even raise the money to take on Shays' Rebellion. So those who were working to design our 1787 Constitution said: Whatever you do, don't embed a supermajority.

Let's see what they said. Hamilton, in Federalist Paper No. 22, said that with the minority in control of the majority, the result will be ``tedious delays . . . and . . . contemptible compromises of the public good.'' He said the real impact of a supermajority will be ``to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of government.''

On another occasion, he summed it up this way. He said:

If two thirds of the whole number of members had been required, it would . . . amount in practice to a necessity of unanimity. And the history of every political establishment in which this principle has prevailed, is a history of impotence, perplexity, and disorder.

Why would he say that? Because the Confederation Congress was a setting of impotence, perplexity, and disorder.

I don't know what other places around the world he was thinking of, but he was certainly thinking of the Government of the United States at that very moment.

Madison, in Federalist Paper 58, said:

It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority.

He was noting that the principle of free government would be reversed.

The principle of free government is that you go the direction the majority weighs in on, not the minority. But when you require 60 votes to go down path A, and without them, you go down path B, then you go the direction the minority wants. You have done exactly what Madison said we must not let happen. We are reversing the principle of free government.

So we have seen two things. We have seen that--as the filibuster is used more and more and eating up the time of the Senate, we have seen amendments decline dramatically. We saw, for example, in the 109th Congress some 314 amendments. That has declined to just 26 amendments in the last Congress, the 116th Congress. We are currently in the 117th. Why is it? Well, Senators can't come to the floor and offer an amendment.

When I was first here as an intern covering the floor for Senator Hatfield during the Tax Reform Act of 1976, I watched how one amendment was debated for an hour or so, voted on, and then half a dozen to a dozen Senators would say to the Chair ``Mr. President, Mr. President,'' and the Chair was supposed to call on whomever he heard first--at that point, it was always a man in the Chair--and that person would offer an amendment, and an hour later, they would vote on it. And then again, there would be a group seeking to get the next amendment, and they would go on until they were exhausted.

That debate on a bill might go on for days and days or be spread over the course of numerous weeks, with other intervening activity, as in the Tax Reform Act of 1976, but every Senator knew they could offer an amendment. If they cared about a tax issue, they could offer it, and this body would have to debate it, would have to take a vote on it, but not today--not today. We twiddle our thumbs while the majority and minority leaders negotiate over amendments. The minority leader wants to protect Republicans from having to vote on issues that they might be embarrassed by. The majority leader wants to protect majority Members from voting on issues they might be embarrassed by or that constituencies might not support. So we twiddle our thumbs while the leaders of the two parties debate. That is not how the Founders envisioned this Senate.

This process of requiring 60 votes--it isn't just the 60 votes; it is also the time it eats up because, in order to get that vote to close debate, you have to file a cloture motion and you have to wait an intervening day. So if you file it on a Monday, you have to wait until Wednesday. Then, if it should pass and you close debate, you have to have 30 hours of debate. Then, if a Senator wasn't allowed to vote during those 30 hours, they get another hour, so tack on a few more hours. So every cloture motion eats up a week of the Senate's time, even if it is successful.

Well, we are about to see in the charts I am going to put up how this is destroying the Senate.

After 1965, after the Voting Rights Act, the filibuster, the cloture motion lost its racist taint because we had passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. So Senators started to think, Well, we can use this on other issues. But, still, it was pretty much under control until the early seventies.

In the early seventies, you saw an increase to about a dozen motions per year, in 1971, 1972, 1973. In 1974, it exploded to almost three dozen, and if you think about that eating up 36 weeks of the Senate's time, people yelled: This is terrible. This is terrible.

So they reformed it in March of 1975, but that reform actually backfired after a few years, and Senators started to use this cloture motion--this cloture requirement in ways it hadn't been used but rarely in times past. It hadn't been used on motions to proceed with bills to the floor. It hadn't been used on amendments. It hadn't been used on nominations.

But let's take a look at how that has changed. Let's look first at the amendments--actually, cloture on nominations.

That one didn't make it through the printer in time, but here is the story: On nominations, there were only three cloture motions in the history of the United States before 1975--three. After 1975 to now, 852 times cloture has been filed on nominations; 852 weeks of the Senate's time potentially obstructed.

Let's look at motions to proceed. Before the reform in 1975, only 16 times in our history had cloture motions been filed to keep a bill from being debated on the floor of the Senate. Think about it. If the filibuster was about enhancing debate, extending debate, here it is being used to prevent debate, prevent a bill from ever being debated. That is very relevant to the election bill we have been talking about because, as Majority Leader Senator Schumer pointed out, four times now, Republicans have voted to prevent an election bill from being debated, ever getting started, a debate occurring on the floor of the Senate.

It is the most anti-democratic thing to do, and both parties have done it, but it is a practice that needs to end, and it is a practice that exploded in the eighties, in the nineties, in the 2000s, in the 2010s--blocking bills from ever getting to the floor 175 times in the decade 2010 through 2020.

Looking at cloture motions on amendments, it was considered unacceptable to prevent votes on amendments until the 1970s, and then the practice expanded. So you couldn't actually get your amendment up because of the filling of the tree and the negotiating between the two bodies, but if you did get it up, you could end up with it being blocked because it was blocked by a 60-vote requirement to close the debate on the amendment. The practice has continued and gone up and up and up.

How about on final passage? Final passage before 1975, that is virtually the only place where cloture was used, and that expanded as well.

So we are seeing that the cloture motion that takes up a week expanded in every single realm, and now, we are at an average of more than 100 per year--more than 100 per year. We don't have a 100 weeks in a year.

So the filibuster in its best form--its best form--is the ability of the minority to stand here on the floor and speak to delay action while they use that leverage to negotiate amendments or to negotiate compromise, and both sides have an incentive to reach a deal.

They have an incentive to reach a deal because those who are filibustering--it takes time and effort. That is difficult, so they have an incentive to reach a deal. And the majority, which is responsible for getting things done, has the goal of not having lots of time eaten up by filibuster. So both sides have an incentive to negotiate.

But under the current 60-vote requirement, that is not a filibuster; it is a 60-vote requirement. It is a minority veto, and because it is a minority veto, it doesn't incentivize negotiation. It does the exact opposite, especially with the polarized tribal politics of today. The base of both parties wants us to stop the other party, and so we paralyze each other.

It is Mahatma Gandhi to whom it is attributed the phrase ``An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.'' It is the same challenge here. If Democrats do everything they can to prevent Republican ideas from getting into law to be tested and Republicans do everything they can to prevent the Democratic ideas from being tested, then no ideas are tested, and no issues are addressed, and the legislature fails in its responsibility to the people of the United States of America, and that is what is happening right now.

We are failing in our responsibility to the people of the United States of America.

Now, there are two ways that we can get that election bill--so vital to our responsibility under the Constitution, so vital to defending the rights of Americans to vote--to the floor of the Senate and off the floor.

One is to create a carve-out that says we will not apply the 60-vote standard to the election bill because the election bill is too vital.

The second is to rehabilitate, reenergize the filibuster, return to the vision that if you want to slow things down, you have to be on the floor speaking. The way that it worked was that you kept that power in place by making sure there were continuous speeches, one after the other, because if there was a break, the Chair could call the question. That means it comes before the public. That is a good thing. The public of the United States will see us arguing the pros and cons of whether to defend or not defend the voting rights of Americans. They would see us debating whether to stop billionaires from buying elections or not with dark money. They would see us debating the finer points of stopping gerrymandering so the principle of equal representation would either be honored or not honored. That debate would be healthy for the United States of America.

Those are the only two possibilities right now to have an election bill enacted to protect the rights of Americans: a carve-out or restore the filibuster.

I powerfully believe the best path is to restore the filibuster. The Senate is better off by having the rights of the minority honored, the ability of minority Members to be heard; to slow things down to seek amendments; to slow things down to seek compromise; to slow things down to make sure a complicated bill has been weighed in by experts; to slow things down to make sure the press has been able to examine what is in the bill. That is all positive. That doesn't happen with a carve-out.

So I hope we will reinvigorate the filibuster; that all 50 of us will say: Let's restore the balance in the Senate where the minority can slow things down for those valuable reasons but ultimately cannot block a final vote being taken.

This idea was here from the start. The initial Senate--26 Members-- they had a motion to move the prior question in the rule book, but they never used it. So in 1805, when Aaron Burr directed the rewriting of the rules, he said: We never use this rule, so let's take it out because we all listen to each other before we vote.

That is a big positive. Every Member should be heard in this Chamber. Every Member should be able to participate and have the ability to put amendments forward, have their voice heard. We should not become the House. The House of Representatives--the majority runs over the top of the minority.

It is a better Chamber for having the voices of minority and majority weighing in on legislation, having amendments from both parties being considered. That is the reinvigoration of the filibuster in its best light.

You know, a year ago and 1 day, a mob attacked the Presidential election, but in the ensuing year, we have had 19 States attack Federal elections for House and Senate Members by changing the rules in their State prejudicially to try to block the young, the college students, the Tribal members, the Black Americans from voting. It is wrong, but it is happening, and it is on our shoulders, our responsibility, to stop that.

Earlier, I referred to the fact that the path of democracy is not the road most taken. Most of the people in the world operate under authoritarian governments. We have been the shining light to the world to say the right thing in human rights is for governance to flow up from the people, not down from the powerful. We have been that light. But if we cannot make this Chamber function, then the world does not look at us and say, That is the model we want to follow. If we cannot protect the rights of Americans to vote because their names are stripped out of the voting rolls or they are blocked from registering to begin with or blockades are put around the ballot box to make it hard for them to participate, then we are not in a position where the world looks to us and says, That system works. So it is incumbent on us to fix it.

As I was thinking about these roads, the authoritarian road and the democratic road, the role of the Republic and the Republican road being the road less taken, it brings to my mind the poem by Robert Frost, ``The Road Not Taken.'' Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both.

He goes on to say at the end of the poem: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

That is how his poem ends.

We have taken the road less traveled, the road of power flowing up from the people. It is the right road to take, and it makes the difference.

Look at the vast difference between human rights being crushed by China, enslaving a million people in Xinjiang Province, stripping the democratic voice of the people, the right to free speech in Hong Kong, versus the freedom we have in our Nation. Our road is the right road. We have to make it work. To make it work, we need to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and we need to do it now.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source