H.R. 5746

Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Madam President, I care about the future of this institution, but right now, I care more about the future of our democracy. Our country has been the bedrock for democracies around the world. It has been the gold standard by which other countries wishing to achieve transparency and validation of their governments, have asked us to come and witness their elections.

Let's not forget what is great about a democracy. The power rests with the people. And when you have an election, it is the people who have spoken.

So whether it was F.D.R. and the New Deal, or Ronald Reagan declaring ``Morning in America,'' the people had spoken, and the country went about the change that was implemented because of free and fair elections.

Trust me, there are countries who are jealous of this. They obviously run their countries by other means. They are less stable, and they are less egalitarian. And yet, if we think of the many great advantages of a democracy, nothing says it better than the people have spoken.

Yet now, we have a former President of the United States, Donald Trump, who has dared to say and continues to say the people haven't spoken. Donald Trump is not just like the guy at a football game who doesn't like the referee's calls. Donald Trump has taken it to a whole new level of basically, without evidence, saying his team didn't lose the game.

Can you imagine an NFL or college football structure where the coach says, ``I don't like the ref's call. My team didn't lose the game. And I'm going to spend the rest of my time going, marching around to every football game and every community saying my team didn't lose the game.''

Well, thank God college and professional coaches know better. They don't do this. And yet former President Trump keeps saying, I don't like the call of election officials, judges, Federal courts, never mind there were 60 decisions by different courts. I am going to protest the outcome of this election.

Never in the history of our country do I know a major race where someone declared they really didn't lose. What if everybody went around saying, I really didn't lose? What if our system of governments would be affected by that?

Well, it is getting to that level of absurdity. The Republican nominee in the 2020 Washington gubernatorial election lost by over 600,000 votes. Yet he claimed voter fraud. He lost by 56-43. And even though he lost by such a huge margin, he claimed voter fraud. He sued the secretary of state, who happened to be a Republican, in King County Superior Court. He only dropped the election fraud lawsuit after the court threatened his lawyer with making meritless claims.

Do we really understand this danger, the danger of people in our country, to our economy, to our way of life if these falsehoods continue? We are not here, though, just because a former President cannot accept an election loss. He began sowing these seeds of distrust into our election system the minute he stepped onto the national stage.

We are here because the problem has become so serious that people are now trying to disenfranchise the voting rights of our fellow Americans. Some voter suppression tactics are being put in place because some believe the former President did not like the outcome of the election.

I want to be clear. There are people on both sides of the aisle that do believe in free and fair elections. There are Republicans in key election positions who stood up to the illegal tactics of the President when he tried to change the outcome of the last election. But what our country can't afford right now is the continuation of Trump-think to allow to erode the voting rights of our fellow Americans.

Voting rights have been hard fought and hard won. I know the President presiding understands this--first by women in 1920, then, later, protecting minority groups in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. In 1970, we updated it, making standards helping to regulate Presidential elections--in 1975, saying we had to protect minorities. Both sides of the aisle agreed to this. And in 1992, we expanded it for bilingual education requirements. That passed with 75-20 votes. And again in 2006, the last time the voting rights was updated, we were in a similar situation. The Supreme Court had two cases and struck down part of the act, and we all came together to renew and reaffirm the constitutional protections for people in the United States of America. It passed 98-0.

There is nothing wrong with the John Lewis Voting Rights law before us. There is nothing wrong with the John Lewis Voting Rights law before us.

It is a bill with bipartisan support that tries to maintain, I think, a Federal minimum assurance that States don't suppress the rights of our fellow Americans. When Martin Luther King was fighting this fight, he said, ``one man, one vote.'' He knew that this was about making sure that everybody had a chance to vote.

The John Lewis Act is a continuation of those rights in upgrading something that has been upgraded numerous times since 1965. That is why my colleagues Senator Manchin and Murkowski called for bipartisan reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, a bipartisan call for reauthorization last spring of the Voting Rights Act. They said, ``Inaction is not an option.'' They continued to say, ``Congress must come together just as we have done in the past time and time again to reaffirm our long-standing bipartisan commitment to free, accessible, and secure elections.''

And that is what we must do now. That is why there are 150 businesses who support the John Lewis Act--companies like Microsoft and Google, Intel and Tesla, Target, PayPal. These are companies who know and understand, they want to do business in a democracy. As Tim Cook said, the right to vote is fundamental to our democracy.

American history is a story of expanding the right to vote to all citizens, and Black people in particular have had to march, struggle, and even give their lives for more than a century to defend that right, and we support efforts to ensure that our democracy and our future is more hopeful and inclusive than the past.

There are others--Best Buy--an election cannot be free or fair if every eligible voter is not given a fair chance to vote or if the law makes it harder to do so.

Now, I disagree with my colleague who was just on the floor because there is a lot of demeaning of the system. I am not going to spend a lot of time on this now because I have another segment here on the floor later, but I come from a vote-by-mail State, and I am proud of what our State has accomplished. So I do not appreciate the disinformation of Newt Gingrich when he says, ``The biggest way with to expand voter fraud is to expand vote-by-mail.''

He is wrong. If I could slash a red line and a red circle through this now, I would do so. But I will spend many minutes later on the floor talking to people why vote-by-mail is part of the solution and not the threat that he thinks it is.

Companies know that when it comes to our economy, we are greatly aided by being in a democracy, and that is why they don't want it eroded. It will cost us if we are a less stable place to do business. So why now do people refuse to engage on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act?

You know, I might be one of those people who would say, ``Don't change the filibuster rule, we can wait.''

Wait? Wait? For what? What are we waiting for? Our Capitol was attacked. We were attacked. People defending us were killed. For what? For what? A big lie, a big lie about our election.

I sat outside the Capitol on January 6 and listened to the President telling these lies I knew weren't true. I knew what he said wasn't correct about our voting laws because I know and understand them, and I certainly know vote-by-mail. But he said many lies that now many court decisions have all said are not true.

But the point is that Donald Trump and his followers keep following and they tell the people the election wasn't fairly decided, and now, they are trying to pass State laws eroding our constitutional rights to protect every American's ability to vote, and some here don't want to act.

Our democracy is under threat, and people are trying to undermine the credibility of our elections, and you don't want to act. Trump supporters are literally trying to hoist a Jolly Roger flag over our democracy because they lost the election, and some people don't want to act. Some percentage of the Republican Party now believe that the election was wrongly decided, and some people don't want to act.

We have to have faith in close elections, and the best way to do that is not to suppress the vote but encourage and empower more people to vote in a safe and secure manner. We need to believe in our voting system, not believe that we can undermine it.

Democracies don't grow on trees. They need to be protected. They need to be defended. They need to be fought for. And with all the challenges we are facing--COVID, a changing economy in an information age, global migration, climate change--I am getting too many questions from my constituents about whether we are becoming a fascist nation.

Why am I answering those questions? Because Trump told a big lie and he got people to attack our Capitol and now he is ramping up fear and anxiety to the point where locals are changing their election laws and eroding our democracy? No, I can't stand by. I will vote to proceed and change. I will not stand by because my parents taught me better.

My father fought in World War II and reminded me constantly when I was growing up that if someone's rights were eroded, you better stand up because if you don't, they are coming after your rights next. And a threat to one was a threat to all.

My mom worked at the polls on election day. When she was a child, she played in her backyard and met an African-American woman who became her friend. When election day rolled around, my mom noticed that her friend had to wait outside in the cold to vote, where the White voters got to go inside and wait. My mom took her friend by the hand inside the polling place and said, ``My friend's not waiting outside.''

It earned my mom the nickname ``Little Eleanor'' after the First Lady of the period.

What might seem surprising is how much my mom liked her fellow Republican precinct committeemen. She felt like they were on the same team--Team Democracy: people who got the vote out. They may not agree on who they were voting for, but they agreed people should vote. And they were willing to live with the consequences. And believe me, my parents had a lot of--a lot of things that they had to keep fighting for, but they believed in democracy.

I remember my mom saying how uneasy she felt when she realized her friends and neighbors, seeing the results of her precinct, didn't support John Kennedy for President of the United States.

My parents were crushed when John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were all assassinated, but they never lost faith in the system, and they never said the system was rigged.

What we need to do now is to protect our democracy. We need to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. We need to say, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, that one man, one vote is what our country stands for, and it is the strength of our Nation.

One thing about January 6 that bothers me the most--it bothers me the most because I think about my father and his brother. My father quit high school to fight in World War II because his brother was already missing or in a POW camp. He knew he had to join the fight against the oppressions, the tyranny, the fascism that existed. He knew he had to join the fight to uphold the democracy of the United States.

This is a picture of what it looked like to be escorted back into this chamber on January 6. All I could think of when I saw this picture is, obviously, yes, support and gratitude for the military who supported us. But all I could think about was my father and his brother who fought in World War II for these rights, to uphold a democracy, so that I could stand for election and that my friends and neighbors could vote for me, and then I would come here in an environment where I was free to walk into the Capitol at any moment and cast a vote on behalf of the people that I represent.

And yet, on one fateful day, that all changed. And we were no different than some other country who had to use military force to support our democracy here in voting. That is not the way it is supposed to be. That is not what we are fighting for. Many Americans have fought to uphold the democracies of our Nation. The least we could do is pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. The least we could do is work in a mission together to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and show that our country believes in holding these important values of a democracy as utmost important. Let's vote to get this done. Let's move forward to show our country we believe in voting rights in the U.S Senate.

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