Providing for Consideration of H.R. Presidential Election Reform Act
Floor Speech
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Ms. SCANLON. Madam Speaker, I would reiterate Mr. Raskin's point that certainly the voters in Pennsylvania that I have heard from care deeply about whether or not their votes are counted.
Madam Speaker, the Presidential Election Reform Act will reinforce one of the defining American characteristics of our American experiment in democracy: the peaceful transition of Presidential power.
It is critical to that experiment that Americans have faith that our leaders will honor the will of the people when they vote. The process of counting and transmitting votes is a question of procedure and should not be treated as an opportunity to manipulate the outcome of a free and fair election as it was in the wake of the 2020 election.
I am heartened that the legislation under consideration today is a bipartisan bill. I don't care if you are a Democrat, a Republican, a conservative, a liberal, an Independent. If you love this country and believe in a government by the people, for the people, and of the people, we all have an obligation to confront the dangers posed by antidemocratic agents who try to undermine our elections, abandoning the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power for their own personal or political gain.
I regret that we must bring this bill to strengthen the guardrails of our democracy after the subversive actions of the disgraced former President and his supporters threatened to derail our government entirely.
But we must confront those continuing threats to our electoral system, in Pennsylvania and across the Nation, where bad actors continue to promote lies about election security. To be clear, there was never justification for the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But bad actors lied about the election results and willfully misinterpreted the law, and Members of the former President's party, whether explicitly or by their silence, continue to support these lies and baseless legal challenges.
These tactics demand the bipartisan set of reforms we are considering today to insulate our democracy from demagoguery.
I look forward to working with my colleagues of all political stripes to strengthen the guardrails of our democracy and to support and defend the Constitution.
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