Directing the Removal of United States Armed Forces From Hostilities Within or Against the Islamic Republic of Iran That Have Not Been

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, the issue is our right to vote in this democracy and in this country. For many of us, that has never been a big question. We registered. We vote regularly. We show our identification. We get our ballots, do our civic responsibility, push the ballot into the machine in my hometown, and get a little sticker to wear on your lapel that says ``I voted.'' It is simple, easy.

But I can remember when voting was not so easy for a lot of people. The year was 1965, and I was a college student here at Georgetown in Washington, DC. We heard about a march that was going to take place in Selma, AL, and a number of my fellow students and I sat up one night and said: Why don't we go? Let's go. Let's be part of this.

So we talked about it, and here is the way the conversation went:

Do you remember what happened in Mississippi last year when those three guys from up north--New York and places like that--went down to Mississippi for the Civil Rights Movement, and they were murdered, and they never found their bodies?

At that point in time, they had not found their bodies. They did later.

They associated the murders with members of the Ku Klux Klan who were out to get these foreign meddlers who were coming into Mississippi, pushing for the right to vote for Black people.

We talked about it and said: Well, is it safe to go down there and march?

We went back and forth and back and forth and ultimately decided not to go. Bad decision. I wish I had gone.

Why were they marching in Selma, AL--a town you haven't heard of except for that march? It was over the issue of the right to vote for Black Americans in that town.

Here are the numbers. There were 15,000 eligible Black voters in Selma, AL. How many were actually registered to vote out of the 15,000? There were 335. What happened? Why didn't more register? Because they put a test down, a literacy test, before they could vote, and you had to pass that test to be eligible to vote. They asked constitutional questions like ``The Constitution has the phrase `letters of marque and reprisal.' What does that mean?'' I am not sure I can answer it standing here today as a Senator. They couldn't answer it, either, and they were denied the right to vote.

That was the reality of the voting crisis in America in the 1960s that led to the Civil Rights Act.

Let me fast-forward in my story to a much more recent time. It was about 25 years ago. I was on a trip down to Alabama, this time with John Lewis, my friend and fellow Member of Congress, who actually marched in Selma the day that I didn't go. We went to a number of places and saw a number of key locations in Birmingham and Montgomery, AL, where important civil rights events had occurred.

The highlight of the trip was going to be on Sunday. After breakfast, we were going to go march together across and down the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL. Unfortunately, I was called back home. I had to leave to catch a flight.

I said to John Lewis: I am sorry to miss this opportunity, my friend. I really wanted to be there finally to march in Selma.

He said: What time is your plane?

I said: 8 o'clock.

He said: We are going to get up at 5 and go over there, you and me, and I will march with you down the Edmund Pettus Bridge and show you where they almost killed me.

I said: I wouldn't miss it for the world.

We got up at 5 o'clock, took the drive over to Selma, and marched down and across that bridge. And I thought of all the times I had seen the video and film of John Lewis--this young, idealistic Black man-- wearing a tan raincoat, marching with the folks across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the troopers coming up and battering him so badly, they fractured his skull and almost killed him. He survived, thank God. And he talked about that day and what it meant to him. I wish I had been there. I hope I would have survived it, as he did. I hope I wouldn't have had to go through the beating that he did.

When we talk about the right to vote and the Voting Rights Act, it was created here in Washington the next year by Lyndon Baines Johnson, as President, because he said: Once and for all, we have to put an end to this. We have to say that every American, regardless of race, creed, or color, has an opportunity to vote, and they can never be denied for their racial composition or whatever it might be.

We are back debating the same issue, and, of course, the question is: Do we need a Voting Rights Act? Senator Durbin, you are talking about something that was passed 50-plus years ago. Why do we have to continue to have a provision in the law to protect your right to vote?

Well, my experience as a Congressman and as a Senator has been that there are nefarious, devious ways to make it tough to vote. You can draw a map that basically says you will never get to vote for anybody you want. You are always stuck in the wrong district, the wrong place. That is called gerrymandering or redistricting to deny a constitutional right. Or you can basically be the object of discrimination. That can happen too.

So the issue of voting is so sacred and key to our democracy that I believe the Voting Rights Act should be in place. As a warning to those who would violate it, there is a price to be paid. That, to me, doesn't seem like too much to ask. In fact, it gets down to the heart of who we are and where we are today.

You hear a lot of people now talking about illegal and ineligible people who are trying to vote. There have been suggestions that some of them are illegal, undocumented people living here who should never have come into this country and once here, should never be allowed to vote.

In fact, the other side has proposed--the Republicans have proposed that people prove they are American citizens before they can vote.

The interesting thing is, they say: We want to see your identification before you vote.

Well, what identification would you produce? The same thing you produce every day--your driver's license, right? Everybody uses their driver's license. I do to prove who I am when I buy a plane ticket or something.

But the Republican approach says that a driver's license is not eligible to be used for identification under their new law. Under their new law, you basically have to produce one of two things.

A passport.

Well, I have a passport. Doesn't everybody?

No. Half of Americans don't own a passport.

Well, then get one before the election.

I have a problem. I need $165 to buy a passport, and I have to wait a few weeks, maybe a few months if it doesn't come through quickly.

So that is one proof of identification, which many people don't have and can't get in time for an election, not for sure.

The second thing they would like you to produce is your birth certificate that proves you are who you say you are because your name is on it. It is OK for me, if I can ever find the darn thing up in that box in my closet. But I can find my birth certificate that has my name on it.

My wife is not so lucky. It has her maiden name on her birth certificate, of course, so she has to go ahead of time and obtain a new birth certificate, pay for it, and get it delivered with her married name on board.

Why? The basic premise is to make sure that you are an American when you vote.

Well, this must be a real problem. If we are going to ask people to produce a passport or a birth certificate with their birth name on it because we want to keep ineligible people from voting, this must be a real problem.

Well, we took a look at it, and here is how it turns out. Over a span of 20 years of voting in America--imagine the millions and millions of votes that were cast--they found a number of people who were ineligible because they weren't citizens of the United States, who actually tried to vote.

Out of 40 million people, how many do you think they found? Seventy thousand? No. Seven thousand? No. Seven hundred? No. Seventy-seven. Seventy-seven people who tried to vote who were ineligible.

Now the other side--the Republicans--is coming up with the idea to go buy a passport to prove you are eligible; go find a birth certificate that fits the law to show you are eligible.

The point I am making is this: 77 people who were stupid enough or devious enough to try to vote and weren't eligible shouldn't create a hardship for every other conscientious American who gets up regularly and never misses the opportunity to vote. To put some new identification requirement in there for registration just makes no sense to me whatsoever. That is why we continue to debate about voting.

Incidentally, let's say the obvious. One of the reasons we continue this debate is that a former President, and now President again, has decided he never lost an election. He says, in the year 2020, he never lost to Joe Biden.

It has reached a ridiculous point, where nominees to become a Federal judge for life--attorneys--come before us; take an oath; and testify in the Judiciary Committee, where I am the ranking member.

We ask these judicial nominees a basic question: Who won the election in 2020?

I will bet you, if I went to the Galleries up there, everybody could answer: Why, of course, Joe Biden won that election.

These nominees cannot say those words. They are afraid of the reaction of Donald Trump when he hears that they are not promoting the Big Lie--that he never lost an election.

Think I am exaggerating?

Just 2 or 3 weeks ago, Senator Coons of Delaware started asking those nominees who had won a lifetime appointment on a Federal bench another basic question. The amendments to the Constitution include an amendment that says: If you have been elected two times as President of the United States, you can't run for a third term. So Senator Coons asked these nominees that question: Do you believe that because Donald Trump was elected twice as President that he is prohibited from running for a third term?

They refused to answer. ``It may be an issue on a case before me someday.'' That is not what it is all about.

Donald Trump likes to hold out the possibility that he will run again, even though it is clearly, clearly unconstitutional for him to even consider it. But these nominees are in such fear that he will end up vicing them or taking them off the list to be judges that they won't answer these basic questions about who won the election or whether or not Donald Trump can run for a third term. That is the ridiculous extreme we have reached in this country.

There will come a day for some of these people--and they will be put on the Federal bench by my colleagues on the Republican side--when somebody is going to assemble a video of their testimony. It will be a moment of embarrassment for them to think what they had to do to finally get approval before the Judiciary Committee.

Today, the right to vote is under attack in this country. We are witnessing a brand of politics we have never seen before. The Trump administration has shown they are dead set on restricting Americans' right to vote by pushing for partisan gerrymandering, restricting mail- in voting, and demanding unreasonable voter registration requirements, such as those I just mentioned.

Incidentally, the President of the United States says he wants to eliminate vote-by-mail, which many of us have used over and over again, because of the fraud involved in it. How did the President of the United States vote in this last election in Florida? He voted by mail. Go figure. This is supposed to be a corrupt form of voting in America. Yet the President, who wants to end it, uses it himself.

All Americans need to have a fair say in who represents them, but in being led by a President who tried stealing an election, Republicans have lost all respect for election integrity. We are now witnessing a never-before-seen political pressure campaign to rig our elections by enabling politicians to choose their voters, not the other way around.

Rather than tit-for-tat political games, the American people deserve stability at the voting booth. The Voting Rights Act used to be an overwhelming bipartisan sentiment that we are all in this together and that we don't want anyone to cheat their way into public office.

In the most recent Supreme Court case of Louisiana v. Callais, the Court had an opportunity to protect this representation for all Americans, especially those who have been historically disenfranchised by gerrymandering and other discriminatory voting practices. Instead, the Court's conservative supermajority has again turned its back on the promise of an equal right to vote, further gutting the Voting Rights Act.

The impact is already being felt. Across the South--primarily in the former Confederate States--you see decisions being made to eliminate African-American Representatives from congressional districts.

Justice Kagan, in writing for the dissent, said the Voting Rights Act was ``born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers.'' We cannot allow that blood to have been spilled in vain. We must fight these dangerous attempts to restrict the right to vote, and we must restore confidence in our democracy by ensuring that every eligible American has access to the ballot.

That is why, in honor of my late friend and voting rights pioneer Congressman John Lewis, I have been proud to introduce a bill that bears his name. It is the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore and strengthen the Voting Rights Act.

It has been an honor to work with Senator Warnock of Georgia, who is cosponsoring this bill with me. We are going to try to make sure it has its day in court--or its day in the Senate, as we say.

We also need to advance additional tools against current voter suppression efforts. Attacks on voting rights aren't happening in a vacuum. Across this country, Republican lawmakers and litigators are using every trick in the book to rig the rules of the game. Why? They are afraid of losing in November. Purging voter rolls, closing polling places, restricting mail-in voting, and undermining the Voting Rights Act all serve one purpose--to limit access to the ballot box.

America is better than that.

Some Democrats will continue to stand up and push back against this effort. It is about time that this became a bipartisan effort again.

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