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Floor Speech
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Ms. LUMMIS. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about a bill that, at its core, asks for something almost embarrassingly simple: That the person registering to vote in an American election is actually an American citizen and that the person showing up to cast the ballot is actually who they say they are.
The SAVE Act does not reinvent our elections. It does not add redtape for the sake of redtape. It asks for documentary proof of citizenship at registration and identification at the ballot box--the same basic verification we already accept without complaint when we board an airplane, open a bank account, or pick up a prescription.
If we trust that system to protect a checking account, we should trust it enough to protect the vote. That is not extremism. That is common sense, and it is long past time this Chamber treated it that way.
This past Saturday, I was riding in the Cheyenne Frontier Days parade alongside Senator Barrasso. Cheyenne is my hometown. It is the world's largest outdoor rodeo. And we have great parades--four of them--during the course of the week of the world's largest outdoor rodeo. It is an exceptional tradition in my hometown.
Senator Barrasso and I are riding along the parade route, the same parade route Wyoming has watched for generations. And as we came down the street, I could hear it from my constituents over and over: Pass the SAVE Act, Senator. Pass the SAVE Act. Not once. Not from just one corner of the crowd, all along the parade route. That is not a talking point; that just happened last weekend. That is the people of Wyoming telling us what they want.
So, I came home from that parade wondering if Wyoming was maybe a little ahead of the country on this.
It turns out, Wyoming is right where the country already is. And it turns out these constituents aren't just in line with the people of Wyoming; they are in line with the country.
A Gallup poll found 84 percent of U.S. adults favor requiring photo identification to vote. In that same poll, 83 percent--just one less-- support requiring proof of citizenship for new voter registrants. Mr. President, 83 percent. That includes 71 percent of self-identified Democrats and an overwhelming majority of Independents. In this town, we can't get 83 percent of anybody to agree on the weather.
This is not controversial outside the walls of this building. It has simply become controversial inside them.
Would we expect to go to Mexico or Canada and walk into an election booth and have them let us vote in their elections without an ID, without proving we're a Canadian citizen or a Mexican citizen? They would have nothing to do with the process that allowed a U.S. citizen to vote without identification in their elections. No country would.
So is the opposition to this bill just another symptom of Trump derangement syndrome, where any policy this administration touches becomes reflexively toxic the moment it reaches this floor? Or do my colleagues across the aisle actually believe it is bad policy for only American citizens to decide American elections? Because, really, those are--as near as I can tell--the only two explanations on offer.
The same is true of protecting girls' and women's sports. Gallup has found 69 percent of Americans believe athletes should compete on teams that match their biological sex. I am surprised it is not a higher number, but it is 69 percent. This is not a fringe position. It is the plainly stated view of most people in this country, arrived at through a basic, widely shared sense of fairness: That girls who train and compete deserve a level playing field where they can compete safely. They don't have to worry about a man who identifies as a woman or as a transperson spiking a volleyball so hard that it does brain damage and causes concussions and lifelong injury to a young high school athlete. We owe that to our female athletes.
Wyoming didn't send me here to just spew political jargon, to play politics, because these things are simple; they are timeless; they are understood values. We can't bend and shape thousands of years of common sense with new, woke ideology. Wyoming sent me here to conduct myself in a manner that reflects their common sense, their values.
So it is time to send the SAVE Act to President Trump's desk. I heard that on the parade route in Cheyenne, WY, last weekend, and I hear it on this floor. We need to pass the SAVE Act.
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