senate rules have been necessary to adapt to changed circumstances. even senator bird the traditionalist did that. to address voting rights in a timely fashion is an opportunity to do exactly that to change the senate rules to promote the public debate that is restorative of the senate -- >> we will leave the briefing as the senate gaveled back in this session here on c-span2.

as we stood with them, meeting with the president, mr. zelensky, and the top leadership, i couldn't help but think of this country and how grateful we should be for our strength, our freedom, our democracy. all of us when we return from travel abroad i think express

our gratitude to be americans, to live in a country where these freedoms and our independence are assured. but where we, too, need to be strong and ever vigilant and vigorous in protecting those freedoms. we are the greatest nation in the history of the world, the strongest and most freedom loving on the planet. we are still an imperfect nation, still struggling to do better and a work in progress, but we are proud to confront our imperfection and move forward in a way that demonstrates that we can broaden access to opportunity and to the right of

people to determine their own destiny. no freedom or right is more important than the right to vote. that is why we are here today and why i am so proud to have helped to lead the john lewis voting rights advancement act and to support the freedom to vote act which are designed to safeguard americans' right to vote and secure the sanctity of our election. and today just as ukraine faces a threat to its independence and freedom, we, too, in america face a threat, not from vladimir putin directly, although he has sought to destabilize and degrade our democracy and continues to do so through

cyberattacks and misinformation, certainly 2016's interference in our elections is a warning bell, an alarm that we need to be stronger against foreign interference. but within the threat is equally if not more alarming because what we are seeing across this great country in state after state are efforts to suppress the vote and restrict the franchise. last year more than 440 restriction bills were introduced in 49 states, and 19 of those states successfully enacted 34 laws that made it harder for people to vote. these laws make mail-that voting and early voting more difficult.

they manipulate the boundaries of districts to reduce minority representation. it led to a purge of 3.1 million voters from the rolls in areas that were once covered by the voting rights preclearance requirement. we are seeing a tidal wave of voter suppression that continues, even as we speak today on this floor. the vote today comes in a week where we celebrate the legacy of reverend dr. martin luther king, center. for the first time in my memory, i was out of the country on that day, but it was ever present in my mind and heart, tand should animate -- heart, and it should animate us today. that memory and legacy which were so powerfully expressed on

august 6, 1965, when president lyndon johnson signed the voting rights act into law, he called it a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield. a triumph for freedom. and it followed a mere seven months after dr. king launched a southern christian leadership conference campaign based in selma, alabama, with the aim of supporting voting rights legislation. it was a great day for america. it is one that has rightly received a place in our history. it's taught to our children. the voting rights act represents the best of america. and its commitment to guaranteeing that members of every racial group would have

equal voting opportunities stands as one of the best days in this country. but it was no way up for the civil rights movement. it culminated a hard-fought campaign and it was a hard-won victory of civil rights leaders by dr. king and john lewis who committed themselves, literally committed their bodies, their physical well-being to advance the rights of others in the face of violent opposition. they were beaten, sometimes near death. and for decades the voting rights act remained a crucial bulwark. it was retained and defended

against insidious efforts to roll back the clock until, until the united states supreme court did that work for opponents in 2013 in shelby county, united states supreme court gutted the highly effective preclearance regime thereby jeopardizing the progress that the voting rights act made over the course of half a century in protecting against those voter suppression efforts throughout the country. justice ginsburg said it best in her powerful dissent in shelby county when she wrote that congress enacted the voting rights act preclearance requirement to cope with the

vial infection of racial discrimination which, quote, resembled battling the hydra whenever one form of voting discrimination was identified and prohibited, others sprang up in its place, end quote. and the time to protect those vieting rights -- voting rights is before they are restricted and that's why preclearance was so important and why the john lewis voting rights advancement act now must be enacted into law. we come here after a year that has seen the most destructive legislative session for voting rights in generations with states and localities returning to the conniving methods as dr. king called them, conniving methods of voter suppression

that block people from getting to the polls and making their votes count and undermines our democracy because as the founders sought to do, representative government means representing the people who are affected by these policies enacted by the federal government. and that means representation that enables every person to vote and have that vote count. there are no guarantees that rights will be protected in this country. the fight for voting equality has faced continuous, often violent resistance and enormous opposition, including from within this congress and now by rules, a filibuster that will prevent the majority from

protecting those rights. the effort to change the filibuster is very simply an effort to convert it from a secret to a public debate mechanism. a secret to public. we will vote tomorrow on a rules change that provides for a means to make majority rule count, not to abolish the filibuster but to make it public instead of secret. as my distinguished colleague senator warnock posed the question in this chamber last month, we want it to be bipartisan, but as he said, quote, bipartisanship at whose expense? and as he also said, clearly in this country some people don't want some people to vote, and the filibuster is a handy means

of preventing reforms that secure the right to vote. historic denials of individual basic liberties and freedoms have long garnered bipartisan support and have required courage and conviction to overcome and that's why we must change the rules tomorrow. dr. king never quit. he never stopped fighting. as he said, i think i'm quoting him correctly, disappointment is fine night -- finite, but hope is infinite. so even if we're defeated tomorrow, we will continue this effort to eliminate dark money, to provide for disclosure, to stop state legislatures from eliminating districts in a way that knocks representatives out of their seats and results in

gerrymandering that is anti-democratic. for decades members of this chamber have deployed the filibuster to delay and block legislation that would have prevented voting rights by -- promoted voting rights by ending poll taxes and literacy tests, safeguard against workplace discrimination and advance civil rights in this country. the filibuster has been used to block those kinds of efforts to promote voting rights. the longest filibusters in this chamber's history were deployed to stop the civil rights act of 1957 and 1964, a testament to this tool's history as a weapon against the advancement of civil rights. and dr. king himself lamented that, quote, tragedy of a senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority

of people from voting. we cannot continue to allow these kinds of procedural tactics to stand in the way of defending against a new era of hostility toward voting rights of people in this country. we must protect the right to vote. it should not be a partisan issue. in fact, voting rights are widely supported throughout american society. those civil rights measures were supported by bipartisan majorities in those years of 1957 and 1964 and in the renewal since then. photographs showing members of both parties at bill signing, a test powerfully to the bipartisan support this cause has enjoyed throughout its history. since the original inception of the voting rights act in 1965,

overwhelming bipartisan majorities of both houses of congress have reauthorized the voting rights act five times. and for nearly a century after the civil war. and before the voting rights act, the scourge of racial discrimination in voting challenged our nation's core commitment, our basic values as a country. from that century of sacrificing and suffering, so embodied by dr. king, came the voting rights act and its extraordinary commitment to realizing our nation's highest ideals, the best in america. for decades, it worked in one decision and its progeny. the united states supreme court

undercut and undermined those rights, and now we face this tsunami of voter suppression bills crashing against america. we must defend america. we must secure those rights and liberties, just as we come to the aid of countries like ukraine that resist attack on their independence. we must renew our nation's commitment to protecting voting rights in this country, and tomorrow we will do it. tomorrow we will vote, members will be held accountable, we will be on record, and i hope my colleagues will do the right thing for america. thank you, mr. president. i yield the floor. i suggest the absence of a quorum.

the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call: from corey and debbie and alex. this is just a passionate with our members for the reasons you heard will take a few questions. [inaudible] you know there will be

political backlash and the senate is already seeing it. are you prepared for that? >> look, i'm not getting into the politics. the vast majority of our caucus strongly disagrees with senators a manchin and sinema on rule changes. the overwhelming majority of our caucus knows that if you are going to try to rely on republican votes, you will get zero progress on voting rights right now, zero. yes. reporter: the with the filibuster for this piece of legislation? >> correct. >> you have any optimism you might convince all 58 members of your caucus? >> we are always fighting day by day, week by week, minute by minute. it is so important to us yes. reporter: the critical moment for democracy? are there efforts to primate center manchin and sinema? >> i'm not getting into the politics is the substantive serious issue, yes.

reporter: obviously black voters were big part. [inaudible] what do you say to black voters that they turned out in earnest. they cannot come to an agreement. >> look who is stopping both of those bills part corey booker knows, republicans, republicans, we do not have a single republican to allow us to go forward and debate except one. we do not have any republican supporting this and i would that the african-american community is passionate about us continuing to fight. better than anyone, no setbacks, they do not stop fighting until they win. and that is infused in our

caucus, yes. reporter: some of the provisions that are in this bill. they started off as a pandemic related measures. how does that fight racism if it's temporary? >> okay whoa, whoa. first of all mail and balloting has been the way of voting and the way of your top right that has not been temporary that is one red state bird are you talking or my? i am talking. mail in balloting have been the way of life in many, states red, blue, purple. one of the things we've learned from the pandemic is that it is actually incredibly helpful in a pandemic but it's also made it easier for people to vote. they rolled back the very things that will make it easier to vote, leading to more and more as i pointed out confusion. the other thing is important to note and the reason he is the example of montana and the

same date registration is they're also rolling back things that have long been the law. they basically quote a north carolina court regarding a law a few years ago are discriminating with surgical precision by look at each state and figuring out how did more people vote this way. 70000 people registered to vote in the state of georgia during the runoff. let's reduce the runoff. like they've thelma senator warnock. and not allow same date registered during registration during that. that's exactly they've done. i can give you numerous they rolled back things change during the pandemic like witnesses for mail and ballots in south carolina and things are put in place before the pandemic. no matter which way they did

but a particular population predict particular people of color, urban people et cetera. students young people, oregon has had a mail and voting for 30 years, long before the pandemic. as the highest or second-highest after minnesota percentage of people participating. isn't it good to have a high percentage of people participating? you get the last question. reporter: >> with inflation and autonomy using the majority to focus on he knows. [inaudible] >> leave answer that question a whole bunch of time. this is so sacred and so important the right to vote is the wellspring of our democracy. we are not abandoning other issues we can do more than

one. but to abandon voting rights when you have seen how important it is in the country, when is the wellspring of our democracy. as in the poison of america would be a disgrace. will do other things as well thank you everybody.

claim placement one. he'll put forward at talking filibuster. once the gop locks the current voting in election bills. filibusters returned to the rules that any senator who chooses the filibuster a bill must stay on the floor, on their feet and continue proposed changes would end a filibuster with only simple majority part however change the 60 vote threshold allow the senate to move to a simple

majority vote, democratic senators manchin and sinema continue to oppose it. we expect votes on this tomorrow. one of those democrats again has been opposed as democrat joe manchin he spoke earlier on the floor and here is his >> it is all good. >> democrats are talked about using the nuclear option for the filibuster. are you open to that idea? >> i think we should be. basically we should be transparent in how we do our business or lack of doing business. that has never happened bird that is never happened in the history of our country. basically there's never been a simple majority vote. basically you get off of the

debate. >> why would you filibuster own bill? may not doing a carveout for voting rights? >> i think i've been very clear about that. i don't how you break a rule to make a role. thinking you're doing something we have never done this. we have never done it. ike so many of my democratic colleagues, i rise alopping with those -- along with those democratic colleagues in calling for comprehensive federal legislation to turn back the avalanche of voter suppression legislation in various states. all of it, all of it animated by the big lie about the 2020 election. we'll talk more about that in a moment. but it's clear to me that republican politicians across the nation in state capitals and even here in washington are attempting to make it harder for tens of millions of americans to register to vote, to cast their

vote, and they're even making it harder, of course, for every vote to count. this is a subversive threat. it's a subversive threat to our democratic institutions. i believe it's a clear and present danger to our elections and also a clear and present danger to our stability as a nation and, of course, it is a clear and present danger hand a direct threat to our democracy itself. just by way of a significant example, consider what happened in just one state in the last couple of years -- in pennsylvania. i'll start with an historical backdrop. pennsylvania, like a lot of states, had a high watermark of voting in 1960 in the election between john f. kennedy and richard m. nixon. then in 1964 the numbers were

very high as well. so in 1960 about -- right at almost exactly 70% of voting-age population voted. but as 1960 and 1964 you had a precipitous drop that occurred every four years. some years it would go up a little higher. other years it would go back down. but it never -- we never got in 60 years to that level again. so, for example, just the most recent two elections before 2020 in pennsylvania, the 2012 election, 5.74 million people voted. that was 57% of the voting-age population. so down from that high-water mark of 70% in 1960. 2016 was a big turnout in our state. we had more voters than in 2012.

it went to 16. so it got over that 60 mark but of course 61 is not 70, so we got nowhere near, even in 2016 when you look at the percent of the voting-age population. so that's the backdrop of 2016, big turnout but not the turnout level we saw in 1960 or 1964 or a few other years. then in october of 2019, this is just an example of why the voting measures we're debating here are important in a positive way for helping people to vote. in october of 2019 governor tom wolfe in pennsylvania signed act 77. this was an historic and comprehensive election reform bill that sailed through the general assembly with strong bipartisan support. consider this, 133 republicans voted for this bill. when you add up the number who

voted in the state senate for this bill who were republicans and then you add them to the number in the statehouse who were republicans, voted for the bill. when you look at it across the whole general assembly, both parties, both houses, about 70% of the general assembly voted for it. so there's a lot of give and take and a lot of compromise, and they voted on a strong election reform bill. remember, that was october of 2019, well before the onset of the pandemic. but thank goodness that we had that bill in place during the pandemic. in addition to enhancing election security, the pennsylvania law so-called act 77 established, quote, no excuse, unquote, absentee voting, better known today as mail-in voting. that applied to all voters. so finally we had a mechanism that people could vote by mail,

especially in a pandemic, but of course when they voted on the bill in 2019 no one could have predicted how useful this legislation would be just a year later. this law was passed before covid, but of course it was in the face of a once-in-a-century pandemic during the run up to the 2020 election, but it approved to be of course particularly important. now we get to 2020. so we have over many, many years, many, many presidential elections nowhere near the percent of the voting age population voting in a presidential election compared to 1906 and 19 -- 1960 and 1964. what happened in 2020? in the middle of a pandemic, when everyone was predicting not only in my home state of pennsylvania but other places as well that turnout was going to be low because people were

worried. they were worried -- this is of course before vaccines -- worried about contracting the virus. they won't voa, turnout will be low and we'll see what happens. it didn't happen that way. in pennsylvania in 2020, 6.9 million people voted. 6.9 million people, that's an increase of roughly 800,000 votes from just four years earlier, and that was a pretty good turnout, really good turnout in 2016. that 6.9 million votes amounted to 71% of the voting-age population in pennsylvania, which was a point higher than 1960. no one, no one thought that was possible. the only way it was possible was because we had better voting procedures in place. so, in other words, if you look at it not just from 2016 to 2020, but the most recent

election before the 2016 -- the 2020 election from 2012 was a 20% increase in voter turnout. there can't be any dispute that pennsylvania's record-setting 71% turnout was made possible only through expanding opportunities to vote for all voters. all voters, young and old and so many others in between. mail-in voting enabled almost three million pennsylvanians to safely and securely cast their ballot. by any measure, pennsylvania should be celebrated as a success story of why these voting provisions help people vote. i hope that we never fall below that 71% of the voting age population. that ought to be the standard for voting in a pandemic or not. in fact, that number should go

higher when we're outside of a pandemic because people have different ways to vote. a republican-controlled legislature and a democratic governor came together and enacted strongly supported bipartisan election reform legislation to increase election security and ballot access. unfortunately, we know that the story doesn't end there. we all know what happened in the next chapter, and it's not unique to pennsylvania. in response to the 2020 election, we've seen a new chapter, one focused on election subversion and sort suppression, written in statehouses across the country. again, it's attributable to the big lie about the 2020 election. i want to note for the record that when we voted here on january 6, the evening of january 6, 2020, after the violent insurrection in the

capitol where you had people marching through this building, calling for the death of the vice president and trying to locate members of congress to bring them harm, and also the whole effort was directed at stopping the counting of the electoral votes. but i want to note for the record that a number of republican senators, in fact most republican senators stood up on january 6 that evening to vote to certify the election. unfortunately, since january 6 of 2020, despite having voted the right way for democracy that night, a lot of these republican senators since then have only validated the big lie. so they may have voted the right way that night for our democracy, but since that time they haven't disputed the big lie enough. some of them, not all of them but some of them. and of course now they've at least turned a blind eye to efforts at the state level that

i just spoke of. i think it's also important for the report to note, mr. president, i won't read all of this, but to note what the associated press found about the election of 2020. here's a copy. i'll ask consent to enter into the record an associated press story entitled far too little vote fraud to tip election to trump, a.p. finds, dated december 14, 2021, by christina a. cassidy. the presiding officer: without objection, it will be entered moo the record. mr. casey: thank you, mr. president. i will just read the first graph of this associated press story dated december of this past year. quote, an associated press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former president donald trump has found that fewer than 475,

a number that would not have, that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election, unquote. of course, pennsylvania was one of those states they looked at. so we know what happened in the election and we know why we can say with certainty that the big lie is nothing but a lie. after the election of 2020, in june of 2021, pennsylvania's republican controlled legislature became one of the many legislatures across the nation passing a voter suppression law. here's what they would have done if they were successful. they passed it, and this bill would have posed unconstitutional voter -- impose, i should say, unconstitutional voter i.d. restrictions, restricted mail-in voting. the mail-in voting they just voted in favor of in 2019,

these same legislators. and this bill would essentially have eliminated the use of drop boxes. furthermore, it rolled back several successful provisions of the bipartisan act 77, including reducing the number of days permitted to register to vote and eliminating an option to opt in to receive an annual mail-in ballot. while this bill was fortunately voted by governor wolf, the threat to suppress the vote in pennsylvania remains ever present as the legislature continues to work on another omnibus election bill. so once n the big lie animates the work of republican politicians, in pennsylvania and throughout the country. it's not simply a lie. it's a lie that engenders fear. sometimes fear of losing your election in a primary. we understand that fear. we've seen it play out here as

well. but sometimes the fear is deeper than that, that your own security will be at risk if you don't espouse the big lie. in light of these efforts, it is fair to question how did pennsylvania go from a shining example of bipartisan election reform in 2019 to ground zero in the fight against voter suppression and election misinformation in 2021 and continuing into 2022. in the months leading up to the 2020 general election, the former president led an assault on our election system sowing seeds of division and without evidence, questioning the legitimacy of voting methods, including mail-in voting which has been utilized in the nation for decades. and by the way, mail-in voting allowed us to set a turnout record, as i said before, in pennsylvania for the first time in 60 years to go that high of the voting-age population.

the former president lost his election to president joe biden but instead of honorably conceding the race, he created the big lie that the election had been stolen from him by raising unfowppedzed allegation -- unfounded allegations of voter fraud, irregularities in pennsylvania and across the nation. there is simply no evidence to justify the claims of voter fraud or irregularities suggested in the a.p. story in their investigation that undergirds their conclusions supports that. the big lie is the fraud. if you want to talk about fraud, that's where it is. that is the fraud, the big lie is the falsehood and the con job. it's a deliberate, ongoing attempt to sow instability. we know that in over 60 cases in court after court from state courts to district courts to circuit courts to the u.s. supreme court, all those courts

refused to indulge the unprecedented loopy legal arguments and false conspiracy theories put forward by the president's campaign and some republicans after the election. despite the lack of any evidence to support claims of widespread fraud, we continue to hear these baseless conspiracy theories and calls to roll back pennsylvania's act 77 for one reason and one reason only, to disenfranchise voters. so in order to please one man rather than support positive reforms that worked in pennsylvania, that increased turnout in pennsylvania exponentially like no other law has, lawmakers have introduced all over the country now some 400 voter suppression bills. there are three types of corrupt proposals that i would like to summarize. number one, shifting election

authority. that's one -- that's one measure of a corrupt practice. number two, attacking election workers. that's corrupt and that's what they're trying to do. and number three, restricting mail-in voting. first and foremost, many of the bills attack the most fundamental foundational element of our democracy. administering our elections. according to a report from voting rights lab in september of 2021, more than 180 of the bills introduced across the country are an effort to subvert our current election administration. some of these bills would allow the legislature or other partisan actors, really purveyors of the big lie, to exert greater control over elections and interfere with local election administrators. for example, georgia's senate bill 202 which has already been enacted into law, not just

proposed, this law will allow a partisan state election board to remove and replace local election administrators. the new law empowers the state legislature, the state legislature to appoint the chair of the election board ensuring that the majority of the board reflects the partisan will of the legislature. we've also seen numerous lawmakers including in pennsylvania initiate or attempt to initiate partisan election, quote, audits, unquote, into the 2020 election results without any evidence of fraud. the better word for this type of approach sf frauded -- approach is fraudulent. it's a fraudulent attempt and it's nothing more than a fraudit. these efforts fueled by the big lie have wasted millions of taxpayer dollar, money solely an attempt to further call into doubt the 2020 election and create instability in our

elections. republican efforts to shift election authority undermines people's faith in elections. and it injects partisanship into our election administration. the second area of corruption we've also seen in some of these bills is efforts to pass legislation that would create or increase civil and criminal penalties against election workers. election officials across the nation, republicans and democrats alike, from blue counties and red counties, should be accorded the respect and commendation they deserve. these are public servants. they should not be subjected to threats, either legal or otherwise. in the middle of a pandemic, these same americans risked their own health and their family's health to ensure that the elections were conducted safely and efficiently. these americans, republicans and democrats and independents, did

their job honorably. rather than receiving appreciation for that efforts, they and their families have been threatened with threats of violence, fueled by the deliberate falsehoods of which i spoke before. the same falsehoods spread by politicians here in washington and in state legislatures across the country. these threats were particularly relevant in my home state after pennsylvania when then-philadelphia commissioner al schmidt, a republican, his family, and his colleagues were subjected to death threats -- death threats -- for doing their job. this is a republican-elected official in philadelphia subjected to death threats. after election day simply because he was trying to fulfill and the others that worked with him were trying to fulfill an essential part of their basic duty, which is counting the

votes in that city. so despite the widely reported threats against our election officials and concerns about mass resignations due to the stresses on our democratic institutions, republican legislatures have enacted laws that further threaten these officials with felony prosecutions, and they also threaten civil penalties for noncompliance with election rules, even inadvertent or technical mistakes. we've never seen this before, mr. president, in america, but that's what we're talking about today. so these attacks are a clear attempt to further undermine our democracy and counter the efforts of many election officials to help make voting safer and easier during the covid-19 pandemic. final i -- fine ail will the third issue which i would consider a corrupt practice that's embedded into these bills is the question of mail-in voting. pennsylvania's record turnout in

2020 was a direct result of the bipartisan efforts -- 133 legislators voting for mail-in balloting -- so that we would have universal mill-in voting and early voting in addition to regular voting. rather than embracing its success, republican lawmakers in pennsylvania and across the country have worked to greatly restrict or eliminate -- or eliminate -- mail-in voting through a variety of methods. seven states have reduced the time frame in which votes -- voters can request mail-in ballots. another four states limited the use of ballot drop boxes. some states have gutted or even tried to gut the ability of voters to automatically receive a mail-in ballot for every election they're eligible to vote in. republican politicians just keep on lying about the 2020

election. not a single republican politician has come forward with evidence of the type of widespread systemic voter fraud that would necessitate any of the changes that these laws are predicated on. and these proposals are predicated on. in reality, these changes are about one thing and one thing only -- making it more difficult to cast a ballot. every single american should be alarmed by these efforts. if we allow voter suppression efforts to go unchecked, they'll event lids and simply impact everyone. i think it was martin luther king who talked about injustice, an injustice that would be validated by these corrupt proposals. injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. voter suppression effort make it harder -- just a couple of examples from my home state. and this is true of a lot of

states. voter suppression laws make a harder for a 90-year-old living in rural pennsylvania who can't get to her counting election area to vote. she'll have a harder time voting if pennsylvania goes in the direction of some of these other states. pennsylvania has over 800,000 veterans who fought for our freedoms, including the right to vote, the freedom to vote. shouldn't that veteran continue to have the option to vote early or to vote by mail, after they've served our nation? shouldn't they continue to have that option? or should we just go back to the old ways where that veteran is limited to one day a year for a certain number of hours a year to vote in a general election? so these proposals, these voter suppression and subversion proposals will impact everyone. it'll impact a farmer in

pennsylvania who might have a very busy day on election day and can't get to the vote for one reason or another. so if they're not able to vote, their vote gets canceled out because we decided not to have early voting, which we have now, we decided no to the have early mail-in ballots, which we have now, all in service of one man and one big lie. that's what this is all about. so we can't go back to those days. how about just another example from pennsylvania. we've had a long tradition where men and women serving overseas have voted by absentee ballot. guess what an absentee ballot is? an absentee ballot is a mail-in ballot. it's the same thing. we just broadening the category of folks who could use the same method. so do we want to go back to a time when we can't have the kind of mail-in ballots that we had in 2020 that led to that great turnout? and it's entirely possible we

could go back to a time when even the votes of men and women serving overseas would be put at risk because when you eliminate mail-in ballots in a state like pennsylvania, you're eliminating absentee ballots as well. -- by doing that. so i don't think we want to do that to our fighting men and women. so we can't go back to the days when farmers and small business owners and veterans and busy moms juggling their kids' schedules and seniors who may have trouble voting and need another option to vote, we can't go back to those days when they couldn't vote if they didn't have the time on that one single day. that's one of the reasons why we had such low voter turnout, even in presidential elections, for all these years in pennsylvania and so many other states. so we know what we have to do. we have to go back to our founding principles and voting is a foundational pillar of our

democracy. as elected officials, it is our responsibility to do all we can to expand voter access and remove institutional barriers to voting are. but we've got to be clear about what's happening. our democracy, by virtue of these suppression bills, is under siege right now. the attack here on january 6 continues. what was a violent attack on that day is now in the form of legislation, to attack our elections, to alack the right to vote -- a tack the right to vote, to make it harder to vote. so attacking democracy at an earlier stage was always met by the right response. today that right response, the correct response is to pass the freedom to vote and john lewis act, to prevent these kinds of

attacks on voting rights. it would protect election officials by criminalizing intimidation, threats or coercion of election officials. it would mandate systematic risk-limiting audits to combat against the unfounded partisan approaches by republicans. it would create national standards for early voting, voter registration, and it would also include some of the provisions of my bill, the accessible vote something act to create an accessible voting experience for every voter ensuring that the needs of people with disabilities are met. that's another category of americans whose votes will be suppressed, people with disabilities, if these republicans get their way. this bill we're trying to pass reflects feedback from state and local officials to ensure that people. mr. mcconnell: for

implementing -- mr. casey: it will restore the full strength of the voting rights act of 1965 after the supreme court gutted the -- gutted several of the voting rights act provisions in recent years. these provisions work hand in hand to improve access to the ballot and protect against election subversion. we should restore the senate at the same time by allowing plenty of time for debate as well as a robust amendment process so the minority party in the senate has a full opportunity to debate issues like voting rights. so, mr. president, we got to do more than just simply move a bill forward tomorrow on voting rights. we should also change the senate rules appropriately to allow that bill to be passed by a majority after we have a robust debate. debating voting right has never been more important. the time to do that is now.

madam president, i would yield the floor. a senator: madam president? the presiding officer: the senator from utah. a senator: thank you. i have enjoyed the discussion which has been going on with regards to this legislation and have a couple of comments. mr. romney: one is, given the interest and the priority and the importance of elections, it would have been helpful prior to preparing this legislation for a vote if those that were the drafters of this legislation actually invited a republican, any republican, to sit down and perhaps negotiate and see if we could find some common ground, but instead the democrat leadership dusted off what they had written before on an entirely partisan basis and then are shocked, shocked, that republicans don't want to support what they drafted. now, i'd note that political

overstatement and hyperbole may be relatively common and they're often excused, but the president and some of my democratic colleagues have ventured deep into hysteria. their cataclysmic predictions for failing to support their entirely partisan election reform worked out entirely by themselves without any input whatsoever from any single person on my side of the aisle, they're far beyond the pale. now, they're entirely right to call out donald trump's big lie about the last election being stolen, but in the same spirit of honesty, they should not engage in a similar lie that republicans across the country are making it much harder for minorities to vote and that the federal government must urgently displace centuries of practice that gives states primary control over elections.

so dire are the consequences, they claim, that this must be done by shredding the rules of our senior legislative body. they point to georgia as evidence of political election villainy. the president went there to deliver his crowning argument, but as has been pointed out by many before me, it is easier for minorities and everybody else for that matter to vote in georgia than it is in the president's home state of delaware and in leader schumer's home state of new york. in georgia, there are more days of early voting, and in georgia, there's no excuse absentee voting by mail. they do decry georgia's prohibition of political activists approaching voters in line with drinks of water. but the same prohibition exists in new york, and why?

so that voters don't get harassed in live by poll activists. just like georgia and new york, many states keep poll activists at length from voters. my democrat colleagues conveniently ignore the fact that the 1965 voting rights act prohibition of any voting practice or procedure that discriminates against minorities is still in effect. even today the justice department is suing two states under that law. protection of minority voting is already required by law. protection of minority voting is a high and essential priority for me and for my senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle. to be clear, i want an election system that allows every eligible citizen in every state

to be able to exercise their right to vote in every single election. so putting aside the hysteria, let me explain why i don't support the democrats' bill. first, their bill weakens voter i.d. i, along with the great majority of voters of all races, favor voter photo i.d. their bill makes it easier to cheat by accommodating unmonitored vote collection boxes. their bill opens the gates to a flood of lawsuits, pre and post an election. and it weakens the safe imardz of voter reg -- safeguards of voter renl stration. there are other things in the democrats' bill that i don't support. i'm not in favor of federal funding for campaigns. i also don't think states should be required to allow felons to vote. and most fundamentally, i think

by reserving election procedures to the states, the founders made it more difficult for a would-be authoritarian to change the law for voting in just one place, here in washington, to keep himself in office. let me add that i think the democrats' bill is insufficiently focused on the real threat, and that is the corruption of the counting of the ballots, the certification of elections, and the congressional provisions for accepting and counting a late of electors. this is where the apparent conspirators were focused in their attempt in the last election to subvert democracy and prevent the peaceful transfer of power. now, rye spect democrats who dis-- i respect democrats who disagree with my point of view. i hope they'll offer me the same respect. people who want voter i.d. are

not racists. people who don't want federal funding of campaigns aren't bull connor. and people who insist that vote drop boxes be monitored aren't jefferson davis. a senator: madam president. the presiding officer: the senator from california. mr. padilla: madam president, just yesterday, we, the nation, celebrated the world vision and exceptional courage of the reverend dr. martin luther king jr. now, born and raised under the violent oppression of jim crow segregation, dr. king deeply

felt the lasting wounds of slavery and segregation. and yet he believed in the promise of america's highest ideal, a system of democracy that we are all created equal. democracy that recognizes that we are all created equal. in 1957 dr. king told a crowd of civil rights leaders, quote, our most urgent plea to the federal government is to guarantee our voting rights. he went on to say give us the ballot and we will creatively join in the freeing of the soul of america. madam president, time and again, from a bridge in selma to the steps of the lincoln memorial, dr. king and the civil rights movement collectively forced

this country to confront the brutal injustice of white supremacy. dr. king kindled a movement of peaceful protests, of voter registration, and a legal revolution. his leadership helped secure the passage of the voting rights act in 1965, a monument to freedom and a guardian of our multiracial democracy. and as important a step as that was, dr. king also understood that the path of progress, the road to freedom would not be linear. it would not be direct. and it would be threatened by setbacks. recent years have illustrated just now right dr. king was. the clock is turning back on voting rights, and far too many

people, both inside this capitol and outside it, are ignoring or denying the alarm bells. madam president, to truly honor dr. king we must rededicate ourselves to the cause of freedom and equality. we cannot wait for a convenient season to act. we cannot wait for another bloody sunday. look around. this is our moment. the threats of democracy today may look different than bull connor with the bullhorn, but they are no less real. now, when republicans claim that this is all hyperbole or hysteria, as senator romney just referenced, consider this, in the year since our nation's most secure election ever, with

regard voter turnout, republican state legislatures have passed 34 laws, not expanding access to the ballot, restricting access to the ballot. and also threatening election security. just look at georgia. yes, georgia. where republicans passed an elections bill, s.b. 202, on the purely partisan basis this last spring. in the 2020 election georgians voted in record numbers. many voted by mail or used early voting options to be able to cast their ballots safely and securely in the midst of this once in a century global health pandemic. and guess what happened -- those ballots were processed, counted, audited, and the results certified. so, how did georgia republicans

respond? they wrote s.b. 202 to cut the number of early voting drop boxes in atlanta by more than 75%. to make it harder, not easier but harder, for voters who mistakenly go to the wrong polling place to cast a ballot and have their vote in statewide contests counted. to stop new voters from being able to register to vote in a runoff election if there is one. now, make no mistake, republicans will deny the intention, but the effect is clear. these changes disproportionately disenfranchise the votes and the voices of people of color. and when voters end upstanding in -- end up standing in line for hours to cast their vote on election day, as voters of color

disproportionia thely do, s.b. 202 will prevent volunteers from offering them food or water. now, senator romney said that these provisions are in place to prevent the harassment of voters waiting to vote. look at what other states have done. there's a clear tist continuation -- distinction between somebody harassing a voter, interfering with the electoral process, versus offering a thirsty neighbor a drink. so outlaw harassment. i think it kind of is. the general public knows the distinction. and so think about that. someone standing in line outdoors, with weather, for hours to do their patriotic duty. and georgia republicans make it a crime to give that person a bottle of water.

s.b. 202 isn't about election security or voter fraud. the data on that is clear. voter fraud is exceedingly rare, in georgia and across the country. s.b. 202 is about erecting barriers for low-income voters, for voters of color, for younger voters to participate in our democracy. madam president, as a member of the senate rules committee i traveled to georgia last summer with my colleagues for a field hearing on voter suppression. and just last week i was invited to join president biden and vice president harris in georgia as well. so when minority leader mcconnell tries to tell you that no state in america is making it harder to vote, he's

wrong. the people of this country deserve to hear the truth. and not just from georgia, but in texas, where a new law empowers partisan pole watchers to -- poll patchers to threaten election officials with lawsuits. in arizona where a new law will unnecessarily cut tens of thousands of voters, eligible voters, from the permanent early voting list. 34 new laws in this past year alone will raise obstacles for people who simply want to cast their ballot. and that's nothing to say of the hundreds more that have been proposed and will surely be reintroduced in future years and future sessions if we do not act. the clock on dr. king's victories is already turning

back. the alarm bells of our democracy are ringing. they've been ringing since the year 2013, when the supreme court gutted the voting rights act. yes, it may still be in place, but the preclearance requirement, the strongest protection within the voting rights act, that stood to prevent discriminatory election laws for nearly five decades, was undone by the supreme court in their decision in shelby v. holder. and yet, the senate has failed three times this last year to even debate a voting rights bill. we've failed to debate because of the filibuster rule, which allows a minority of senators to obstruct the voice of the

american majority. republican senators claim that our legislation, the freedom to vote act, is partisan and divisive. but what goal could be more american than securing the fundamental right to vote for all eligible americans? if republican senators are sincere about opposing partisan changes to election laws, then they should join us in condemning partisan voter suppression in georgia, in texas, in arizona, and across the country. but instead senator republicans only complain about and obstruct our efforts here in the senate to respond to these laws, and in doing so they leave democrats no choice. we must change the filibuster

rule to protect voting rights for every american. madam president, the senate exists to serve american democracy, and the senate rules exist to help the senate serve american democracy. and when those rules endanger our democracy, the answer is simple -- we must change them, and it is not unprecedented. the senate changed the filibuster in 1917 to protect our nation from the threat of world war i. the senate changed the filibuster in 1975 to try to restore the function of this body. in recent decades, the senate has made more than 160 exceptions to the filibuster to do what's best for the nation.

and today, it's time for us to do so once again. with all due respect to the history and the traditions of the senate, our job is to protect the future of this country, beginning with our democracy. as martin luther king once told us, america is essentially a dream, a dream yet unfulfilled. and today it falls on each of us to take up dr. king's lifelong struggle. this is our moment. this is our moment to debate. this is our moment to vote. we must work together to pass a voting rights law that secures the vote for every american,

regardless of race, religion, ability or gender. sometimes progress requires that we change the rules, as we did last month, when we changed the filibuster to protect our economy. sometimes progress requires that one party acts alone, as the courageous architects of the 15th amendment did a century and a half ago. look around this senate and think how surprised the men who created the filibuster in the early 1800's would be to see a senator warnock, a senator baldwin, myself, and others serving in this chamber today. but change that strengthens our democracy is change for the better. colleagues, we must rise to

meet this general moment of challenge in the spirit of dr. king and pass these voting rights bills. thank you, madam president. i yield the floor. a senator: madam president. the presiding officer: the senator from virginia. mr. kaine: madam president, one of the things that i sometimes regret about this body is, and especially after hearing such an eloquent presentation from my colleague from california, is that we don't do enough dialogue here. it's a lot of monologs, and

often some of the best speeches that i've heard in this chamber have been delivered to nearly empty chambers because we don't sit and listen to one another, answer questions, engage, find the greater wisdom. i'm excited that tomorrow will give us an opportunity to do that. i expect 50, hopefully 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 senators on the floor for a discussion about voting rights which we have not been able to have since i joined the senate? in january of 2013. this is an enormously important topic. we have not had a floor debate on any voting rights bill since i came to the senate in 2013. in this spirit of dialogue, i wanted to basically come and talk about senate rules to respond to a question or challenge that republicans were making on the floor last week. they pointed out that i along with a number of democrats had signed a letter in 2017 arguing

in their view that we should not change the filibuster on legislation, and they cited that, and they said how can you stand on the floor now and contemplate changes to the filibuster rule? and so what i wanted to do tonight is come to the floor and talk about 2017, talk about things that have happened since 2017 and, frankly, explain why i haven't really changed the position that i articulated in the letter but i have changed my views about whether the filibuster accomplishes the objective or cuts against it. and finally, what i want to do at the end of that, answering their question about that letter, is reassure them. reassure them that what we will reach for tomorrow is not a blowing up of the filibuster. i heard my colleague from alaska today say we wanted to blow up the filibuster. no. let me reassure all republicans

that's not what they're going to to be asked to vote on tomorrow. they're going to be asked to restore the filibuster to what it was during the vast majority of the history of this body. here is the operative quote from the letter of 2017 that i signed. it was april of 2017, shortly after the republicans changed the senate rules to ram through neil gorsuch after they refused to entertain the nomination of merrick garland to the court. it is a bipartisan letter. we are united in our determination to preserve the ability of members to engage in extended debate when bills are on the senate floor. extended debate when bills are on the senate floor. well, what's happened since that letter was written in april of 2017?

first, those of us in the room know extended debate on the senate floor? are you kidding? it almost never happens. the filibuster rule that some of us hoped might facilitate that has become an obstacle to it. in fact, you can't even get a bill on the senate floor because the filibuster requirement which was initially something about final passage has been now imported even into proceeding to legislation. when a majority of members of the greatest deliberative body in the world decide they want to talk about a topic, they can't. it's like the 21st century's version of the gag rule which prohibited discussions in congress on items related to slavery during the 1830's and 1840's. there has been a gag rule prohibiting discussions of the voting rights bill and other civil rights legislation and other important priorities because you can't even get on the bill, much less have

extended debate about it. and when you do get on the bill, how many bills around here do we have extended debate on? mostly we're in a chamber like this, with three people. and there's no real debate that's going on because the abuse of the filibuster leads a party to know, gosh, if they can't get 60 votes, we don't even have to show up. the old public filibuster of mrn days has now turned to a secret, private filibuster where people can stay in their offices and never show their face on the floor. so that notion of naive senators like me in 2017, we are determined to preserve the ability of members to engage in extended debate when bills are on the senate floor has been undermined by the filibuster by making it hard to get bills on the floor, and then

guaranteeing when they are on the floor nobody needs to show up. other things have happened since 2017. i need not go over them at length but i will go over them. i wouldn't imagine we would have a president who would lead an assault on democracy, who would lie and claim he won the popular vote in 2016, when he didn't. who would claim there was massive fraud in the virginia election in 2016, when there wasn't. who would go to a foreign country and try to dig up dirt on a political opponent that he feared in 2020. i didn't imagine that those things would happen. i didn't imagine that the president, having r lost an election in november 2020, would encourage his followers to gather in d.c. to be wild. i didn't imagine that he would call the head of the georgia elections and say you have to find me thousands of votes so i can win. i didn't imagine those things. i didn't imagine that there would be a violent attack here

that would injure 150 police officers, that there would be an effort to disenfranchise 80 million americans and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. i didn't imagine those things. i didn't imagine that states would do what my colleague from california has suggested. look at what happened in 2020 embrace the trump big lie and decide we have got to carve this back for people who live in certain counties. i didn't imagine those things. but i'll tell you something else i didn't imagine. i didn't imagine that we wouldn't get any help from the republican party in addressing these problems. the republican party throughout most of its history has been a great voting rights party. the 14th amendment, the 15th amendment only passed

with republican votes to guarantee people equal access to the ballot. when the 19th amendment was passed guaranteeing women the right to vote, it was in a democratic administration, the wilson administration but republicans were on board. when the 16th amendment passed, it was in the nixon administration. democrats and republicans were on board. the republican party from its origins right before lincoln was president was always on the march, and frankly usually leading the march to expand people's ability to participate in voting, and there's no example that is more dramatic than the passage of the 1965 voting rights act. a 60-day filibuster here on the senate floor. at the end it was broken. republicans voted for the voting rights act near unanimously. democrats were strong but not as solid as the republicans were. and then over and over again in the years between 1965 and up

through 2006, republicans would vote unanimously or near unanimously to reauthorize the voting rights act. but something changed between 2016 and -- between 2006 and 2013. something changed about the time that barack obama was elected president of the united states. and when the supreme court of the united states in the shelby case gutted the preclearance provisions of the voting rights act but told congress you can fix it, and we went back to all the republicans who had supported the voting rights act from 1965 to 2006 and said, okay, the supreme court says here's what's wrong. we can fix it. we've not been able to find any, any republican support, save lisa murkowski of this chamber who is a cosponsor of the john lewis act, the restoration of preclearance.

when i signed the letter in 2017 i would not have imagined that we could not find any republican support on any voting rights issue. i heard my colleague from utah, senator romney, talk a second ago. he said how come democrats didn't do it? i started working with republicans in july, months before we filed the freedom to vote act. could you do it this way? could you do it that way? what about if we completely gave up the idea of any rule or filibuster reform, would you then engage with us? how about unlimited amendments? how about give us a counter proposal? i have been in these discussions with republican colleagues for months and again save senator murkowski on the john lewis bill there has been no help forthcoming to save our democracy, to save voting. so when colleagues ask will you signed a letter in 2017 and said

we should engage members in extended debate when bills are on the floor. why are you now contemplating rules changes? and my answer to them is i'm contemplating rules changes to do exactly that. we don't have extended debate on the senate floor. you can't get bills on the senate floor. our democracy is under attack, voting is under attack. and you won't lift a finger to protect voting rights or protect the integrity of our election. but because you won't doesn't mean we should not. in fact, if you won't, the burden is on our shoulders even more. here's something else, i'll be honest, that i've come to understand more about the filibuster since 2017, but then i want to conclude by offering some words of reassurance to my republican colleagues. the fact that the filibuster is now used indiscriminately

against everything does not cleanse it of the stench of its predominant use in our history to block civil rights legislation. we use it for everything. however, when the history of the filibuster is written in this chamber, the pivotal epic moments that get remembered are robert byrd's 14 hour and 30 minute speech to try to filibuster against the civil rights act of 1964. strom thurmond's filibuster against civil rights laws. senators from virginia, senators who held the seat that i now occupy filibustering against civil rights laws. you don't cleanse the stench from the filibuster by just suddenly using it for everything. you still have to acknowledge it's played a particular role in

the senate, and sadly, that role has usually been to the detriment of the kinds of people who couldn't see anybody that looked like them in the senate. i occupy a seat that was occupied for 50 years by harry byrd sr. and harry byrd jr. it was called the byrd seat in the senate because the byrd machine ran virginia politics. harry byrd sr. was governor. his son harry byrd jr. was appointed and stayed in the senate until 1983. for 50 years the byrds held the seat i now occupy. i was at the inauguration of our new governor in richmond on saturday, and i walked by an empty place on the capitol square where six months ago there was a statue of harry byrd

sr., the governor who was a great highway builder and infrastructure guy. the governor who came up with the idea and worked with president roosevelt to build the shenandoah national park. the governor who then as senator led this byrd machine and was viewed as the dominant figure in virginia political life during the 20th century together with his son harry byrd jr. the statue was taken down seven months ago. it was renamed five years ago. why was that? highway builder, park developer, dominant political figure. the statue was taken down because of what he did in the u.s. senate, that he would right the southern manifesto with

brown versus board, encourage public school stims to shut down rather than integrate. he would engage in one in filibusters, including the voting rights act, and never apologize and never admit he was wrong. unlike robert byrd who was a clansman before he -- klansman before he was in the senate, and then he voted for the fair housing act. harry byrd sr. used the filibuster for, frankly, what it's been used for around here, to seclude people from the democracy and the tributes to harry byrd and the statues and school names are all coming

down. even shana doa university in -- shenandoah university, which named its business school after harry byrd jr., they wiped that name off because the filibuster is not just like a senate rule that can be used like anything else, it's been used for a particular purpose and we can't be blind to that. let me say this, as i -- as i conclude. i want to offer my colleagues reassurance, those who signed the letter with us. because it was a bipartisan letter. it was led by senators coons and collins and many republican senators signed it, we are united to preserve the ability of members to engage in extended debate when bills are on the senate floor. for the first time in my senate career, there's a voting rights act bill on the senate floor and we will have a rules adjustment

vote at the end of the day in all likelihood. what will the vote be? will it be to eliminate the filibuster? no. will it be to abolish the filibuster? no. will it be to weaken the filibuster? no. here is the vote that we will vote on tomorrow. should we change the secret filibuster that allows members to just sit in their office and not take the floor and not explain their opposition to their colleagues and not have to face the american public. should we change that secret filibuster into a public filibuster the way it was done during the vast majority of senate history where senators who went to block -- want to block action by a majority should at least have to do the work, should have to at least come to the floor and explain to their deletion and the public why the -- to chair colleagues and the public why the majority

should not act. to everyone on the republican side who signed the letter that we should have extended debate and it should not be curtailed. we are giving you a chance to do exactly what you pledged to do. for everyone in our own caucus who has expressed reticence about diminishing the filibuster, we are giving you exactly the thing that you said you wanted, an opportunity to have full debate that could go on for a very long time and not be curtailed, and the only thing we will require is that that debate actually happen in the view in the -- of the american public and your colleagues. a fundamental opportunity for all of us to do the right thing by senate rules, to accomplish the right thing for our democracy. i so welcome the chance to finally have this debate on the floor of the united states senate. with that, madam president, i yield the floor.

the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll.

this evening a majority member schumer announced the talking filibuster was her publican spark the voting and elections built like talking filibuster returns to the rule that who chooses to filibuster a bill must stay on the floor, on their feet and continue talking. opposed rules changeable on the senate and the filibuster after a senator has given up the floor with only a simple majority vote. however since it would change a 60 vote threshold democratic senators joe manchin and cures to sinema continue to oppose it. we expect boats on this

collect the democrats are talking about filibuster. >> i love talking filibuster i think we should be. there should be transparency and how we do our business here or a lack of doing business. >> at the end of it? >> that is never happen but it's never happened in history of our country. basically sever been simple majority vote of the debate. >> clyburn was filibustering the own bill by not doing a carveout for voting rights. parts of it very clear about that i don't how you break a rule to make a rule we have never done this. we have never done it. i've looking in every precedent i can every carve

out. the bottom line is everything we've done, they told me about the debt ceiling. that was done by the rules. that was done by the rules. that was done with majority leader schumer to come to an agreement that's what it's all about we have done everything along the lines of the rules. i don't know why we cannot come together and find a pathway forward. breaking the rules there's no checks and balances in this process the only thing we have is a filibuster. if you have a situation that we have right now he of the executive branch of government and you have congress the house and the senate are all the same. there's no check and balance they sweep right through the same thing could happen with her publican sprayed the only thing i've ever said is this, that majority of my colleagues in the caucus the democratic caucus they changed.

they change their mind. i respect that you have a right to change her mind. i haven't i hope they respect that too. i have never change my mind on filibuster. >> you think it's smart to hold? >> i'm not going to question bona fide with the thought process is. we don't know what their thoughts may be but will find out pretty quickly when i go upstairs. [inaudible] >> nothing i work with everybody. i've been around this a long time. i do not take anything personally. basically i respect everybody and i work with everybody. reporter: [inaudible] why is it so difficult? if a group of senators bipartisan senators. the thing that caused the insurrection was the vote count we can fix that that has

to be fixed for protecting people who work on the polls someone is going to intimidate harass or harm anyone gives everyone a right to vote we have to protect that right. we've just got to find a weight we can make this work to where everyone understands were going to protect their right to vote and have access. [inaudible] >> what you say to the democratic colleagues the possible timing? >> i've been prime rate my entire life that would not be anything new for me. i've never run an election is not primary. this is west virginia it's rough-and-tumble. [laughter] we are used to that. so bring it on. >> the party has the right

priority trying to practice the good electoral bill a lot of concerns about inflation a lot of concerns about covid to the weist white house have it right right now? mike lamy said the thing with the west virginia people believe my colleagues i know it here for my friends around the country they are concerned about inflation, it is real it's not something made up it is real and hurting them. and basically covid is extremely hard on everybody. getting people back to work has been extremely hard. businesses opening back up is been extremely hard. these are things we should be working on parade these are things that should be coming together how to fix the challenges we have in america? we do not need to make up any new ones we have enough already there for us. i would say get your priorities in order that's all. one more. >> x nick sabin's letter they're all straight on for the all want the right to vote, right question we all

went that nick sabin paul did not put what nick sabin wrote at the bottom his footnote, he supports the filibuster. too not get rid of the filibuster bring a white of the out? >> no i think everyone we should all support the right to vote, everyone. not breaking the rules to make new rules. >> would say. >> there's no obstruction whatsoever. >> they are not going to be able to vote in the next election records they are there the rules are there the government will stand behind them and give them the right to vote. we have that the things they're talking about now or in court. the courts are struck down like you know how they struck down gerrymandering. things are happening, okay? we act we are going to obstruct people from voting, that is not going to happen.

[background noises] [background noises] >> okay, good afternoon everyone. i am delighted to be joined by senators stabenow and klobuchar and merkley and kain and warnock and booker and padilla. there he is, okay good. we are not all going to speak. some of us are. but look, for the first time this is the very first time today that congress has been debating a bill to protect voting rights on the senate floor. on the freedom to vote act and the john r lewis voting rights advancement. and a win, lose, or draw, members of this chamber were

elected to debate and to vote. win, lose, or draw we are going to vote. especially on an issue the peope constitution. and tile tell you, every time i look at a printed copy of the constitution and see those three words in super-sized font, we the people, i think it's a great thing when our founders who wrote the constitution reminded us of the heart of what it's all about. not the power that flows down from kings or dictators, but power that flows up to the people of the united states. how does that power flow? it flows through elections. so if you don't have integrity in the elections, then you really don't have government of, by, and for the people. now, over the course of our nation, we know that we have

worked to expand the vision the nation was founded on but wasn't reached in the beginning. it was often the case that only white, male, protestant landowners got to vote in the beginning. we recognized that every person created equal needs to have an equal part of the franchise. and so we have, through battles over more than 200 years, fixed those challenges. and there's been some dramatic debates over this, and it hasn't been easy. but i want to take us back specifically to the debate of 1891. now, this was during a period when in the southern states more and more clever strategies were being developed to prevent people from voting. either through the registration process or through the polling

process. now, the registration process, there would be things like explain what this letter in the constitution means, or how many balls are in this jar of jelly beans, how many beans are in this jar? or other ridiculous questions which those in the registrar's office could say, we're sorry, you can't register. if you got registered, then you would have actually the possibility of intimidation at the polling place. there was one case where men on horseback form a circle around the ballot box, and so essentially a black american couldn't get to the ballot box. but white american, the horses would part and let them vote. voter intimidation. well, those crude barriers are part of history. they're in the dustbin. great. but unfortunately, there are

many modern strategies designed to get to the same result, strategies to make it hard to register to vote. sometimes it's very prejudicial prejudicial -- i.d. requirements, or multiple i.d. requirements, designed to fit the i.d. profile, the profile that members of one party are more likely to have than members of another party, to bias the outcome. sometimes it's taking and saying, we are going to be able to have a private contractor purge the voting rolls of people who haven't voted in the last few elections, knowing that it's being done specifically because the members of one party are a little worse at turning out every single election than the members of the other party. now, these strategies on registration are one stage, then there are strategies on the

polling places. all designed to undermine we the people. and they're mostly election day strategies. what are those strategies? well, take and have a really large precinct with a single voting location in places you don't want people to vote, because so many people have to get into that precinct voting place that there will be a long line. or understaff it so the movement through the polling place is slow. or put in machines that don't work really well. or put it in a location where there's no parking, which makes it really hard for people to get to the polls. you know, you might think that these strategies don't still exist, but i'm sorry to report to you they actually do exist. a member of our caucus today, cory booker, was noting that across america the average wait time for black americans is twice as long as the average wait time for white americans.

but in georgia, in georgia, in the last election the average wait time was by numbers that i have five times as long -- or excuse me, ten times, about five minutes in a predominantly white precinct, 80%-plus white, and about 50 minutes in a predominantly black precinct. about ten times as long. so, along comes a couple strategies to really enable people to vote without that type of intimidation. one is vote by mail and one is early voting. now, my state, oregon, is quite proud of being the first vote by mail state. so let's talk about that for a moment. back in the 1990's the republican party said you know, we have noticed that people who have requested absentee ballots

have a higher turnout rate than those who vote on election day. makes sense because they receive the ballot in the mail, they have plenty of opportunity to fill it out, mail it in. whereas on election day, well, life happens. were you planning to vote, but you had to go pick up your child from day care. you were planning to vote, but your boss asked you to work late. you were planning to vote, but you went by the polling place and it had been moved from the previous two years. another trick. and you didn't know where it was. you went by the polling place, but you saw a long line and you knew you didn't vr three hours to stand -- didn't have three hours to stand in line. so the republicans in my state said, you know what? we will have an advantage if we get all the republicans, or as many as we can, to ask for absentee ballots. so they did. the democrats said, that's pretty smart. we'll do the same thing. so the first year i was running for the state house of representatives, 50% of the people in the state were voting

by mail, by requesting -- they get on a list. they ask for a absentee ballot. so, everyone said this is such a good idea. why don't we do this for everybody, and not make people request absentee ballots. so, the next election, which was the 2020 election, essentially it was all vote by mail. and people loved it. i found out going door to door, because i always kind of had a nostalgia point in my heart for election day where we all go to the polls together, i go door to door in my first campaign in 19 98. i'd say what do you like? what do you not like? people generally would say the thing i'm frustrated about, it would be some issue with transportation, or some problem with simply the potholes in the street. i'd say that's a city issue, but i'm running for the state legislature. maybe the state where help get more money to the municipality. what do you like? oh, we love voting by mail. because we can sit at the

kitchen table and talk over the issues. we're not trying to make decisions in the heat of the moment in a voting booth. we have complicated ballot measures in my state that read through the pros and cons. you know what? we can invite our children to the kitchen table and discuss it with them. they really loved vote by mail when we went to that system. it wasn't something driven by d's or r's. in fact, republicans controlled the house and senate of the legislature in the state of oregon at that time. they controlled both chambers. utah went to vote by mail. utah is a reliably republican state. again, it wasn't to advantage one party or the other. it was to ensure the franchise is available for every single american, and that there are no shenanigans on election day. shouldn't that be what we're all about? because if you really want to look at where voting is

compromised, where essentially votes are stolen from our citizens, it's the shenanigans on election day. which means vote by mail and early elections are very important to address that. so, what do we see now? in some 19 states across our country, in those 19 states there are strategies being implemented to make it harder to register and easier to purge the registration lists. there are strategies to make it harder to vote by mail, including saying there will be no permanent vote by mail list, you have to sign up every single time. there are strategies to limit and curtail early voting. every state is a little different, but those 19 states that are passing laws, those laws are targeted at strategies specifically focused on things that they think will hurt the

turnout of democrats rather than republicans. and it's just wrong. we need to be blind to party divisions when we're protecting the ballot box for all americans. we need to be blind to race. now, folks say surely there's still not a racial component in this effort to keep people from voting. and i would like to affirm that that's the case, but these strategies often target predominantly precincts that are high minority populations -- hispanic or black precincts. and other strategies target the young and college students. why? because they tend to vote a little bit to more the democratic side of the ballot. and some of these are targeted specifically at native american reservations. make it so those on reservations

have to drive and i hour -- an hour to two hours to drop off their ballot and they won't vote in the same numbers as if you have a voting location on the reservation or they can vote by mail. you know, so, we've struggled, and going back to the debate of 18 0, down the hall -- 1890, down the hall in the house of representatives, the conversation was initiated by henry cabot lodge. and lodge put forward a voting rights bill that said, you know what? things are going wrong in america, and we need to protect the right to register, the right to vote, and the right to have those ballots fairly counted. so, he basically said that jurisdictions could appeal to the district courts to get federal supervision on the three critical stages of registering

citizens, of conducting the election, and of counting the ballots afterwards. those three phases. and it passed in the house of representatives. and at that time, it was the republican party that backed this fundamental right for all americans. you know how many democrats voted for the henry cabot lodge's bill? zero. zero. every vote for it came from the republican party. that was the republican party in 1890. in 1891, the bills here in the senate -- the bill's here in the senate. well, what happened in the senate? well, a group of senators said we don't want the senate to ever vote on this bill. so they spoke at length, refused

to give unanimous consent to get to a final vote. now, why do we call that a filibuster? so, at our founding, the whole vision that our founders laid out was that you hear everyone speak, and then you vote and you take the path the majority favors over the minority. now, they really emphasized this is important and that you shouldn't have a super majority, because they wrote the constitution while they were under the confederation congress. the confederation congress had a super majority. and because of that super majority, they couldn't get anything done. they couldn't raise the money to take on shays' rebellion. the senate was paralyzed offense policy making. the senate said whatever you do, do not have a super majority because it paralyzes the body and the body ends up taking the path the minority prefer, who

are obstructing the final vote, rather than the majority. let's just look at some of the comments that our founders said. so, james madison, in cases where justice or the general good might require new laws, or new measures, the principle of free government would be reversed. he's speaking to a super majority. because it would no longer be the majority that would decide, it would be transferred to the minority. and he went on to say the damage that would be done if that happened. the basic principle of free government would be assaulted if the minority makes the decision instead of the majority. what possible logic could there be to say the path that most people think is the wrong path is the path we'll take? that's what happens when the super majority blocks a final

simple majority vote. and we have hamilton. of course, hamilton gets a lot of attention with the play done on hamilton and his general super-sized role in the early stage of our republic. again, hamilton was very aware of how the confederation congress was polarized before we got our constitution in 1787. and he again refers to the super majority. it would be in practice as if you need everybody, and the history of any establishment that takes this principle is the result of impotence, perplexity, and disorder. he's referring too the super majority requirement of the confederation congress. what else did he say?

well, hamilton said, and owe uses some language you don't really use today, if a pertinacious minority can control the majority, tedious delays, continual negotiation, and intrigue, contemptible compromises of the public good. i sometimes think that sounds like a description of the senate today -- tedious delays, intrigue, contemptible compromises of the public good. the public good is compromised when the united states senate is not able to face issues of the united states of america. he went on to say real operations iso embarrass the administration to destroy the energy of the government. isn't that what we've been through in trying to get through build back better, trying to

get a vote to protect our fundamental right to freedom and vote, and it's gone on all year. we're a year into the administration now. so in modern times, we now are facing again what was faced in 1890. i didn't really tell you the outcome of that 1890 debate. the house passed it, all republicans came over here, and a number of senators said we're not going to give consent to get to a final vote. they broke the contract, the social contract that you listen to everybody, and then having heard all the ideas, having had a debate that maybe stretched many, many days or maybe weeks, you vote. so the newspapers started to call this tactic way back in the mid1800's, they called this tactic piracy, because the core

principle was being violated by people taking over the senate, pirates taking over the senate. and the common term for pirates, free booters, free booters, that's where the word filibuster comes from. it's a corruption of the term freebooter. the pirates are taking over. they're breaking the deal of america. they're breaking the design of the senate. it's supposed to be that after you listen to everyone, everyone has made their points, you vote by simple majority. now we have had a particular development over the last three decades in which the senate has become more and more dysfunctional. i had the chance to see this evolve because i first came here as an intern in 1976. and up in the staff gallery, i

would go up and watch each amendment being debated, and there was no television, so senators couldn't see what was going on. staff back in the offices couldn't see what was going on. there was no cell phone. there was no fax machine. so each senator had a staff member watching the debate. and then when the vote came, you'd rush down to those elevators that are outside that door. and when the senators came up from the subway train that comes over from the office buildings, you'd meet your senator and you would describe the debate that had happened. and if it was your particular topic area, you would describe what people back home were saying or what you had understood was the key question. then the senator would come in and vote. and then when the vote was tallied, there would be 6 or 12 senators generally clustered here, and they would all say, mr. president, because whoever got called on first got the next

amendment. there was no set of amendments lined up on the tax reform act of 1976, which which is what i s staffing for senator hatfield. i was very intrigued by the functioning of our government, so i went back to college and then dropped out three months later to come back here for the start of the carter administration to watch what was going on in our government with a new presidency. i waited tables, i volunteered for nonprofits, i went door to door for the virginia consumer congress working on issues related to renewable energy or energy efficiency. but i watched the senate, and what i saw was a senate that could debate issues in that year of 1977. then i came back here after graduate school, and i was planning to go overseas to work on issues of economic development in very poor countries, fundamental issues of health care, fundamental

issues of education. but i was offered an opportunity to work on something here in d.c. as a presidential fellow to work on the issue of how do you decrease the threat of blowing up the world with nuclear weapons. so i went to work for the secretary of defense, caspar weinberger under president reagan. then i went to work for the congressional budget office after two years working for president reagan, caspar weinberger, and the congressional budget office works for congress. and i did studies and did briefings here on the hill, watching the senate. the senate started to have troubles, but it still pretty functional. nothing prepared me for arriving here as a u.s. senator in 2009 january, and seeing the utter decay and dysfunction of my

beloved senate, your beloved senate. the senate once called the greatest deliberative body in the world. so i started to have conversations with colleagues about what had happened. i saw that we had cloture motion, that is a motion to close debate, one after the other after the other, and very few amendments. now on the amendment side, this is a chart that shows the decline in amendments from the 109th congress to the 116th. 116th congress is the one just ended. there is a tenfold reduction in the number of amendments over those 14 years. a tenfold reduction in amendments, steady line downwards. well, that's one symptom of the problem. but then there was another piece of this problem which was more and more motions to close

debate, and those motions are designed to be rare. they take, after you make the motion, a day-plus -- you have to have an intervening day. then the second day after you make the motion, you can call the vote on closing debate because it's supposed to be such a rare moment, once or twice a year. then if you succeed in getting the votes to close debate, it's 30 hours of debate. well, that takes two or three days to get 30 hours of debate in. and then an extra hour for any senator who didn't have the chance to speak. so there's that factor. and then finally you can get to the final vote. those cloture motions eat up an entire week. you come in on a monday, you file a motion to close debate. on wednesday, you vote on actually closing debate because you have to have that intervening day of tuesday. then you have 30 hours which takes up a normal day of

wednesday and thursday. maybe on friday you get to a vote. every cloture motion takes up to a week. the senate is only here 30 or 40 weeks a year. if you have 30 or 40 cloture motions, you have essentially taken up all the senate's time. but the senate has an incredibly complex, extensive agenda. it needs to address so many issues in health care, in housing, in education, good-paying jobs, the environment. how do you take on climate? how do you take on international trade? how do you take on human rights in foreign countries like china which are conducting genocide? so many issues around the world. plus it has so many nominations that have to be addressed. i am told -- i haven't double checked this yet -- that there were four cabinet positions that required confirmation in the first congress. four. then you had ambassadors and you

had judges. but you had pretty small number of nominations and positions. now we have well over 1,000 positions. well over 1,000. and we have a nomination process in which people are nominated to have a higher rank in the military or advancement to certain ranks in the civil service. so you have extensive lists that need to go through as well. so let's take a look at what happened with the growth of cloture motions. this is the history going back to 1910. we actually only had cloture starting in 1917. and 1917, you see that there were very few cloture motions in a decade. three in a decade, ten in a decade, five in a decade, eight in a decade, three in a decade. less than one per year. well, that intervening day kind of made sense because they were less than one time per year.

it was supposed to be a rare moment in which you addressed the fact that some senators were not going to let the senate process, proceed as our founders envisioned which was after hearing everybody to conduct a vote. then you start to see in the 1970's a big change. and i think we have a chart that shows it year by year. this will give you some -- no. some sense of it. so we have, dividing by ten since these are for a decade, we had a growth in the 1980's to more than 20 per year. a growth in the 1990's to, an average of 35 to 36 a year. in the 2000's an average of 45 per year. in the 2010 decade, an average of over 100 per year, taking up an entire week of the senate's time. so how did this unfold?

well, let's think a little bit about the fact that that filibuster that occurred in 1891 was about blocking black americans from having power, the power to vote. because if you have the power to vote, you have the power to weigh in. that means you have a lot of power in our society. so there was a deep determination to keep black americans from voting. that was the filibuster of 1891. and its failure in the senate -- remember it passed by a majority in the house, and it had majority support in the senate. but the filibuster was used to crush. now that process meant from 1891 through 1965, when we passed voting rights in this chamber, the filibuster was used for one thing -- crushing the political rights of black americans.

now someone will say that's not quite right. there was an episode in 1917 in which the issue wasn't civil rights or voting rights. the issue was whether to arm our commercial ships against potential attacks by the germans and that's partly true. in march of that year, of 1917, we weren't yet in the war, world war i, and there was a group of senators who said if we arm these ships and they deploy death charges against german submarines or and so forth, we're going to be in the war and we will not have had a declaration of war. we will be pulled into the war by essentially this process of arming ships. so they spoke at length during the last week of congress, and

time ran out, and the bill died. and the next week the new congress started. this is back when the transition happened in march. and the new congress immediately said we can close debate with 67 votes or two-thirds of the senate. actually it was two-thirds. we didn't have 100 senators here. two-thirds of the senate showing up to vote can close debate. so that was the first time that we had a motion to close debate since 1805. and the reason i say since 1805 is our original rules had a motion called the previous question. and the previous question, a little bit of uncertainty of exactly how it was used. it sometimes said basically you've got to speed things up so we can get to the final vote. other times it's been interpreted as, no, the previous question means we vote. we vote on the question before us. but it was never actually used,

and it wasn't used because there was a social contract. the senate said we can listen to everybody. and then having heard everybody, we can vote. fair enough. fair deal. square deal. so in 1805, when aaron burr was in charge of rewriting the rule book, said we don't use this rule. we don't need this rule. we have a social contract. we listen to everybody and then have a simple majority vote as our founders designed the senate. no need. we hadn't had a rule that essentially enabled this body to come to a vote in that period from 1805 through 1917. so it is true that the bill was delayed for one week, but the new congress immediately came in, created a new rule to close debate, closed debate on that bill, and passed the bill to arm ships. so only real thing that was

crushed in those years from 1891 through 1965 was voting rights for black americans. because the idea that you would prevent a simple majority vote as our founders intented was piracy. well, in 1965, we passed voting rights and the national consensus is we are putting discrimination behind us, and manipulation on election day behind us and everybody will have a fair opportunity to vote. and so it was no longer primarily an instrument to crush the voting rights of black americans and they said maybe i can use it for something other than voting rights, and by the way, it had been used almost entirely on final passage of

bills. maybe i can use it on nominations to prevent nominations from going through expeditiously. maybe i can use it on amendments. maybe i can use it on motion to proceed -- motions to proceed. let's take a look at the issue of amendments. prior to the 1960's, one time there had been a cloture motion on an amendment. you know, that vision that i saw in 1976 when one amendment was debated and then it was done, there was no pending amendment until the next person would say, wait. there is always -- madam president, and whoever got heard fist and put up the next amendment, well, that world started to change along the way. people started to not just obstruct final passage but obstruct amendments.

there's been steady growth in that over time. and we're now up in the last decade to about 14 times per year or 143 times in the decade. then we have the question of the motion to proceed. so you would think we have a legislative calendar and that calendar has a list of bills eligible to consider and someone says, okay, i want to make a motion, normally the majority leader, to go to a particular item, a particular bill on that calendar and you would think that it would be like, hey, we're going to go to the election bill, do i have majority support to do that? you'd have a 15-minute debate, you'd vote and decide to go to that bill or not. why would you take up a lot of the sean's precious time -- the senate's precious time debating whether to debate a bill? but that logic has not prevailed so we have a continuous increase in the attack on the ability to

get a bill to the floor. well, the 1960's, about one per year and the 1970's, about one per year, four times in the 1980's, more than ten in the 1990's, it escalates. to get a bill to the floor in a group is intent on forcing a cloture motion, you have to have 30 hours of debate and then you have to be table to have an additional hour for any senator that wasn't able to speak in those 30 hours. in other words, it takes an entire week whether to actually debate a bill. that's absolutely insane if you want the u.s. senate to be unable to address issues, then allow unlimited debate until there's a cloture motion on the motion to proceed. and i think most senators agree that that should go. but here's the problem.

whichever party is in the minority doesn't want to make things easier for the majority, and this really goes to a core challenge of our highly tribal parties. the senate that i first saw, the philosophies of the two parties if you were doing a bell curve of each party, they overlapped. they overlapped a lot. there were republicans who voted more like democrats and democrats who voted more like republicans. a lot more, therefore, bipartisan work. now if you do the same bell curves on people who vote, there is a chassism. -- chasm in the chidle so it -- in the middle. so it becomes more intensely tribal in ways that are absolutely reinforced by social media and so all those commentaries on -- on various

instagrams or tweets, reinforcing the idea the other side's evil, the two sides are far apart. which leaves the minority in this chamber to say, since the other side's evil, we will just prevent them from ever getting to a bill. if 41 of us, and right now there are 50 desks on this side of the aisle and 50 desks on that side of the aisle. if 41 of us proceed to say we will not vote to close debate on a motion to proceed, you can never get to a bill. and we've had that happen multiple times this year in which my republican colleagues voted to prevent us from debating voting rights, the protection of voting rights. what a change from 1890, when the house of representatives, every vote cast for the bill to defend the right to vote in america was a republican vote,

and now every vote against debating the issue has come from the republicans. what a swap over this time period. so this essentially is a strategy to kill bills in the cradle before they are debated on this floor. and both caucuses, by the way, have done this. when i'm speaking of voting rights, it is now my colleagues across the aisle that are deliberately blocking them from being debated time and again. but on other issues, and when the democrats are in the minority, we have done the same thing. it needs to end. i had conversations with a whole group of republicans, next year, we have no idea who will be in the majority, we have no idea. let's just have one hour at most evenly divided to discuss whether a bill comes to the floor and we'll vote.

instead of an intervening hours, and if one side yields back, that means in 30 minutes we can decide, 30 hours or 30 minutes. that makes a lot more sense. we have to end this. i had these conversations with nine of my colleagues across the aisle and said, let's fix the motion to proceed and guarantee germane amendments on the floor. and they were interested. and some said they would go and take it to their policy team and some said they would take it to their caucus and some said they would take it to their leadership, and then all said sorry because their leadership said no way are we going to have kind of the ordinary senators who aren't in leadership vr a movement to -- have a movement

to fix the senate. mitch mcconnell told them, no, we will make changes depending on what's best for our caucus and if we're a majority, that's different than if we're in the minority. and so thoafs forts failed -- and so those efforts failed. and people said to me, hey, wouldn't it work if you draw up rules and implement them with the next congress? we tried that. my colleague, tom udall, who is now our ambassador in new zealand. he was there coming in with my class in 2009. he followed this as well. so we teamed up and we worked on these conversations, but ultimately we couldn't make it happen. and we need to fix the senate. we need to guarantee germane amendments, i mean amendments on the topic. when i was staffing that tax

bill for senate hatfield, every amendment was on taxes. should we proceed to increase or rein in the tax credit that goes or the tax deduction that goes to deducting the cost of your home office if you were a teacher in a school. there were a ton of letters from teachers in oregon about that. and i remember another amendment was employee stock ownership plans which enable you to be able to enable your workers to own a share of the company and how do we that make those esops work better? and so on and so forth, one tax issue after another. nothing to do with highly polarizing issues on the tax bill. because people knew when another bill came on health care, they could put health care on it and one comes along with transportation, they could put their transportation bills on it.

and if we have a bill, throw in every idea we ever had because that's the only bill that gets through the senate. the result of these massively thick bills which are an insult to democracy. because in a 1,000 or 2,000-page bill, you're talk about thousands of ideas of new laws, of new ideas being invented. there is no way the citizen can hold us accountable when we're voting on a bill that is this think. there a bunch of things that are good and bad and we can't figure out what to vote because when a deal is struck off the floor because we can't do amendments and because there's no debate, well, we're stuck with a big bill being delivered and described to us. that's not the way it should work. that's not good for us. that's not good for the

citizens. so let's note that what is happening in those 19 states puts us at an absolutely critical moment. you can think of democracy as a flickering flame or a flame that has to be maintained and nurtured from one generation to the next. and now it's our challenge -- our challenge because laws are being passed on registration, laws are being passed on the process of voting, laws are being passed on the process of counting that are designed to manipulate the outcome, to basically cheat americans out of a fair election. and in many cases cheat them out of the opportunity to vote at all or if they can vote, not to have their vote fairly counted.

so it's our responsibility to act. i see my colleague from massachusetts has come to the floor and i think she's ready to -- to speak. so i just want to sum up with this notion. the failure of this senate to act in 1891 led to three generations in which civil rights for black americans were suppressed in our country. if we fail to act, if we fail to act this year, 2022, and allow the authentic integrity of elections, then we may see three generations in which we lose government. of -- government. of, by and for the people. if government is elected and go off track, you throw them out through fair elections.

if they go off track and there are no fair elections, they increase power. you have to have fair elections to maintain government of, by, and for the people. and that is the reason we must act this week to pass the john lewis voting rights act and the freedom to vote act that are before the senate right now. thank you. i yield to my colleague from the great state of massachusetts. ms. warren: madam president. the presiding officer: the senator from massachusetts. ms. warren: thank you, madam president. i want to say a special thank you to my friend from oregon. senator merrick has worked harder -- senator merkley has worked harder on procedures of the united states senate for years now and tried to lead us to a more functional situation

than we are in right now. i want to thank him for his leadership. i know tonight must be frustrating for him because he has tried so hard to get us to a better place, but i very much appreciate all he has done and to the extent we make progress in no small part thanks to your leadership. so thank you. madam president, i rise today to urge the senate to take action to protect voting rights and to defend our democracy. voting is foundational to our democracy. in a strong-functioning democracy, the playing field is level. citizens have a right to vote and neither one side or the other has the right to block voters from the ballot box or getting their vote counted. that basic premise no longer holds in america. let's be blunt. american democracy is under attack from american

politicians. in the past year alone, republicans -- republican state legislatures have passed laws in nearly 20 states to restrict americans' rights to vote. the republican nominees to the supreme court have destroyed long-standing protections against dark money in politics, they've given the green light to partisan gerrymandering and they have gutted the voting rights act. republican dark money networks are bank rolling voter suppression efforts with hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying and advertising. and for years and years, republican donald trump and republican politicians have spread lies about the integrity of our loaks. -- of our elections. last january 6, a republican president, backed up by republicans right here in this senate, provoked a deadly insurrection at our nation's

capitol. and in the intervening year, is republican leaders have refused to accept evidence of president biden's seven million vote victory over donald trump. instead, they have fed conspiracies and lies that further undermine our democracy. yes, american democracy is under attack, and today 50 democratic senators agree on the right response to this attack. the freedom to vote act would guarantee that every american citizen can easily vote and get their vote counted. the act would defend against attempts to overturn the will of the people. the act would reform our broken campaign finance system and help root out dark money. and critically important, the act would ban partisan gerrymandering by either side.

the companion bill, the john lewis voting rights advancement act, would restore historic protections against state laws that have the purpose and the effect of discriminating on the basis of race. unfortunately, senate republicans would rather destroy our democracy than have free and fair elections. and so they support those around the country who are trying to block access to voting and who are trying to rig how votes get counted. elections are about the will of the majority, but the republicans in the senate don't want what a majority of americans want. in fact, the 50 republicans in the senate together represent 41.5 million fewer americans than the democratic majority. but instead of taking a simple vote to protect american citizens' access to the polls,

they want to stop legislation to defend the very foundation of our democracy from even getting a vote on the floor of the senate. let me be clear -- my view on this is that the filibuster has no place in our democracy. our founders believed deeply in protections for the minority, and those are enshrined in the constitution and in the structure of congress. but our founders made it clear that, after extended debate, the majority could always get a vote. and that final vote, except in the case of treaties and impeachment, would always be by simple majority. the founders did not add a filibuster. with two exceptions, they insisted on plain old majority rule. when senate changed its rules a decade later, the filibuster became the favored tool of

racists and segregationists. the filibuster preserved jim crow laws and stalled civil rights legislation for decades. the filibuster helped block the passage of antilynching legislation for over 100 years. the filibuster nearly stopped congress from passing the most important voting rights law in our nation's history, the voting rights act of 1965. today's filibuster does not foster bipartisanship and compromise. in fact, the exact opposite is true. the filibuster has been weaponnized to intensify partisan division. the filibuster is a wicked tool used to kill legislation supported by the majority of americans of all political parties. and that's true for protecting

the right to vote and gun safety legislation and immigration reform and codifying roe v. wade. the filibuster thwarts the will of the people. today's filibuster doesn't encourage debate, it promotes cowardice. senators can torpedo bills without saying a single word in public, or even stepping to the floor of the united states senate. this is not how a so-called deliberative body should operate. senators should be required to talk and vote, instead of the hiding behind a rule. they should have to put skin in the game. if republicans are fine with the wave of anti-voter laws being enacted in state after state, then they should have to come to the floor and make that clear. if republicans oppose

reinstating the voting rights act that passed in this chamber unanimously in 2006, their constituents and the historical record should know exactly where they stand. instead, because of how today's filibuster works, we have two sets of rules in our country -- one for democrats, who want to promote civil rights and liberties, and another set for republicans, who want to take them away. republicans, who want to close polling places, who want to limit voting, who want to pass gerrymandered maps, are hard at work doing that right now with simple majorities in state legislatures all across this country. they face no filibusters to stop them. it's majority rule all the way. and here in washington, when republicans want to pass massive tax cuts for billionaires and

rig our tax code to favor big businesses, an exception to the filibuster lets them do just that with a simple majority. republicans, who want to pack the supreme court with extremist justices, who roll back fundamental rights, and who disregard the rule of law, can do that with a simple majority right here in the united states senate. but a majority of democratic senators, again, democrats who together represent over 40 million more americans than the republican senators, a majority of democrats can not pass legislation to improve the lives of americans. democrats want to raise the minimum wage. democrats want to lower the cost of prescription drugs and healthcare. and democrats want to protect the right to vote.

but too often we cannot achieve these goals because the filibuster gives the minority party an almost total veto over legislation, including the legislation we need to save our american democracy. we can't ignore republicans' attempts to rig free and fair elections in this country. we can't roll over when republicans want to make it harder for black americans to vote. we can't look the other way when republicans want to make it tough for latinos and asian americans to vote. we can't be silent when republicans make voting harder on tribal lands. we can't shrink back when republicans work to keep students from voting. we can't turn away when republicans try to keep working class people or anyone who might be more inclined to vote for democrats, keep them away from the polls. that is not how democracy works.

in a democracy, the most votes wins, period. in a democracy, the senate debates and then the senate votes. and in a democracy, the people, not the politicians, decide who will lead the nation. this week the eyes of the nation and the entire world are on the united states senate. we can choose to protect a tool of jim crow and segregation that is found nowhere in the constitution, or we can choose to defend the sacred right to vote. i urge the senate to protect our democracy and to protect the right of every american citizen to vote and to have their vote counted.

mr. president, some of our republican colleagues have made the dishonest claim that there is no voter suppression crisis and there is no need for federal voting rights legislation. so, i'd like to enter into the record a series of articles that demonstrate the voter suppression taking place in state after state in this country. i'll start by reminding everyone that the supreme court, led by chief justice john roberts, opened the door to all of these anti-voter tactics by gutting preclearance from the voting rights act and by turning its back on equal justice under law. so, first, i'll read excerpts from an krayl published in -- from an article published in "vox" on july 21, 2021, entitled "how america lost its commitment to the right to vote."

the supreme court, justice elen, justice elena kagen lamented in a dissenting opinion earlier this month, quote, has treated no statute worse than the voting rights act. she's right. the voting rights act is arguably the most successful civil rights law in all of american history. originally signed in 1965, it was the united states' first serious attempt since reconstruction to build a multiracial democracy. and it worked. just two years after president lyndon johnson signed the voting rights act into law, black voter registration in the jim crow strong hold of mississippi skyrocketed from 6.7% to nearly 60%. and yet, in a trail of cases,

shelby county vs.holder in 2013, abbott vs.perez in 2018, and brnovich vs.the d.n.c. in 2021, the court drained nearly all of the life out of this landmark civil rights statute. after brnovich, the decision that inspired justice kagen's statement that the court has treated the voting rights act worse than any other federal law, it's unclear whether the supreme court would rule in favor of voting rights plaintiffs even if the state legislature tried to outright rig an election. these cases are the culmination of more than half a century of efforts by conservatives who, after failing to convince elected lawmakers to weaken voting rights, turned to an

unelected judiciary to enact a policy that would have never made it through congress. all of this is bad news for minority voters in america, who are the most likely to be disadvantaged by many of the new restrictions currently being pushed in state houses across america. and for the country's relatively young commitment to multiracial democracy. and there are at least three reasons to fear that decisions like shelby county and brnovich foreshadow even more aggressive attacks on the right to vote. the first is that republican partisans can use race as a proxy to identify communities with large numbers of democratic voters. in 2020, according to the pew research center, 92% of non-hispanic black voters supported democrat joe biden

over republican donald trump. and that's after trump slightly improved his performance among african americans compared with 2016. that means that state lawmakers who wish to prevent democrats from voting can do so through policies that make it harder for black voters, and to a lesser extent most other nonwhite voters, to cast a ballot. and republican lawmakers haven't been shy about doing so. as a federal appeals court wrote in 2016 about a north carolina law that included many provisions making it harder to vote, quote, the new provisions target african americans with almost surgical provision. -- surgical precision. an even starker example, georgia recently enacted a law that effectively enables the state republican party to disqualify

voters and shut down polling precincts. if the state g.o.p. wields this law to close down most of the polling places in the highly democratic majority black city of atlanta, it is unclear that a voting rights act that's been grateful wounded by three supreme court decisions remains vibrant enough to block them. the second reason to be concerned about decisions like brnovich is that the supreme court's attacks on the voting rights act are not isolated. they are part of a greater web of decisions making it much harder for voting rights plaintiffs to prevail in court. these cases include decisions like purrcell vs. gonzalez in 2006 which announced judges should be very reluctant to

block unlawful state voting rules close to an election. crawford vs. marion county election board in 2008, which permitted states to enact voting restrictions that target largely imaginary problems. and ruto vs. common cause in 2019 which banned federal courts from hearing partisan gerrymandering lawsuits because the court's g.o.p.-appointed majority deemed such cases, quote, too difficult to adjudicate. finally, decisions like shelby county and brnovich are troubling because the court's reasoning in those opinions appears completely divorced from the actual text of the constitution and from the text of the federal laws such as the voting rights act. shelby county eliminated the

voting rights act's requirement that states with a history of racist election practices, quote, preclear any new voting rules with officials in washington, d.c. it was rooted in what chief justice john roberts described as, quote, the principle that all states enjoy equal sovereignty, a principle that is never mentioned once in the text of the u.s. constitution. in brnovich, the court upheld two arizona laws that disenfranchised voters who vote in the wrong precinct and limit who can deliver an absentee ballot to a polling place. justice alito purports to take, quote, a fresh look at the statutory text in this case, but he imposes new limits on the voting rights act, such as a

strong presumption that voting restrictions that were in place in 1982 are lawful, or a similar presumption favoring state laws purporting to prevent voter fraud, qualifications which have no basis whatsoever in the law's text. as justice kagan writes in dissent, brnovich, quote, mostly inhabits a law-free zone. that doesn't necessarily mean that the supreme court will allow any restriction on voting to stand. under the most optimistic reading of cases like brnovich, the court might still intervene if georgia tries to close down most of the polling places in atlanta. but it does mean that voting rights lawyers and their clients can no longer expect to win their cases simply because

congress passed a law protecting their right to vote. the rules in american elections are now what justice roberts and his five even more conservative colleagues say they are. not what the constitution or any act of congress has to say about voting rights. mr. president, republicans are not just content with making it harder to vote. they are also passing state laws allowing them to replace local election officials with those who will administer elections in their favor. unsurprisely, they are targeting areas with huge black populations like atlanta that help determine the outcome of the 2020 election cycle. and they're targeting smaller

places too, as described in an article published in the atlanta journal constitution on december 29, 2021, entitled, new election board in lincoln county seeks central voting site. a replacement elections board is planning to close all seven polling places in lincoln county, north of augusta, requiring in-person voters to report to one centralized location. the poll closures would reduce voting access for rural residents who would have to drive 15 miles or more to cast a ballot in a county with no public transportation options. leading to opposition from voting rights advocates. the plan is moving forward after a state law passed this year abolished the previous county

elections board and gave a majority of appointments to the republican county commission. lincoln is one of six counties where the republican-controlled georgia general assembly reorganized local election boards. quote, this is about the powerful flexing their muscles and saying we can do whatever we want to do, and who's going to stop us, said the reverend denise freeman who is organizing lincoln voters to oppose the poll closures. she goes on to say, in lincoln county, it's always been about power and control. the board is the same as before with one exception. a democratic party appointee was replaced by an appointee of the county commission whose five members are all republicans. the elections board could vote

on the poll closure plan on january 19. quote, folks should have access to their polling locations. they should be able to vote without having to drive 30 minutes to get there, said cindy battles for the georgia coalition of the people's agenda, a civil rights group that has been collecting voter signatures for a petition to try to stop the closures. there's no public transportation vaiblg in lincoln county nor are their taxis, uber, or lyft. anyone who wants to vote would have to drive or walk to a polling place or return an absentee ballot. turnout decreases when voters have to travel farther to cast a ballot. according to a statistical analysis by the "atlanta journal constitution." polling places can be closed by a majority vote in lincoln county, and the federal government has no oversight role.

a 2013 u.s. supreme court decision removed requirements of the voting rights act for states with a history of discrimination, including georgia, to obtain federal preclearance before making cheaks to voting practices -- changes to voting practices and locations. and what happened? county election boards closed 214 precincts across georgia between 2012 and 2018. that is nearly 8% of the state's total polling places, according to a count by "the atlanta journal constitution." mr. president, republican efforts have already succeeded in disenfranchising voters, especially black voters. so i now want to share the impact that limiting polling places had on voters during the last presidential election in georgia.

using an excerpt from an npr article published on october 17, 2020 entitled why do non-white georgia voters have to wait in line for hours? too few polling places. here's the story. cathy spotted the long line of voters as she pulled into the christian city welcome center about 3:30 p.m. ready to cast her ballot in the june 9 primary election. hundreds of people were waiting in the heat and rain outside the lush, tree-lined complex in union city, an atlanta suburb with 2 2,400 residents, nearly 88% of them black. she briefly considered not casting a ballot at all, but she decided to stay. by the time she got inside, more than five hours later -- five hours later -- the polls

had officially closed and the electronic scanners were all shut down. poll workers told her she'd have to cast a provisional ballot, but they promised that her vote would be counted. quote, i'm now angry again. i'm frustrated again, and i now have an added emotion, which is anxiety, said cathy, a human services worker, recalling her emotions at the time. she asked that her full name not be used because she fears repercussions from speaking out. quote, i'm wondering if my ballot is going to count. by the time the last voter got inside the welcome center to cast a ballot, it was the next day. june 10. the clogged polling locations in metro atlanta reflect an underlying pattern -- the number of places to vote has

shrunk statewide with little recourse. although the reduction in polling places has taken place across racial lines, it has primarily caused long lines in non-white neighborhoods where voter registration has surged and more residents cast ballots in person on election day. the pruning of polling places started long before the pandemic, which has in turn discouraged people in voting in person. in georgia, which is considered a battleground state for control of the white house and the united states u.s. senate, the difficulty of voting in p black communities like union city could possibly tip the results on november 3. with massive turnout expected, lines could be even longer than they were for the primary, despite a rise in mail-in voting and georgians already turning out by the hundreds of thousands

to cast ballots earlier. since the u.s. supreme court shelby vs. holder decision in 2013 eliminated key federal oversight of election decisions in states with histories of discrimination, georgia's voter rolls have grown by nearly two million people. but polling locations have been cut statewide by nearly ten%. this is according to to an analysis of state and local records by georgia public broadcasting and pro propublica. much of the growth has been fueled by younger nonwhite voters especially in nine metro flant counties where four out of five voters were nonwhite according to the georgia's secretary of state office. the metro atlanta area has been hit particularly hard. the nine counties -- fulton, republican -- gwinnett and

others have nearly half the state's voters. as a result, the average number of voters packed into each polling location in those counties grew by nearly 40%, from about 2,600 in 2012 to more than 3,600 per polling place as of october 9. in addition, a last-minute push that opened more than 90 polling places just weeks before the november election has left many voters uncertain about where to vote or how long they might have to wait to cast a ballot. the growth in registered voters has outstripped the number of available polling places in both predominantly white and black neighborhoods. but the lines to vote have been longer in black areas because

black voters are more likely than whites to cast their ballots in person on election day, and they are more reluctant to vote by mail, according to u.s. census data and recent studies. georgia public broadcasting propublica found that about two-thirds of the polling places that had to stay open late for the june primary to accommodate waiting voters were in majority-black neighborhoods, even though those neighborhoods made up only about one-third of the state's polling places. an analysis by stanford university political science professor jonathan rhoden of the data that was collected by the georgia public broadcasting propublica found that the average wait time after 7:00 p.m. across georgia was 51 minutes in polling places that were 90% or more nonwhite.

that's 51 minutes in polling places that were 90% or more nonwhite. but only 6 minutes in polling places that were 90% white. georgia law sets a cap of 2,000 pollers that has limited voter delays but that is rarely if ever enforced. our analysis found in majority black and majority white neighborhoods about nine out of every ten precincts are assigned to polling places with more than 2,000 people. a june 2020 analysis by the brennan center for justice at the new york university law center found the average number of voters assigned to a polling place has grown in the past five years in georgia, louisiana, mississippi, and south carolina, all states with substantial black populations that before

the supreme court shelby decision needed federal approval to close polling places under the voting rights act. and those dozens of states have regulations on the size of voting presicts or voting places or the number of voting machines, the analysis found that many jurisdictions simply do not abeside by them. georgia's -- abide by them. georgia's state officials have largely ignored complaints about poll consolidations even as they taught record growth in voter registration. as secretary of state from 2010 to 2018, when most of georgia's polls closed, they took a lazy fair save for a 2015 document that spelled out messages that officials could use to show how

the change can benefit voters and the public interest. his office declined to comment thursday on the letter or why it went unchallenged. he did not encourage officials to close polling places but merely offered guidance on how to follow the law. inaction has left black voters in georgia facing barriers reminiscent of jim crow laws said a political science professor at moorehouse college in atlanta who has studied the land marc -- shelby decision. closing down polling places so people have more difficult time getting there. you make vote by mail difficult

or confusing. now we're in court arguing about which ballots will be accepted and it means people have less trust in our state. mr. president despite false republican republican claims to the contrary, voter i.d. laws disproportionately harm people of color, rural americans, and poor americans. i now want to read an article from the abcnews published on october 5, 20, it tells a story of texas voter i.d. laws and it is entitled quote, black woman in rural texas struggles with process to vote. advocates say system is unfair. while voters submitted voter registration applications ahead of the november 2 statewide election, 82-year-old elmira

hicks worried she would not be able to have her vote counted. the oakwood, texas, native said she has not been able to renew her texas driver's license for more than a year because she has been unable to show her birth ser tif indicate. voters are required to have a passport, military identification card, state identification certificate or a personal identification, a person doesn't need an i.d. to register to vote or vote by mail in the state of texas. for voters over 70 and otherwise valid form of i.d. may be used as long as it is not expired. if a voter cannot reasonably obtain one of the seven acceptable forms of photo i.d.,

they may file a reasonable voter declaration, may present a paycheck, or government check. hicks and her daughter said they were unaware of the r.i.d. process and that without a driver's license and limited transportation it's difficult for hicks to participate in state and federal elections. quote, my vote does not count, hicks told abc news. quote, it's very important, people have died just to vote. people have stood in line in the rain, women fought to vote and now i can't vote. like many black elders in the south, hicks was born at a time when records weren't kept. she never had a birth certificate. her daughter has helped her apply for one. the pair even 2022 court over the issue and said -- even 2022

court over the issue. the judge ruled in their favor, but the judge said she filled out an outdated form. i feel like the laws are targeting my mother and other african american in this country, white said. eight constitutional amendments rage rg from taxes to judicial eligibility will be up for a vote on november 2 in an election as of now hicks cannot participate in. advocates warn that potentially thousands of predominately minority voters could be disenfranchised due to voter identification requirements which could have large implications during next year's mid-elections for state and congressional races. quote, it's often very common for people of a certain age not to have a birth certificate. i want to emphasize it's not as uncommon as people might believe said the vice dean for faculty

and academic affairs and professor of law at the university of southern california. quote, in this country, race correlates to a lot of different characteristics, so, for example, if you take voter identification laws, people of color, so african americans, latinos, would be less likely to have the underlying documents that you need in order to get the i.d. in the first place in order to get a driver's license, she said. texas recently passed the election integrity protection act, one of the most restrictive voting laws in the country. it bans drive-through voting, it enlists new regulations for early voting, and it enacts new i.d. requirements for mail-in voting. while tolson does in the believe all voter identification requirements are discriminatory, she called texas voter i.d. measures racist, during a

congressional subcommittee hearing on september 22, because she believes they disproportionately impact voters of color. quote, texas has very restrictive voter i.d. law tolson said. if you read it, it doesn't seem racist on its face, but if you think about how it operates in practice as well as the intent behind it, it is fairly racist. for example, texas law only allows voters to have certain limited amount of i.d.'s. you have to have a driver's license, you can have a handgun license, you can have a military i.d., but you can't have a federal i.d., you can't have a student i.d., which are types of i.d.'s that people of color are more likely to have. white said, obtaining an election identification is not so easy for an 82-year-old woman who listlesst lives in a rural

area without the convenient ability to drive herself to the department of public safety. quote, my challenge is it's taking so long to get this done, white said and to send my mother through all these hoops at this age to get documents noartized and -- note arized -- we are having -- to send her through such a process, it really is ridiculous. mr. president, latino communities have also been at the forefront at the fight for social, racial and economic justice, but republican gerrymandering is silencing these communities as described in the following article publish by the brennan center on november 14, 2021, entitled it's time to stop gerrymandering latinos out of political power.

in 2020, latinos made up just 1% of all local and federal officials despite being 18% of the population. in fact, the 2020 census results show that latinos made up over half the country's population growth from 2010 to 2020, adding 11.6 million people to their total numbers. more by far than any other ethnic group in absolute terms. latinos are already the largest minority group in 21 states and in california and new mexico they have already surpassed nonlatino whites as the largest single ethnic group in the state. in texas, they are poised to do the same. in states where growth among latinos and other people of color threaten the political status quo, lawmakers are already beginning to gerrymander

latino communities out of their political voice, packing them into fewer and fewer districts to circumscribe their electoral power or disbursing latino communities across multiple districts in order to dilute their voting strength. in texas, for example, lawmakers recently passed a new congressional map that reduced the number of latino majority disirkts -- districts despite the fact that the state added two million latinos since 2010. this isn't a new tactic. last decade, texas failed to create any new elective opportunities for latinos despite the rapid latino growth leading to years of drawn out discripple nation. -- discrimination. successful litigation in florida demonstrated that lawmakers

packed latino voters into hefly democratic -- heavily democratic districts. even if states under democratic control, like illinois and washington, latinos are often shuffled between different districts to bolster safe democratic seats an deny the equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. even with record turnout in 2020, latino voters were, by many accounts, neglected by republican and democratic campaigns alike. this comes at a time when latino communities are in particular need of responsiveness from lawmakers. over the course of the pandemic, latinas have been 2.8 times more likely to die from covid-19 and suffered more economic and job losses than other americans. and since the pandemic began,

latino adults were more likely to get evicted and their children were more likely to fall behind in school than their white peers. rather than address the concerns of this growing body of constituents, many states like texas and florida, have instead created new barriers to the ballot box. anti-latino district practices are occurring amid the biggest voter suppression push in decades, much of it at the latino communities. this has deep roots and historical prejudice and violence going back over a century, often erased in u.s. history books, violent mobs are estimated to have killed thousands of people of mexican descent. forgotten are to forcibly move people to mexico, an estimated

two million mexican americans were moved during the great depression, many of whom were u.s. citizens. later, even the voting rights -- voting rights act of 1965, failed to initially protect puerto ricos from english literacy tests at the new york polls. quote, language minorities, close quote, weren't included in the law until ten years after its passage. though the latino population has grown and grown more diverse over the past 50 years, the pattern of discrimination remains strikingly unchanged. every day lawmakers across the country are recycling the bad map-drawing practices that have stymied latino political opportunity for decades. voters and advocates can

challenge these maps in courts, but they will be hampered by strict interpretation of voting rights laws and the ability for map drawers, after the supreme court green lighted partisan gerrymandering, to claim that latinos were targeted for partisan reasons, not for their ethnicity. and that is why it is more urgent than ever that congress repair and strengthen the nation's voting rights laws by passing the john lewis voting rights advancement act and the freedom to vote act. now, mr. president, asian american voters are turning out at record levels, and it's no coincidence that republican state legislatures are responding with new laws to suppress their voices. i'll now read from nbc news article from march 31, 2021, about the effect of georgia's recently enacted voter suppression law on asian american voters. this is entitled "asian american

voter rates in georgia hit record high: how voting bill threatens progress." while new data shows asian-americans have record turnout in georgia in the last election, a new law that restricts voting in the state threatens their participation in the political process, particularly at a time they also have the highest rates of absentee voting, critics say. the new legislation, passed with the overwhelming support of republicans in the state legislature last week, adds restrictions to absentee and early voting, among other forms of balloting. critics say the law could disproportionately affect communities of color, including asian-americans, whose voting population already confronts significant barriers to civic engagement. the bill, activists say, is particularly alarming, in light of a recent analysis by policy

nonprofit aapi data on turnout in battleground states that showed an historic 84% vote gain in georgia by asian-americans from 2016 to 2020, a result in part of aggressive community outreach. quote, voters of color, including asian american voters, have shown their electoral power in georgia, phi nguen, a director for sheab -- asian-americans atlanta told nbc. and now, some elected leaders want to try to suppress those voices rather than be accountable to a diverse, multiracial, multiethnic electorate. critics said that the bill, which was fast tracked through the statehouse and senate and signed by republican governor brian kemp in just over an hour, was passed without public notice

to advocates or voters. the sweeping legislation criminalizes line warming, the practice of offering food and water to voters waiting to vote, and allows the georgia legislature to take power from local boards of election. in regard to absentee and early voting, the earliest date a voter can request a ballot is 11 weeks ahead of an election, less than half the time before the law was passed. and the deadline to complete the ballots has been moved up as well, both requesting and returning ballots requires identification, such as driver's license, state i.d. number, or copy of an acceptable voter i.d. the restrictions on absentee voting, nguyen said, are particularly concerning, given that asian-americans vote by mail at the highest rate, compared to all other racial groups in the general election. voting data from november showed

that in 13 of the most contested battleground states, including georgia, aapi early and absentee voting rose almost 300% from 2016 to 2020. nguyen further pointed out that any laws that make up voting -- make voting more challenging have a particularly amplified impact on those who are limited english proficient or people who have difficulty communicating in english. the asian american population has some of the highest rates of limited english proficiency, and according to pew research asian-americans are the only group made up of a majority of naturalized immigrants who account for two-thirds of the electsorrate. with a high immigrant population, asian-americans face barriers beyond just language.

carthic ramushkrishna, founder of aapi data said, because the majority of the electorate is foreign born, most asian americans, most likely, did not grow up in a democratic or a republican household, he said. for those who were able to get college degrees, they probably attended universities in their home country, which influenced their knowledge of the political process. quote, what that means, is that the political awakening and consciousness and even information about where the party stand on the issues and where candidates stand on issues, the barriers are pretty high, beyond the language barriers, he said. quote, you combine that with the fact that parties and candidates traditionally have not reached out to them. it's asking a lot for someone to make a decision when they don't have all that background information and no one is reaching out to them.

given the added work that is required by immigrants to seek out this information, nguyen noted that, quote, they are more likely to give up or feel intimidated in the face of additional hurdles or hoops. within the asian american community those who tend to vote at higher rates also tend to be more pro tisht in english and -- proficient in english and have higher incomes and higher education. many are also homeowners, as opposed to renters. voter suppression laws would result in a distorted representation of the asian american population. quote, all of these factors matter. they disproportionately hurt populations that are lower income, lower education, representers, -- renters, younger people. you got to skew in terms of communities of color, less likely to be represented. even within those communities you will get a class skew and an age skew in terms of who has a

voice. ultimately, people should be pushing for more ways to make voting easier and to pull more people towards civic engagement, adding that even if lawmakers are genuinely concerned about voter fraud, it occurs far more infrequently than voter suppression, of which there are widespread examples. previous research suggests there is little to no voter fraud, and a harvard study on double voting, one of the most frequently cited examples of fraud, suggests it is not carried out in such a systematic way that it presents a threat to the integrity of american elections. this is a serious -- it presents a threat to the integrity of american elections. this is a serious reminder of how important political and civic education is for our most vulnerable communities.

mr. president, for far too long native communities have faced massive challenges in exercising their right to vote. voter suppression efforts in montana, as illustrated by this "mic" article from july 6, 2021, are just one example of recent efforts to disenfranchise native voters. the article is entitled "montana is ground zero for native american voter suppression and the fight against it." the voting rights act of 1965 banned discriminatory voting practices and gave native american communities the right to vote, in theory. most of us know now that even with the voting rights act in place, voter suppression is still going strong. in montana, native americans are fighting new republican laws that further restrict their ability to vote. this year, montana democratic governor steve bullock, who served for eight years, was

replaced by republican greg gianforte with a democrat no longer holding veto power, state republicans took advantage of the governor's election by passing two new voting law billh eliminates same-day voter registration, and house bill 530, which makes it illegal for people to distribute or collect mail-in ballots if they're being paid to do so. per the national congress of american indians, the turnout rate amongst native voters is up to ten percentage points lower than any other racial group. in 2019, the brennan center reported that restrictive voting laws throughout the country continued to disproportionately impact native communities. on the surface, preventing people from being pa id to collect ballots might seem like an okay idea, but in montana local nonprofits like western native voice and montana native voice, pay people to collect and

distribute ballots as an important part of their voting strategy. without this practice many people would be unable to cast their ballots at all. for example, "the new york times" reported the story of laura rudine, a residents of the black feet indian reservation, who had emergency open-heart surgery only a week before the 2020 election. because of the risk that coronavirus posed neither rudin nor her husband could vote in person. home delivery wasn't an option either, because it doesn't exist in her area of the reservation. instead, the "times" reported, the couple relied on rene la platt a black feet community organizer with western native voice, who took applications and ballots back and forth twine their home and one -- between their home and one of the only two satellite election offices on the 2,300 square mile reservation. the new laws signed by gianforte would make this practice illegal.

native american communities in montana are organizing against these voter suppression efforts. in may, the ucla of montana and the native american rights fund sued on behalf of several native voting rights act objections and for montana tribal -- four montana tribal communities, stating that the new laws will disenfranchise native voters in the state. mr. president, i know i'm running low on time. i will not be able to speak to the question of the student vote and how republican legislatures are doing all they can to keep young voters from voting, because they are more likely to vote democratic, or to speak on felon disenfranchisement and what that means in our democracy. i am not able to speak on these, but it does not mean that i doesn't think they are important. it just reminds tus of the mag any -- reminds us of the magnitude of this problem. voter suppression walls have

devastating consequences for real americans every day. so, i want to conclude my story today, my remarks today, with the story of crystal mason, which is told in "the new york times" on april 6, 2021, in an article entitled "crystal mason was sentenced to five years behind bars because she voted." whenever you hear republican rants about widespread voter fraud supposedly undermining americans' faith in the integrity of their elections, remember the story of crystal mason. ms. mason, a 46-year-old grandmother from the fort worth area has been in the news off and on since 2016 when texas prosecutors decided she was a vote fraudster, so dangerous that justice demanded she be sentenced to five years behind bars. her offense? visiting her local precinct on

election day that year and casting a provisional ballot for president. ms. mason was not eligible to vote at the time because she was on supervised release after serving a prison term for federal tax fraud. texas, like many states, bars those with criminal records from voting until they have finished all terms of their sentence. ms. mason, who had only recently returned home to herp three children -- to her three children and had gone to the polls that day at the urging of her mother, said she did not realize she couldn't cast a ballot. when poll workers couldn't find her name, they assumed a clerical error, suggesting she fill out the provisional ballot. provisional ballots are useful ways to deal with questions about voter eligibility that can't be resolved at the polling place. since 2002, congress required states offer them as part of the help america vote act, a law passed in the aftermath of the 2000 election debacle when

millions of ballots were disqualified. her ballot was rejected as soon as a search of the database determined she was ineligible. in other words, the system worked the way it was intended to. tara county prosecutors went after her for illegal voting anyway. they said she should have known she was not allowed to vote. the state had sent her a letter telling her so back in 2012, shortly after she'd been sentenced in the tax fraud case. the letter was delivered to her home, even though she had already begun serving her sentence behind bars. quote, they sent it to the one place they knew she was not going to be, said allison grinter, mrs. mason's lawyer. the prosecutors also pointed out that when she cast her ballot in 2016, she signed an of affidavit saying she had completed all the terms of her sentence. miss mason said she hadn't read the fine print. she was focused on writing her address in exactly the form it appeared on her driver's

license. she was convicted after a one-day trial and sentenced to five years behind bars for casting a ballot that was never counted. quote, it's a surreal experience to be in a courtroom for these trials, said christopher oogan, a professor of law and sociology at the university of minnesota, who studied the impact of felon disenfranchisement for decades and testified as a expert in prosecutions of people charged with illegal voting. you've got the judges, the lawyers, somebody who is often a model probationer, and what is at issue is whether they voted. i have this overriding sense of, gosh, don't we have other crimes to prosecute? it should be a consensus issue in a democracy that we don't incarcerate people for voting. mr. oogan said there is a stronger case for criminal punishment of certain election law offenses like campaign finance violations or sabotaging

voting machines that can do more widespread damage to our election system. but in his own work, he has found that the people who get punished are more likely to fit ms. mason's description -- female, low-level offenders who are doing relatively well in the community. quote, these are not typically folks who represent some great threat to public safety. you wouldn't get that sense from how ms. mason has been treated. after her voting conviction, a federal judge found she had violated the terms of her supervised release and sentenced her to ten extra months behind bars. that punishment which she began serving in december 2018 earned her no credit toward her five-year state sentence. ms. mason has continued to fight her case, but so far she has lost at every step. in march 2020, a three-judge panel on a state appellate court

rejected her challenge to her sentence. the court reasoned shah she broke the law by trying to vote while knowing she was on supervised release. it didn't matter whether she knew texas prohibited voting by people in that circumstance or not. this appears to be a clear misapplication of texas election law, which criminalizes voting only by people who actually know they are not eligible. not those who, like ms. mason, mistakenly believe that they are. it's as though ms. mason had asked a police officer what the local speed limit was and he responded beats me. why don't you start driving and see if we pull you over. last week the texas court of criminal appeals, the state's highest court for criminal cases, agreed to rule on ms. mason's appeal. it's her last chance to avoid prison for voting. tossing her conviction would bring a small measure of justice to a woman whose punishment should have been limited to at most not being able to cast a

ballot but it wouldn't give her back the last four years of fear and uncertainty she has endured for no good reason. ms. mason's first grandchild was born a few months ago, another reminder of how much she would miss if she were to lose the appeal and end up back behind bars. quote, this is very overwhelming, waking up every day knowing that prison is on the line, trying to maintain a smile on your face in front of your kids, and you don't know the outcome. ms. mason told the times in an interview. your future is in someone else's hands because of a simple error. identifying errors like this is the whole point of offering provisional ballots. the crazy quilt of voting rules and regulations that americans face from state to state can trip up even the best informed voters and honest mistakes are common. by prosecuting ms. mason, just one of more than 44,000 texans whose provisional ballots in 2016 was found to be ineligible, the state is saying

that you attempt to participate in democracy at your own risk. that risk is almost always higher for people of color. texas attorney general ken paxon likes to brag about the 155 people his office has successfully prosecuted for election fraud in the last 16 years, an average of fewer than ten per year. what he doesn't say out loud is that the aclu of texas found in an analysis of the cases he has prosecuted, only three-quarters of those cases involve black or latino defendants and nearly half are women of color like ms. at this point you might be wondering why ms. mason was ineligible to vote in the first place. she had been released from prison. she was trying to work her way back into society. as more states are coming to understand there is no good argument for denying the vote to people with a criminal record, and that's before you consider the practices explicit racist roots. there is even a strong case to

be played for letting those in prison vote as in maine, vermont, and most western european countries. and yet today more than five million americans, including ms. mason, are unable to vote because of a criminal conviction. that has a far greater impact on state and national elections than any voter fraud that has ever been uncovered. given the disproportionate number of black and brown people caught up in the criminal justice system, it is not hard to see a connection between cases like ms. mason's and the broader republican war on voting, which so often targets people who look like her. the nation's tolerance of prosecutions for the act of casting a ballot reveals a complacency about the right to vote, mr. oogan said, and troubling degree of comfort with voting restrictions generally. there is a slippery slope.

if you're -- start exempting individuals from the franchise it's easy to exempt other individuals by defining them outside the citizenry, he said. what is shocking to me is that people view this as acceptable in a political system that calls itself a democracy. mr. president, these efforts to subvert our democracy cannot be allowed to stand. congress must pass the freedom to vote act. the john r. lewis act immediately, to protect free and fair elections across this nation. and if senate republicans will not join us, then we must reform the filibuster. we must pass this vital legislation. our democracy depends on it.

and now, mr. president, i yield the floor.

ms. warren: mr. president. the presiding officer: i recognize the senator from massachusetts. ms. warren: mr. president, i understand that there are 20 bills at the desk due for a second reading en bloc. the presiding officer: the clerk will read the title of the bills for a second time. the clerk: s. 3452, a bill to ensure that state and local law

enforcement may cooperate with federal officials, and so forth. s. 3453, a bill to prohibit the payment of certain legal settlements, and so forth. s. 3454, a bill to clarify the rights of indians and so forth. s. 3455, a bill to prohibit the implementation of new requirements to report bank account deposits and withdrawals. s. 3456, a bill to enact the definition of waters of the united states into law, and for other purposes. s. 3457, a bill to codify the temporary scheduling order for fentanyl related substances and so forth. s. 3458 a bill to amend title 18 united states code and so forth. s. 3459, a bill to prohibit a federal agency and so forth and for other purposes. s. 3460, a bill to prohibit

local education agencies from obligating certain federal funds and so forth. s. 3461, a bill to provide that the rules submitted by the department of labor relating to covid-19 vaccination and testing emergency temporary standard shall have no force or effect and for other purposes. s. 3462, a bill to require u.s. immigration and customs enforcement to take into custody certain aliens, and so forth and for other purposes. s. 3463, a bill to impose sanctions and other measures in response to the failure of the government of the people's republic of china, and so forth. s. 3464, a bill to preserve and to protect the free choice of individual employees and so forth. s. 3465, a bill to clarify the treatment of two or more employers as joint employers.

s. 3466, a bill to prohibit the use of federal funds for the production of programs and so forth and for other purposes. s. 3467, a bill to withhold the united states contributions to the united nations relief and works agencies, and so forth and for other purposes. s. 3468, a bill to provide for a limitation on the removal of the government of cuba from the state sponsors of terrorism list. s. 3469, a bill to establish a review of the united states multilateral aid. s. 3480, a bill to prohibit the use of funds to reduce the nuclear forces of the united states. s. 3488, a bill to counter the aggression of the russian federation against ukraine, and and so forth and for other purposes. ms. warren: in order to place the bills on the calendar under the provisions of rule 14, i

would object to further proceeding en bloc. the presiding officer: objection is heard, so the items will be placed on the calendar under rule 14.. ms. warren: i ask unanimous consent that when the senate completes its business today, it recess until 10:00 a.m. on wednesday, january 19, that following the prayer and pledge, the journal of proceedings be approved to date, and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed. that upon the conclusion of morning business, the senate resume consideration of the house message to accompany h.r. 5746, the legislative vehicle for the voting rights legislation. further, the cloture motion of the house message to accompany h.r. 5746, ripen at 6:30 p.m. the presiding officer: without objection. ms. warren: if there is no further business to come before

the senate, i ask it stand in recess under the previous order. the presiding officer: the senate stands in recess until senate stands in recess until we expect vote tomorrow if you

can watch senate live here on c-span sales. ♪♪ >> sees manager unfiltered view of government funded by these television companies and more including cox. >> cox is committed to providing eligible cannibals. the urgent the digital divide, one engaged student at a time. cox in sports c-span as a public service along with these other television providers giving a front row seat to democracy. ♪♪ ♪♪ weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual piece every saturday, event people explore our nation's pass on american history tv. on sundays book tv brings the latest in nonfiction books and authors, television for serious readers. learn, discover, explore.

weekends on c-span2. ♪♪ >> chuck schumer announced he will have a talking filibuster want to block the current voted bill. any senator who chooses to filibuster a bill must stay on the floor on their feet and continue talking. proposed rule changes would allow the senate to end filibuster after senators given up the fork would only simple majority felt. since that would change 60 felt threshold, democratic senators joe manchin and kyrsten sinema continue to oppose it. we expect vote on this tomorrow, which would include schumer and others spoke to the press for about half an hour.