Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 1
Floor Speech
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Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I am pleased to be here with my colleagues to fight to restore the American Constitution. I am pleased to be here with Senator Tom Udall, who has led the For the People Act, and my colleagues Mazie Hirono, Michael Bennet, Amy Klobuchar, and Dick Durbin--all speaking up to say that we must defend the American Constitution.
At the root of that is our system of electing those who represent us, and that election system, America, is now deeply corrupted by gerrymandering, by extensive, persistent voter suppression, and by dark money. It affects everything that we should achieve for the people of the United States.
If we believe we need to end the price gouging of Americans on pharmaceutical drugs, we need to end this corruption and pass the For the People Act. If we believe that every child deserves a quality K-12 education and that our children should be able to go to college without a mountain of debt, we need to end this corruption and pass the For the People Act. If we believe that Americans should be living in homes and apartments, not sleeping on the streets, we need to end this corruption and pass the For the People Act. If we believe that we have a responsibility to pass on a habitable and livable planet, free of pollution, to our children and grandchildren, we need to end this corruption and pass the For the People Act.
This corruption--gerrymandering, voter suppression, dark money--is all about eviscerating the very soul of our Constitution--the ``we the people'' vision of our Constitution, that we would not be like European nations that had government by and for the powerful, but that here in America representatives of the people would be able to have government by and for the people.
It is Jefferson who said: The real test of whether we succeed is whether the laws reflect the will of the people. But instead, we see the laws in this Chamber being constructed solely, uniquely, and, unfortunately for the most powerful and wealthy among us rather than the people.
Gerrymandering, where voters should choose their politicians but, instead, politicians choose their voters--that is a deep and powerful corruption that has extensive impact on the Chamber that is just down the hall.
We have seen what happened in North Carolina, where 47 percent of the State's popular vote in House races won 23 percent of the seats and, similarly, in Pennsylvania, in the election before last, and the Supreme Court threw up its hands and said: We can't do anything about this, even though the Pennsylvania Supreme Court understood it is so important to fairness and equal representation and took it on and solved it.
This bill sets up independent commissions across the country so that the districts for representation are drawn fairly.
Then there is voter suppression and intimidation. If you believe in our Constitution and if you honor it, you believe in voter empowerment, not voter suppression.
We have seen a flood of suppression and intimidation since the Supreme Court took a hatchet to the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County case--voter ID laws, purges of voter rolls, moving polling locations, cutting back on the hours, cutting back on the staffing. We have seen it in North Dakota. We have seen it in Georgia. We have seen it in Ohio, and we have seen it in North Carolina. We have seen it in Iowa. We have seen it in New Hampshire, and we saw it in Texas last week.
There are strategies to keep the poor from voting, strategies to keep those Americans of minority communities from voting, strategies to keep American Native Indians from voting, and strategies to keep college students from voting. Talk about the intense and deliberate corruption of America. Voter suppression and intimidation is it.
But this bill lays it out--automatic voter registration, national vote-by-mail, prohibiting the purging of voting rolls, online registration to enable people to have a smooth, solid road to be able to participate, rather than roadblocks and land mines to prevent them from participating.
Then we have the dark money. These are the most powerful and richest Americans trying to drown out the voices of millions of Americans through unlimited dark and dirty money in our campaigns. Americans know the system is now rigged. They know it is now corrupted by this money. We have seen an explosion of this money since 2010 when the Citizens United decision came down, a 5-to-4 decision from the Supreme Court. It bloated to more than $4.4 billion.
This bill takes that on. It shines a light on all the money so we know where it is coming from and where it is going, so it can't be hidden in a shell game from one level, to the next, to the next. It requires honest ads. It allows small-donor matching grants. This bill, for the people, says no to corruption and yes to the ``we the people'' Constitution of the United States of America.
If we want to act on the fundamentals for families on healthcare, on housing, on education, on infrastructure, and on living-wage jobs; if we want to take on the Equality Act so doors are no longer slammed for the LGBTQ community; if we are going to take on the carbon pollution that is destroying so much in American agriculture and our forests and our fishing, doing so much damage with fiercer storms; if we are going to take this on, we must pass the For the People Act.
This act has passed the House down the hall. It has come down here, and it has been buried by the Republican leadership in this Chamber in, I must say, one of the most deliberate acts of sabotage of the Constitution we have ever seen on the floor of this Senate, and that sabotage must end.
39, H.R. 1; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.
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Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, my colleague has just demonstrated why this bill should be on the floor. He has given extensive conversation on a series of points that should be deliberated upon.
I say to my colleague from Missouri, isn't this what we should be doing as a body, putting issues on the floor of the Senate and debating them for the future of this country so that we can get, if you will, right to the facts rather than to have things obscured by the fact that the issue is not on the floor.
So I would encourage my colleague from Missouri to go back to his caucus and say: You know, I just gave a vigorous opposition to this bill, but I believe in the role of the Senate in deliberating the issues. So I think this bill should be put on the floor, and I think it should be open to amendments.
I can hear from what my colleague has stated that he probably thinks the bill should be shrunk and probably thinks it could also be expanded. Good. That is the point of having debate and amendments on the floor of the Senate.
So I would hope, in the spirit of your comments, you would be willing to actually stand up and debate this bill and advocate for your colleagues to debate this bill on the floor of the Senate, because once upon a time, this floor would have been full of Members arguing over key issues, enlightening each other, pointing out the flaws in their thinking, but now substantive policy bills don't arrive here on the floor because of an unconstitutional position--one that is not delineated in the Constitution--the majority leader has decided that nothing should be debated on this floor that he alone doesn't want considered.
Let's think about some of the points that were just raised. One point was that the Federal Government should have no role in elections; it should all be left to local officials. Didn't we have that debate in 1965 in the Voting Rights Act? Why did the Federal Government say that we should, in fact, have laws for the integrity of our elections? It was because there were all kinds of forms of voter intimidation and voter suppression, keeping the people of the United States, the citizens of the United States, from fully participating in their democratic Republic. It is the Constitution that laid out this role for the Federal Government, saying Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations regarding elections. So it is the Constitution that envisioned that if States failed to protect the integrity of our elections, then we should act right here, right now.
My colleague said he didn't like the idea that the bill says what type of paper to use. Well, that's certainly something that can be worked out. But shouldn't we have paper ballots everywhere?
My colleague said local officials are doing a great job. Then why were people in minority districts waiting 7 hours to vote, when people in many other districts--more affluent districts--were waiting 7 minutes to vote? That is discrimination, straight and simple. Shouldn't we debate eliminating that discrimination here on the floor of the Senate?
This is about the integrity of our elections. This is about the vision of our Constitution. This is about not letting the wealthy and powerful control what happens in our United States of America.
If we do not address this corruption of this Senate and of the voting institutions, then we, in fact, will fail to fulfill our responsibility under the Constitution of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Thank you, Madam President.
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