For the People Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, first, I thank my colleagues who have gathered here on the floor to help pass and urge the passage of this very important piece of legislation, the For the People Act.

Our Constitution begins with three words that ring in the minds of each and every American, ``We the People.''

Seventy-six years after those words were written, President Lincoln resolved, in 1863, that those who had lost their lives on the battlefield at Gettysburg ``shall not have died in vain and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.''

One hundred two years after Gettysburg, our beloved former colleague, Congressman John Lewis--then a civil rights activist and leader-- together with nonviolent marchers, was beaten bloody by Alabama State Troopers in 1965 as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge while demanding voting rights. Later that year in 1965, Congress acted and did pass the Voting Rights Act, and it was reauthorized regularly thereafter, most recently in 2006 by a vote of 90 to 0 here in the U.S. Senate and 390 to 33 in the House, where I served at that time.

Then, in 2013, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court, in a notorious 5-to-4 decision, stripped away a key enforcement provision from the Voting Rights Act: the requirement that the Department of Justice approve changes to voting rights laws in States that had histories of discriminating against African-American voters and others in their past laws.

Almost immediately, like within 24 hours, you saw States that had been covered by that act begin to move to erect barriers to the ballot box, making it more difficult for people of color to vote. Indeed, in the case of the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. McCrory, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said that the voting provisions passed by the North Carolina legislature, in the aftermath of the rollback of the Voting Rights Act, were designed to ``target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.''

Now we come to 2021. On January 6, we witnessed a violent mob, incited by the former President of the United States, attack this Capitol in order to overturn the results of a democratic election. The mob came because of the big lie--the big lie told by Donald Trump and fueled by some of his allies here on Capitol Hill--that he had been cheated out of an election victory. It is a pernicious and insidious lie that has caused Republican State legislatures across the country to try to build up barriers to voting: limiting vote-by-mail, reducing the number of days for early voting, even making it illegal in Georgia for anyone to provide water to someone who is waiting in line to vote--a real provision that has already passed the Georgia House and that is on its way to the Senate. These are all measures designed to make it harder for American citizens to exercise their right to vote.

We needed the For the People Act before January 6, but we need it more than ever now to establish some minimum national standards to ensure that every American's right to vote is secure.

In addition to the barriers being erected around the country to voting, our democracy faces another real and present danger: the flood of cash from Big Money and special interests--invading the airwaves and invading the internet--that seeks to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.

In 2010, in another notorious 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision, Citizens United, the Court opened the floodgates to unlimited amounts of corporate special interest money flowing into our elections. Over $14 billion was spent in the 2020 election cycle, much of it secret. In fact, one of the consequences of that decision, coupled with already existing laws, was that more money flowed secretly into our elections-- the dark money, the dark money trying to hijack our democracy for the highest bidder.

As my colleagues have said, the American people have a right to know who is spending all of this money to try to influence their votes. That is why, back in 2010, I authored and the House passed the DISCLOSE Act--to require that the information be available to voters and the American people. In fact, had that House bill become law, we wouldn't have secret money today. While it was overwhelmingly popular in the country and supported by an overwhelming majority of Senators at the time, because of fate and a quirk of history in the death of Ted Kennedy, the Senate was not able to secure the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster. Ted Kennedy passed away, and his replacement was a Republican. This Senate voted with 59 votes--a big majority--to pass the DISCLOSE Act, but because of the filibuster rule, it couldn't get over that hurdle.

The DISCLOSE Act is part of S. 1. Senator Whitehouse and all of the Senators here have been part of that effort. It is part of S. 1.

We cannot afford to repeat the history of 2010. We cannot allow a minority of Senators who represent a minority of the public in this country and the people of this country to stop the For the People Act. We have a duty to every patriotic American who has worked hard--and the many who have spilled blood--for the right to vote. We have a duty to pass the For the People Act.

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