SAFEGUARD AMERICAN VOTER ELIGIBILITY ACT

SAFEGUARD AMERICAN VOTER ELIGIBILITY ACT

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 49 (Wednesday, March 18, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 49 (Wednesday, March 18, 2026)] [Senate] [Pages S1195-S1202] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] SAFEGUARD AMERICAN VOTER ELIGIBILITY ACT S. 1383 Mr. LEE. Mr. President, here we find ourselves today, a little over 24 hours after we began consideration of the SAVE America Act, having passed the motion to proceed to that measure yesterday afternoon. It is important to me. I think it is important to the American people, who overwhelmingly support this measure and the policy changes it would bring about when enacted into law, that we keep our running tally of the arguments being raised against it. The arguments for and against it are and properly should be monitored by the American people so that they can see what is going on. This does, after all, impact them, and it impacts them in a way that goes beyond the run-of-the-mill piece of legislation. Everything we do potentially affects the American people one way or another, some things more than others. A simple sense of the Senate resolution declaring ``National Sofa Care Week'' might impact them less than something like raising taxes, for example. This one is, in some ways, upstream from all of those because the SAVE America Act deals with something very fundamental. It deals with the way that the citizens are able to interact with and influence their own government. Really, it is the fundamental premise of the founding of our Nation and the creation of our Republic. In many respects, the Declaration of Independence, whose birthday we are about to celebrate this year--we are nearly 250 years since we became our own country, since we declared independence. In the Declaration of Independence, in addition to kicking off the creation of the greatest civilization that human history has ever recorded, it also set out a vision for the type of Nation we aspire to become and, in fact, have become. It established a few basic principles. In many respects, the Declaration of Independence, while not quoted as often, while not celebrated as much, and while it is maybe a step or two detached from the day-to-day operation of the government--in some respects, the Declaration of Independence is itself the picture that we look at when we assess who we are as a country. The Constitution is the frame--the structure that holds it in place, that sets the boundaries-- but the Declaration provides the picture. The Declaration acknowledges the existence of popular sovereignty. It acknowledges the natural fundamental rights that God and nature's God lay before us; that acknowledges the fundamental truths about who we are and what government is in relation to us; that we have these self- evident truths, these God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the understanding that government exists for the well-being of human beings and not the other way around; and that whenever government becomes destructive of those same ends--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for example--it is the right, it is the duty, it is the obligation to alter or abolish that government and to establish something that will secure their freedoms. Some 11 years after that document was penned, after several years, we won the war against what was then the world's last-standing great superpower in a conflict that could be analogized to David and Goliath. We were not Goliath. We were David--we were the underdog of underdogs-- and, somehow, we managed to win that war. We established a form of government, after winning that war, under the Articles of Confederation. Instinctively, intuitively, we adopted a form of national government that was weak, that was meek, that was mild--in part because we had just come off of an experience with our mother country where we saw that the risk of tyranny was greater at the national level than it was at the local level. Meanwhile, during our Colonial period prior to the Revolution, we had had a taste of local self-rule in a way that was somewhat different than local government had been prior to that time back in the mother country. Given how far we were removed geographically, physically, in miles from the mother country, that by itself offered a degree of independence from our London-based government, and we became accustomed to it. The amount of muscle flexed by the mother country would wax and wane over time depending on what was happening back in London, throughout the British Isles, and throughout the British Empire during periods where there were a lot of debts to pay off often from wars waged on multiple continents. There were times when our British overseers became more aggressive in the way they regulated us, in the way especially that they collected taxes from us, and they became more of a brooding omnipresence during those seasons. It was during one of those seasons in which the American people had decided that they had had enough and that it was time to break our ties with the mother country and become our own country. So years passed. We won the war against all odds, against all expectations. We set up the Articles of Confederation instinctively, reflexively, creating a fairly weak form of national government, but it was so weak that it couldn't perform the basic functions that we needed a national government to perform, and it was that set of circumstances that led the individuals who would write the Constitution to try to come together. [[Page S1196]] They tried to come together in 1786 in Annapolis. They couldn't form a quorum, so they abandoned that project. They reconvened the following year in the late spring of 1787. By the time they formed a quorum in 1787, the heat of the season was upon them. It was unseasonably hot, and it was muggy as Philadelphia often is during that time of year. They labored through a process that was intense, that was itself a system that you might describe almost as flying a plane while building a plane. They came together initially, ostensibly, to amend the Articles of Confederation to correct some of these inadequacies--the inability of the national government to forestall the economic balkanization that had started to take place among the former Colonies--now States--and to deal with some of the defects of the Articles of Confederation. What came out from all of that was, of course, a completely new document; and it was a document that, I believe, was written by the hands of wise men raised up by Almighty God under that very purpose, but it preserved these basic tenets--the basic tenets of popular sovereignty, of natural rights that had been articulated so well in the Declaration of Independence--and it gave them substance; it gave them form. It put in place a structure that would be there to guarantee their endurance and to make them a reality. How is this relevant to the SAVE America Act? Well, it has everything to do with the SAVE America Act. In that Constitution--predicated on the Declaration of Independence-- we made clear that the people are, in fact, the sovereigns; that this is their government. It set up these three coordinate branches of government. One branch of government--the branch of government in which we operate--makes the laws. They understood this government from the outset to be the most powerful and the most dangerous because the other two operated, would operate, or were designed to operate in some ways ancillary to this one. They certainly understood that this was the most dangerous branch, and we know that because it is the branch of government most routinely subject to regular elections. Every Member of the House of Representatives is subject to reelection every 2 years, and a third of the Members of this body are, likewise, up for reelection every 2 years. So it is no accident--it is not a mere coincidence--that the Founding Fathers subjected us to the most regular elections because we are the most dangerous branch. We make the laws. The executive branch implements and executes and carries out those laws. The judicial branch resolves disputes over the meaning of the laws that we put in place where two or more parties can't agree as to what a particular provision of Federal law--whether it is statutory or constitutional-- might mean. For all of this to work, popular sovereignty has to be maintained, and that means a close, tight connection to the American people themselves. These elections matter. It is one of the reasons why, in article I of the Constitution--the part of the Constitution that sets up the legislative branch--it gives the Congress the power to establish rules with some significant limitations but rules nonetheless that would apply nationwide with respect to the election of Federal officials--of Members of the House of Representatives and Members of the Senate. Those rules would need to have nationwide application because they involved, distinctively, national lawmaking powers. That is why we have the power to operate here to begin with. If at any point the Federal Government generally or in particular at this particular branch of government becomes untethered from the will of the people--from the elections and the decisions made in those elections concerning those who serve in the Congress of the United States, whether in the House or in the Senate--we have a problem. To the extent that our elections for these Federal offices lose their legitimacy--actual or perceived or a combination of the two--we end up with problems because the government itself starts to lose its legitimacy. And it is not just that, well, it is one of the three branches that is in question in this part of the conversation. It is that this is the wellspring of everything else that happens within the U.S. Government. What happens in the executive branch and what happens in the judicial branch are in many respects downstream from what

Referenced legislation: S1383, S1383