SAVE AMERICA ACT

SAVE AMERICA ACT

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 50 (Thursday, March 19, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 50 (Thursday, March 19, 2026)] [Senate] [Pages S1411-S1418] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] SAVE AMERICA ACT Mr. LEE. Mr. President, we have begun what will be our third day of debating the SAVE America Act, just over 48 hours ago. We voted to proceed to this bill, and we have been debating it for a couple of days, now entering our third 24-hour period of debates. I want to make a few observations to some of the arguments that I have made and respond to some of them; in particular, respond to some of the arguments that I have heard made just in the last couple of hours. We have heard a number of arguments. Nearly all of them that come from the other side of the aisle deal with something that is either easily addressed in ways that would not require any change to the legislation before us, or, more commonly--in fact, almost entirely-- what we are hearing are arguments that overlook or even blatantly mischaracterize key features of the legislation. The distinguished Senator from Colorado who spoke just a little while ago, made a number of accusations against the legislation. Now, they are not materially different from some of the other arguments that have been made this evening, but they were a little bit more strident coming from the Senator from Colorado than they have been from some others. He repeatedly referred to this legislation, in ways described it using adjectives like ``shameful,'' a lot of characterizations of the legislation as being somehow evil or malign. But as important as anything, he continued to repeat characterizations of the bill that are just lies. And I wish I didn't have to use that term. It is a very blunt term, but these are lies. It is as though he is staring straight into the noonday Sun and, while looking at the Sun with a cloudless sky, saying: It is midnight. There is no Sun visible. A lot of this--not all of it, but a lot of it--traces back, in one way or another, to this refrain about how this law is alternatively either Jim Crow 2.0; that it disenfranchises women; that it disenfranchises racial minorities, persons of color; that it disenfranchises 20, 21 million people; that it disenfranchises anyone who lacks any documentation, anyone who, after getting married, goes through a name change if the marriage certificate can't be found along with the other documents. Arguments that you would have to get a passport in order to vote, having to shell out a couple hundred dollars, which is about what a passport costs. I think it is $185 without any expedited fees, more than that otherwise. On that basis, these arguments often culminated in the point that this is somehow a poll tax because if you have to spend a couple hundred bucks getting a passport or otherwise procuring documents, without which you couldn't register to vote, according to them, then you are disenfranchised; therefore, this is a poll tax. Poll taxes were outlawed by constitutional amendment over 60 years ago, and therefore this is bad. There are a lot of other arguments, but let's just stop right there and let me address--I think I can address nearly all, if not all, of those arguments by referring to one section of the bill that I have oft repeated, oft cited, oft quoted. And yet no matter how many times I cite it, paraphrase it, quote it, or refer my colleagues across the aisle to its provisions, they seem to ignore it. Many of the same people have continued to repeat this lie, even after they have been in the room here in the Senate Chamber when I have made the argument, and here is the argument that overcomes most, if not all, of the immediately aforementioned arguments. This legislation doesn't require you to have any of the documents that they reference. Ideally, you should have them. And, in fact, most Americans do have them, and most Americans are required to use them, from time to time, in other contexts. Perhaps the most common of those contexts is in the employment context. When you start a new job--whenever any American citizen starts a new job with a new employer in the United States--you have to fill out a form called the I-9. The I-9 requires you to establish your U.S. citizenship. Now, if you are not a U.S. citizen, then you don't have to produce that because you have to produce something else. You have got to produce a visa and establish the link between the visa that you have, your authorization to work, and your authorization to work in that particular job. So that is par for the course if you are not a U.S. citizen because you have got to establish a very specific type of work permit or an authorization based on your visa. But if you are an American citizen, you still have to pony up with documents every time you begin new employment as a new employee with a new employer in the United States. You have to prove you are a citizen, and you have to do it in fairly precise ways. It prescribes a couple of methods that you can use to establish your U.S. citizenship. Method one, which is the simpler one: You show up with a U.S. passport that establishes your citizenship, and that one document can satisfy the entire obligation--if you have one. A lot of Americans have them, but a lot of them don't. Not everyone travels outside the United States. If you don't travel outside the United States, you are not necessarily going to need a passport. Why go through the expense and hassle of getting one if you don't travel? That is why a lot of people don't have them. And that is one of the reasons why I find it so reckless when people are making the claim that you would have to have one, or even the indirect suggestion that anyone without a passport who is not willing to shell out a couple hundred bucks to get a passport and go through the hassle and the waiting period to get one might be disenfranchised, because that is not the only means by which you can establish your U.S. citizenship--not under the SAVE America Act, certainly, and also not under the I-9. But under the I-9, you can also prove your citizenship by coming up with an original copy of your birth certificate--the original certified copy of your U.S. birth certificate--and then a government-issued photo ID. And in some contexts, the original Social Security card can also be acceptable along with the original certified copy of your birth certificate. And that is about it. So anybody who has ever had a job in this country who is a U.S. citizen has had to do that. Like most Americans, I have had a number of jobs in my career, and so I have had to fill out the I-9 many times. I don't always have those documents right with me. I can usually track them down. I am pretty sure my wife knows where they are. They are not things that we utilize every day, but I know that, from time to time, I will need access to them. And I have needed access to them every time I have applied for a new job. There have been other times when I have needed them, including when I have applied for a passport. I have needed them most recently when I renewed my driver's license in Utah. And Utah is moving toward a system of having a driver's license that can establish citizenship. The last time I renewed, they asked me to bring in those documents. I established my citizenship with that. If you don't have those, you can't start a new job. So most Americans, if they don't have those documents at the moment they start a new job, they have to find them. We wanted the SAVE America Act to provide other methods of documenting one's citizenship, recognizing that not everybody has those documents. A lot of people are not going to have a U.S. passport; and those who don't have a U.S. passport might also not have the combination of other documents, including the birth certificate with the State-certified seal on it--not just a photocopy--along with a government-issued photo ID and/or a Social Security card. And so we added a bunch of other things to it. There is a subset of the REAL ID driver's license. Not all REAL ID driver's licenses prove citizenship. Some of them do. It is typically evident on the face of a REAL ID driver's license whether or not that particular driver's license establishes citizenship. That would suffice under this legislation. It would also suffice--in some circumstances, certain forms of Tribal ID could be used, insofar as they establish citizenship. [[Page S1412]] But we wanted to go even further than that, recognizing that some people might not have any of these forms. And we didn't want to add to the expense, to the burden, to the hassle, to the delay, to the deterrent effect from voting that it might have if you had to procure or find documents that you had either lost or you never had to begin with; or your house burned down or dog ate them or your crazy Aunt Madge took them and took them to the dump and lit them on fire or whatever she did with them; or you just don't believe in documents or you don't care about them or you never had them to begin with. Whatever your reason, if you are a U.S. citizen, you need to be able to register to vote, and that ought not be that hard. So we created an alternative mechanism. Now, mysteriously--magically--my friends across the aisle, my Democratic colleagues in the Senate, refuse defiantly to acknowledge that this provision even exists. They refuse, and they continue. They persist undaunted, undeterred by the fact that they are making false arguments--fake arguments--without a scintilla of truth to them, to the effect that this is a poll tax, to the effect that they are going to have to shell out 200 bucks to vote, to the effect that this is going to deter people, dissuade them from voting. It is going to create a chilling effect--dogs and cats living together in the streets, stuff right out of the Book of Revelation, end-of-the-world stuff. This is nonsense. It

Referenced legislation: HR1