SAVE AMERICA ACT

SAVE AMERICA ACT

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 48 (Tuesday, March 17, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 48 (Tuesday, March 17, 2026)] [Senate] [Pages S1156-S1158] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] SAVE AMERICA ACT Mr. LEE. Madam President, I appreciate the skill and the passion that my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from the State of Washington brings to the table on this. I appreciate her thoroughness in making the case that she has made to the Senate. I would like to address a few of those items which I think call for a response. One of the arguments that she points to--all of the arguments that she points to in one way or another--reminds me of how important it is to turn back to the central objective of what we are trying to achieve here: Let's make it easy to vote but hard to cheat. Again and again, she refers to the desire to make it easy to vote, but as to the ``hard to cheat'' point, she goes off on a number of tangents, and I would like to address a number of those right now to make sure we set the record clear. One of the arguments she makes right out of the gate has to do with the fact that this is a constitutionally protected right, and she is right there. We have a number of freestanding constitutional protections in various parts of the Constitution that protect your right to vote. The fact that it is a constitutionally protected right doesn't mean that it doesn't matter that we make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. In fact, it makes it that much more important to do it. The fact that something is a constitutionally protected right doesn't mean that it has to be uninhibited. In fact, very often, as is the case with voting, if we make it easy to cheat, then your constitutionally protected right to vote will mean less and less with each passing election, and our failure to take these risks seriously further undermines the public's perception of the legitimacy of the rights in question. Now, the mere fact that something is a constitutionally protected right doesn't mean you can't make it harder for people to break the law in gaining access to it. Otherwise, there would be all sorts of things that would be off in our society. Take for example the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. Yes, we [[Page S1157]] have a constitutionally protected right to bear arms, and it is a fundamental right that is available to individuals. Yet, when you decide to exercise that right by going into a federally licensed firearms dealer to purchase a firearm, guess what you have to do? You have to produce identification, and you have to wait a period of time. It might take a few minutes or it might take a few hours, but you have to wait until they run your identification and your information through some databases to make sure you are eligible to purchase a gun. It still is a constitutionally protected right. It doesn't cease to be a constitutionally protected right simply by virtue of doing that. Never in a million years would you see my colleagues on the other side of the aisle or many in my party, I assume, saying: OK. This is all we need to do in order to deal with this issue since the right to bear arms is protected by the Constitution. Yes, we have laws about who may purchase what firearm and when and under what circumstance and when they might be disqualified based on a prior conviction or otherwise from purchasing a firearm. All we need is a signature because, according to my colleague's logic, a signature is all the identification you need. Well, is it? Well, signatures can be forged. With increasing ease, they can be forged. In other circumstances, they can be presumed not to be checked, and in some cases, that might pan out to be more true than in others. But nobody would seriously suggest--particularly those who like these background check laws--they wouldn't be content with somebody just signing their name even if it said: I hereby declare under penalty of perjury that I am entitled to purchase this firearm, that I am an adult, that I am a U.S. citizen, and that I have not been convicted of a felony offense which would disqualify me under 18 USC section 922(g); nor do I trigger any of the other exclusionary factors articulated in various subsections of 922(g) or under any other Federal law. The signature wouldn't do it there, and that is a constitutionally protected right. This is a constitutionally protected right, but we are still making it, yes, easy to vote and hard to cheat. You have to have both. You don't get that if you have a mere signature. It is so, too, with the purchase of alcohol or tobacco by minors. Even if you had people sign something saying, ``I hereby attest by signing this under penalty of perjury that I am, in fact, entitled to purchase alcohol; I am, in fact, at least 21 years old''--we wouldn't do that. Why? Well, it would be really hard to enforce the law at that point. When we turn to the examples--and I tried to count the number of times she said it, but I think she said ``very, very, very, very, very, very, very little fraud in elections.'' OK. I understand that. Election fraud is extremely difficult to detect and therefore is rarely prosecuted. There have been very few cases of voter fraud actually having been discovered--detected--and prosecuted through to completion. Well, likewise, with other laws, if all you were required to do was to check a box and sign your name, there would be a lot of other instances of legal wrongdoing that would also be very hard to detect if that would be all you had to provide. We have this known vulnerability in our laws here, and Heaven help us all if we don't acknowledge the vulnerabilities that we face and take reasonable steps to close those loopholes. The fact that we are requiring documents here--yes, it adds a step. Now, there are a couple of things I need to be clear about. No. 1, if you are already registered to vote, this doesn't undo your existing voter registration. We are not going to make hundreds of millions of Americans who are already registered to vote go back and start the process over again--that wouldn't make any sense--but it would apply to new voter registrations. If you move or if you register to vote in a new State or a new precinct and you have to establish a new voter registration file after this becomes law, then, yes, you would have to do that. But, again, if you are an American who has ever had a job anywhere or who has started any new job at any point in your career with a new employer, you have already had to supply the same documentation. In fact, you have had to supply a much more rigid set of documents than what this requires because this, unlike that, allows you to prove it even if you have not a single document--not a single one of those. Again, going back to page 12, line 22, and the sentences and paragraphs that follow, it makes it abundantly clear. Even if you are missing all of it, we have taken that into account, and we can put the onus back on the State to go back and prove you wrong. That is very different than just checking a box and signing your name. Even if it does have some warnings attached to it, that is very different than having to supply the necessary information about how and where you were born. If you are a natural-born citizen, meaning if you were a U.S. citizen as of the moment of your birth, based on the circumstances surrounding your birth--either born on U.S. soil or born elsewhere to U.S. citizen parents--then you have to establish that. That is very different than simply checking a box and signing your name. Yes, signing your name can be used to identify a person under some circumstances, but it is a lot less information than we are required to provide elsewhere. She then makes this about what she refers to as States' rights. I don't like to use that term because I think it is a misnomer. It also conjures images of a bygone Jim Crow era in which the Democratic Party subjected substantial swaths of the American population to a set of racist, evil, exclusionary laws. It has a George Wallace connotation to it that I don't like. Besides that, States don't have rights; they have authority. ``Authority'' is sort of the inverse polar opposite of a right. It is the ying to the yang that is a right. States have authority; people have rights. Rights are a check on authority, and that is what we are talking about here. Regardless of whatever you want to call that--State sovereign authority, federalism, whatever you want to call it--it is not implicated here. Remember, this objection is coming from the same party that, no less than 5 years ago, through a vehicle that, in the Congress empaneled between 2021 and 2023, was run by Democrats during a Democratic administration, under the auspices of a bill commonly known at the time as H.R. 1, tried to undertake a wholesale takeover of our Federal voting and election system. Among other things, it would have subjected every voting jurisdiction in the United States to the status that today we equate only with section 5 jurisdictions. What that means is, anytime any voting jurisdiction in the United States anywhere--no matter how large or small, whether Tribal, local, State, or otherwise--wanted to redistrict, they would have to go to a political appointee at the U.S. Department of Justice and obtain preclearance. It is a ``Mother, may I?'' of sorts from Uncle Sam and Aunt Sam. It is something that is as fundamentally un-American, something as fundamentally contrary to federalism as we know it. This is the same party that is now making the federalism objection to this. While we are on this Federal objection to this, let's remember the whole reason this is necessary in the first place is because of an existing Federal law passed in 1993 by Congress--the National Voter Registration Act. So the whole reason it is necessary to begin with is because of an existing Federal law

Referenced legislation: HR1