For the People Act of 2021

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, we have been told by the majority party that soon we will be having a vote on an 800-page bill to change 50 State voting laws to 1 Federal law. This bill is called the For the People Act. It was compiled after the 2018 elections to call into question the legitimacy of democratic elections for partisan political purposes.

If it had been a serious attempt at legislating, there would have been some outreach to some Republicans because it takes 60 votes, a bipartisan vote, to get anything through the U.S. Senate.

In that process, there would have been consultation also with local elected officials--the election officials who conduct the State elections--to make sure it was workable. There would have been hearings in the Congress. There would have been revisions from the bill originally introduced.

The fact that back in 2018, when it was introduced, is the fact that it was intended as political propaganda, and that betrays the absurdity of the title, the ``For the People Act.''

Also, despite Senator Schumer's using Senate rule XIV in the last Congress to bypass the committee and put the bill directly on the Senate calendar, Senator Schumer never used his right to force a vote on moving to the bill. At that time, the Democratic narrative was that Republicans were not doing enough to secure the election so the results might end up being in doubt. Now, what we know from happening in the last election, that argument is out the window now.

Since the Democrats got the results they wanted, they endlessly quote the Trump administration's top cyber security official declaring the 2020 election the most secure ever in history.

I assumed last Congress that Senator Schumer would wait until right before the 2020 election to force a vote so he could accuse Republicans of blocking an election bill for their campaign narrative questioning election security. Instead, they repeatedly, dishonestly, blamed the Republican leader for blocking the bill, ignoring the fact that the Democratic leader had reserved the possibility of forcing a vote.

The For the People Act is a messaging bill. The bill has now been reintroduced and recast as a response to a few State election security laws. A handful of relatively modern reforms at the State level have been shamelessly and falsely characterized as voter suppression, even considering the fact that in the last election, the winner got the highest number of votes of any winner for President in the history of the United States, and the loser got the highest number of votes of any candidate for President of the United States throughout our history.

As I have mentioned before, the claim by some Trump supporters that a certain brand of voting machine switched votes, I pointed out that that was lifted entirely from the Democrats' 2004 playbook. And President Trump's questioning of his loss in Georgia was simply following in the footsteps of the losing candidate for Governor of Georgia 2 years before. The Georgia Democrat lost by over 50,000 votes in 2018 and has never even bothered to try to prove voting irregularities on that scale.

Foreign adversaries like Russia and China cast doubts on the soundness of our democratic system, both to weaken us from within and to justify their own repressive regimes. American politics should not do these repressive regimes propaganda jobs for them, but too often we tend to be doing that.

This bill is being called democracy reform. I support our American democratic system. All Americans should be proud of it. We can and should have confidence in our elections. Our democracy does not need a fundamental rewrite because our democracy works.

Let's stop casting doubt on American elections, stop casting aspersions on the commonsense election security measures supported by Americans of all backgrounds. Let's work together to boost the confidence of all Americans in our elections.

This bill would register illegal aliens. It would do away with State voter ID laws. It would have taxpayer-funded elections.

I remember what our colleague Senator Cruz said. In the first quarter of this year, he raised--it must have been in the neighborhood of about $5 million from contributors of under $200. So if you get that kind of money, under this bill, from people under $200, for every dollar you get, you get $6 from the taxpayers. So Senator Cruz, I am told, would get about $34 million of taxpayer funds to use for political purposes. We don't need to replace 50 State voting laws as this 800-page bill would.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source