Mr. Schumer. Senator Klobuchar.
The Vice President. The Senator from Minnesota.
Ms. Klobuchar. Mr. President, I first would like to say I appreciate the words of our leader, Senator Schumer, as well as Senator McConnell’s call for a higher calling.
January 6 is not typically a day of historical significance for our country. For centuries, this day is simply the day that we receive each State’s certified electoral votes, and it has come and gone without much fanfare.
In fact, this is only the third time in 120 years that the Senate has gathered to debate an objection, and as Senator Cruz well knows, both times these objections were resoundingly defeated. The last time the vote was 74 to 1.
Why? Because Senators have long believed that they should not mess around with the will of the people. They have understood the words of our great former colleague John McCain from the State of Arizona, who once said that nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself.
In this case, my colleagues, our cause, despite our political differences, is to preserve our American democracy, to preserve our Republic because, as someone once said long ago, it is a republic if you can keep it.
Now, I appreciate all my Democratic and Republican colleagues who have joined our ranks of coup fighters, who have stood up for our democracy, who stand tall for our Republic, and who believe in an ideal greater than ourselves, larger than our political parties. That ideal is America.
And Senator Cruz, he knows this: On January 20, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be sworn in as President and Vice President of the United States. He knows that President-Elect Biden won more votes than any President in history and more than 7 million more votes than President Trump.
Despite the unfounded conspiracy theories Senator Cruz tells, he knows that high-ranking officials in President Trump’s own Homeland Security Department have concluded that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.”
If he wants to improve the numbers in his own party that he just mentioned of people believing in our elections, maybe he should start consulting with them or maybe he should start consulting with former Attorney General Barr, who said that he has found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
We don’t have to go back to 1877, my colleagues. Senator Cruz knows that 80 judges, including conservative judges, including judges confirmed in this Chamber, nominated by President Trump, have thrown out these lawsuits, calling them baseless, inadequate, and contrary both to the plain meaning of the constitutional text and common sense.
And he knows that all 10 living Defense Secretaries, including both of Trump’s Defense Secretaries—Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, William Cohen—he knows that all of these leaders have come together to say that these scurrilous attacks on our democracy must stop and we must allow for a peaceful transition of power.
Senator Sinema will fill you in on the specific facts as to why this election was sound and true in Arizona, but a summary: President Trump received 1,661,686 votes in the State; President-Elect Biden won 1,672,143 votes, meaning that he won the State by 10,457 votes.
On November 30, after Arizona’s Republican Governor, the secretary of state, the attorney general, and the conservative chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court certified the results of the election, the Governor actually said:
We do elections well here in Arizona. The system is strong.
Eight postelection lawsuits brought in Arizona to challenge the results were dismissed by judges. Nine Members of the House from Arizona were elected in the same election, including four Republicans. Colleagues, I did not see Senator Cruz over at the swearing-in at the House of Representatives last Sunday asking for an audit. He did not stop their swearing-in because there was no fraud, and he did not ask for an audit because we had a fair election.
I will end with this. My friend Roy Blunt, my fellow Rules Committee leader, many years ago found a statue, a bust of a man at the top of a bookcase. He did research. He went to the historians. All he could find out was that no one knew who this guy was except that he was a cleric. Hence, the statue is called “The Unknown Cleric.”
Now, at the time, our leaders thought this man important enough that they would warrant a statue for him, but today no one knows who he is. Senator Blunt’s message to schoolkids and Senators alike that visit his office, when he shows them the statue: What we do here is more important than who we are.
Senators, what matters is not our futures, not our own short-term destinies.
What matters is our democracy’s destiny because I think many of us know people will not know who we are 100 years from now or 200 years from now, but what they will know is this: They will know what we did today, how we voted today. That is more important than who we are. It is a Republic, if we can keep it.
Thank you, Mr. President.
I yield the floor.
The Vice President. The majority leader.
Mr. McConnell. I yield up to 5 minutes to the Senator from Pennsylvania, Senator Toomey.
The Vice President. The Senator from Pennsylvania.
Mr. Toomey. I intend later to address the specifics of Pennsylvania if and when an objection is raised in regard to Pennsylvania.
For now, I want to address my remarks to what I think is the fundamental question being posed by the objectors, and that is, does Congress have the constitutional authority to decide which States’ electoral college votes should be counted and which should not based on how well we think they ran their elections? This is what the objectors are really asking us to do—to federalize elections by rejecting electoral college votes from States whose processes they say they disapprove of and thereby having Congress select the President of the United States instead of the American people.
The answer, Mr. President, is no, there is no such authority under the Constitution. The Constitution assigns to the States the responsibility to conduct elections. It is clear in article II, section 1. It leaves courts with the responsibility to adjudicate disputes, and it assigns to Congress the ministerial function of counting ballots, except for extreme circumstances, such as when a State sends competing slates of electors to Congress, which brings me to the 1877 President.
Some objectors claim to merely want a commission to conduct an audit and then let States decide whether to send electors. Well, first, the situations are not at all analogous.
In 1877, Congress had before it two slates of electors from several States. There are no Trump electors from swing States; there are just Biden electors.
Second, legislators from the swing States—they have already spoken. They have made their decision. They have chosen not to send us alternative electors.
Third, a commission—really? It is completely impractical, and we all know it, with 14 days to go before a constitutionally mandated inauguration.
Look at it this way: If the electors are right and it is Congress’s job to sit in judgment on the worthiness of the States’ electoral processes, what is the criteria for acceptable electoral processes? What investigations have been conducted of these processes? What body has deemed that certain States’ processes are unacceptable? What opportunities were these States given to challenge the findings? Why are the objectors objecting only to swing States that President Trump lost? What about the ones he won? I don’t know—North Carolina? What about California? They have ballot harvesting, I am told. If this is all supposed to be Congress’s job, you would think we would have answers to these questions and procedures in place because we would have done this every 4 years, right? But we don’t because it is not our job.
If we adopt this new precedent that we sit in judgment of States’ processes, then we are federalizing the election law. We would necessarily have to establish the permissible criteria and rules for the States’ elections.
The ballot harvesting example—it is illegal in some States; it is encouraged
