wrong. And this, too, went to a court. In rejecting this claim, the State court in Arizona found that the county followed the properly issued guidance on hand audit procedures from the Arizona Secretary of State. And the court found that Maricopa County officials, therefore, could not lawfully have performed the hand count audit the way the plaintiffs wanted it done. If they had done so, they would have exposed themselves to criminal punishment.
The Vice President. The Senator’s 5 minutes has expired.
Ms. Cortez Masto. Thank you, Mr. Vice President. I would close by just saying, please, my colleagues, do not disenfranchise the voters of Arizona and certify their votes tonight.
Thank you.
The Vice President. The majority leader.
Mr. McConnell. Mr. Vice President, I yield up to 5 minutes to the Senator from Utah, Senator Lee.
The Vice President. The Senator from Utah.
Mr. Lee. Mr. Vice President, from the time I prepared my remarks for today, it seems like a lifetime ago. A lot has changed in the last few hours. So I am going to deliver some of the same remarks, but it has a little bit of a different feel than it would have just a few hours ago.
My thoughts and prayers go out to the family members of those who have been injured or killed today. My heartfelt gratitude goes out to the Capitol Hill Police who valiantly defended our building and our lives.
While it is true that legitimate concerns have been raised with regard to how some of the key battleground States conducted their Presidential elections, this is not the end of the story. We each have to remember that we swore an oath to uphold, protect, and defend this document, written nearly two and a half centuries ago by wise men raised up by God for that very purpose. That document makes clear what our role is and what it isn’t. It makes clear who does what when it comes to deciding Presidential elections.
You see, because in our system of government, Presidents are not directly elected. They are chosen by Presidential electors, and the Constitution makes very clear, under article II, section 1, that the States shall appoint Presidential electors according to procedures that their legislatures develop. Then comes the 12th Amendment. It explains what we are doing here today in the Capitol. It explains that the President of the Senate—the Vice President of the United States—shall open the ballots, “and the votes shall then be counted.” It is those words that confine, define, and constrain every scrap of authority that we have in this process.
Our job is to open and then count. Open, then count—that is it. That is all there is.
There are, of course, rare instances—instances in which multiple slates of electors can be submitted by the same State. That doesn’t happen very often. It happened in 1960. It happened in 1876. Let’s hope it doesn’t ever happen again. In those rare moments, Congress has to make a choice. It has to decide which of the electoral votes will be counted and which will not. That did not happen here—thank heavens—and let’s hope that it never does.
Many of my colleagues have raised objections or had previously stated their intent to raise objections with regard to these. I have spent an enormous time on this issue over the last few weeks. I have met with lawyers on both sides of the issue, and I have met with lawyers representing the Trump campaign, reading everything I can find about the constitutional provisions in question, and I have spent a lot of time on the phone with legislators and other leaders from the contested States. I didn’t initially declare my position because I didn’t yet have one.
I wanted to get the facts first, and I wanted to understand what was happening. I wanted to give the people serving in government in the contested States the opportunity to do whatever they felt they needed to do to make sure that their election was properly reflected. I spent an enormous amount of time reaching out to State government officials in those States, but in none of the contested States—no, not even one—did I discover any indication that there was any chance that any State legislature or secretary of state or Governor or Lieutenant Governor had any intention to alter the slate of electors. That being the case, our job is a very simple one.
This simply isn’t how our Federal system is supposed to work. That is to say, if you have concerns with the way that an election in the Presidential race was handled in your State, the appropriate response is to approach your State legislatures, first and foremost.
These protests—hearing from those who have raised concerns—should have been focused on their State capitols, not the Nation’s Capitol, because our role is narrow, our role is defined, our role is limited.
Yes, we are the election judges when it comes to Members elected to our own body. And, yes, the House of Representatives are the judges of their own races there.
We also have the authority to prescribe, as a Congress, rules governing the time, place, and manner of elections for Senators and Representatives. There is no corresponding authority with respect to Presidential elections—none whatsoever. It doesn’t exist. Our job is to convene, to open the ballots, and to count them. That is it.
Thank you.
I yield the floor.
The Vice President. The Democratic leader.
Mr. Schumer. The Senator from Colorado, Mr. Bennet.
The Vice President. The Senator from Colorado.
Mr. Bennet. Colleagues, it has been a terrible day for everybody here and for our country.
One of the things I was thinking about today is something I often think about when I am on this floor, which is that the Founders of this country, the people who wrote our Constitution, actually knew our history better than we know our history.
I was thinking about that history today, as we saw the mob riot in Washington, DC—thinking about what the Founders were thinking about when they wrote our Constitution, which was what happened to the Roman Republic when armed gangs, doing the work for politicians, prevented Rome from casting their ballots for consuls, for praetors, for senators. These were the officers in Rome, and these armed gangs ran through the streets of Rome, keeping elections from being started, keeping elections from ever being called. In the end, because of that, the Roman Republic fell, and a dictator took its place, and that was the end of the Roman Republic—or any republic, for that matter—until this beautiful Constitution was written in the United States of America.
So it is my fervent hope that the way we respond to this today, my dear colleagues, is that we give the biggest bipartisan vote we can in support of our democracy and in support of our Constitution and in rejection of what we saw today and what the Roman Republic saw in its own time.
There is a tendency around this place, I think, to always believe that we are the first people to confront something when that is seldom the case and to underappreciate what the effect of our actions will be. We need to deeply appreciate, in this moment, our obligation to the Constitution, our obligation to democracy, and our obligation to the Republic.
There are people in this Chamber who have twisted the words—twisted the words—of a statute written in the 19th century that was meant to actually settle our electoral disputes, to leave them with the States, as the Senator from Utah was saying, to give us a ministerial role, except in very rare circumstances. That is what that law is about that the Senator of Texas was talking about today. And that is the law that is leading us to be asked to overturn the judgments of 60 courts in America, many of the courts in Arizona, some of whom have howled the President’s lawyers out of the courtrooms because there is no evidence of fraud.
By the way, the fact that 37 percent or 39 percent of Americans think there is evidence of fraud does not mean there is fraud. If you have turned a blind eye to a conspiracy theory, you can’t now come to the floor of the Senate and say you are ignoring the people who believe that the election was stolen. Go out there and tell them the truth, which is that every single Member of this Senate knows this election
