The Presiding Officer. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. Wyden. Mr. President, with just a few minutes to speak, I am going to get right to the point.
Gunfire in the halls here, IEDs on the Capitol grounds—I will say to my colleagues, with the domestic terrorists roaming the halls just a few hours ago, I have been stunned that this debate is actually going forward, and that is because, colleagues, this is a fake debate on electoral certifications; that is because it lends credibility to the bogus idea that the Congress can actually toss out the results of the election, and, as we saw today, it serves to fuel insurrection.
Contrary to what some of my “aye” voting colleagues believe by votes cast just a few minutes ago, this debate has never been about setting up some kind of routine election tribunal. This isn’t about election security. If the Republic majority for the last 2 years had actually been interested in election security, they would not have worked relentlessly to block my legislation to secure our 2020 elections with hand-marked paper ballots and post-election security audits.
By the way, those are the kinds of approaches that are part of the Oregon system, where for 25 years we voted by mail. I am the Nation’s first mail-in U.S. Senator. The second—and I see my colleagues from Maine and Alaska here because they are very fond of him, like I am—Gordon Smith, a Republican, was the second mail-in U.S. Senator in our country. That is because we do the job right. It is efficient.
Our late-Republican secretary of state, Dennis Richardson, actually told President Trump there was no evidence of fraud.
So if Republicans had been interested over the last 2 years in actually working with me and colleagues on both sides of the aisle and secretaries of state, we could have had an approach that would have empowered the Oregon idea to go national. Instead, we are now debating tonight the idea of—a discussion grounded in total fiction, brewed in cauldrons of conspiracies online. These, colleagues, are fever dreams—fever dreams laundered by people with election certificates and real power. And I will tell you, it has been painful to watch colleagues sidle up to some of those conspiracies that would inflict so much damage on the American experiment.
Colleagues, I am going to close with one last point. We saw today an effort by domestic terrorists to try to punch our democracy to the ground, to the ropes. I am going to close by simply saying something that hadn’t been said tonight, and that is that Donald Trump can do enormous damage to our country in the next 2 weeks. In the next 2 weeks, colleagues, Donald Trump can do enormous damage to our wonderful country.
This afternoon—I don’t know if my colleagues saw it—the National Association of Manufacturers—an organization with thousands of businesses, thousands of companies, and not exactly a leftwing outfit—they called for moving forward with the 25th Amendment. That was all over the news already this afternoon, colleagues. The National Association of Manufacturers. That is what we are seeing in our country with respect to the fear of Americans, having watched what happened here.
I am just going to close by way of saying that I believe that for the next 2 weeks, we have an enormous responsibility to watchdog Donald Trump day in and day out, to do everything possible to prevent the kinds of abuses that we saw today, where an American lost her life, and we saw the fear among our citizens at what went on. Let’s do everything we can as leaders, Democrats and Republicans, to make sure that in the next 2 weeks, Donald Trump’s abuses are checked and we do everything we can to protect this wonderful Nation of ours.
I yield the floor.
The Presiding Officer. The Senator from Florida is recognized.
Mr. Rubio. Mr. President, over the last weeks and days leading up to this vote here today, I have heard from a lot of people about this vote, and I guess I want to address it as much to them as anybody else. These are people I know. These are friends. These are neighbors. These are longtime supporters, generally people on my side of the political aisle.
And they are upset. They are upset. They look at the media, and the media, they censored stories that might have been negative toward Joe Biden or were negative toward Joe Biden, and social media companies helped them out. And they saw how some States tinkered with and even mutilated State election laws, and they have doubts that the election was legitimate.
It gives this country this extraordinary crisis of confidence, which is very dangerous because democracy is very fragile, and it is not held together by elections. Democracy is held together by people’s confidence in the election and their willingness to abide by its results.
So the notion was we need to do something; we need to fight. Several of my colleagues have adopted the idea—and I respect it—that they are going to object.
Now, listen, it is important to understand something. Even the people objecting in the Senate recognize that it is not going to pass. It is not going to change the outcome, but it is going to send a message, and it is going to make a point.
The problem is I think it is a terrible idea at this moment. Just hours ago, a young lady died in this Capitol. That means somebody, somewhere in this country, got a phone call that their daughter was dead. Their daughter was going to a political rally; she is dead—died in this Capitol, somewhere not far from where we are standing.
We had police officers—the men and women we walk by every single day, who guard the doors and we say hello to—out there with riot gear getting spit on and attacked today—not 10 weeks ago; just a few hours ago. I think it is important to think about all those things on a night like tonight with everything that has happened.
I wouldn’t even be here today—I doubt very much whether I would have even been interested in politics—had it not been for my grandfather. He died when I was 14, but I grew up at his knee. He would sit on the porch and would smoke three cigars a day, and he loved history.
He was born in 1899 in rural Cuba. It was still governed by the United States. It was a protectorate. Three years later, it gained its independence and became a republic.
During my grandfather’s first 60 years of life, he saw his country have an armed insurrection after a contested election, multiple Presidents go into exile, two military coups, and the rise of a Marxist dictator—a tyranny that stands to this day.
My entire life—my entire life I have lived with and next to people who came to America because their country was chaotic and their country was unsafe. What I saw today—what we have seen—looks more like those countries than the extraordinary Nation that I am privileged to call home, and I think about the mockery that it makes of our country.
A lot of people say: Oh, well, China, China. Let me just say something. In all modesty, no one here has worked harder on the issue of China. They hate my guts. I am sanctioned—I don’t know what they are sanctioning—double sanctioned, and I can’t travel there. I wasn’t planning to anyway.
China is laughing. They are loving this tonight. In Beijing they are high-fiving because they point to this and they say: This is proof the future belongs to China. America is in decline.
Vladimir Putin—there is nothing Vladimir Putin could have come up with better than what happened here. It makes us look like we are in total chaos and collapse—not to mention the Ayatollah, who is probably bragging, if he has buddies, to his buddies: Look what is happening to the Great Satan.
I think politics has made us crazy. Everybody in this country has lost their minds on politics, and we have forgotten that America is not a government, America is not a President, America is not a Congress.
Let me tell you what America is. America is your family. America is your faith. America is your community. That is America. That is what our adversaries don’t understand, and that is what we need to remember. That is how we are going to rebuild this country and turn the page and have a future even brighter than our past.
So that is why I feel so strongly about this and why I hope those who disagree with me will understand.
