Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 1

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this bill.

I thank my colleague Senator Udall, of New Mexico, and my colleague Senator Merkley, of Oregon, for their extraordinary work.

I don't know if they have ever had the experience that I have often had or the Presiding Officer has had, but there are times, in my having spent a week here after having done absolutely nothing, when I am walking through the Denver International Airport, and I want to put a paper bag over my head because I am so embarrassed about the failure of this institution to live up to even the barest responsibilities that we have.

I mean, we can't even pass a basic infrastructure bill around this place while China is building 3,500 miles of fiber-optic cable to connect Latin America with Africa and back to China to export the surveillance state from China. That is what China is doing there while we are doing nothing here. We have become the land of flickering lights, whereby the standard of success is whether we have kept the lights on for another 2 hours or another 4 hours.

What the American people need to understand is that this is the ideological end state of what the Freedom Caucus came to Washington to do. It has become the ideological end state of what Mitch McConnell can do because, in the rubble of our institutions, they can achieve the objectives they want to achieve. They can put rightwing judges on the courts without our institutions working. They can come out here and cut taxes for rich people and claim it is a middle-class tax cut without our institutions working. Yet what we are unable to do without those institutions working is invest in our infrastructure, is make sure that we have an education system in this country that is actually liberating people from their economic circumstances instead of reinforcing their economic circumstances, is ensure that we are doing something on the climate and doing something on guns.

It has been more than 20 years since Columbine happened in Colorado. My State--the Western State, a Second Amendment State--passed background checks after Columbine. My three daughters grew up knowing they lived in a State that was actually trying to respond to what was going on in their schools--not true of the U.S. Congress.

The reason for much of this inaction is the Supreme Court's decision with regard to Citizens United. I will not belabor the point, for I know my colleague from Hawaii was kind to let me go ahead of her, but let me just repeat this: After Citizens United, 10 donors over the past decade have contributed $1.2 billion to our policy. That has created a corruption of inaction in the U.S. Senate. It is not corruption that you see because it is a corruption of inaction. It is the bill that is not introduced. It is the committee hearing that is not held. It is the vote that is never taken for fear that, if you do that, some billionaire is going to drop $30 million on your race and run a primary against you in your next election.

Do you want to know why we can have a Senate in the United States that votes on only 22 amendments in a year? That is the reason. Do you want to know why we have a Senate wherein 75 percent of the votes are personnel votes and 25 percent are actually on amendments? That is the reason. We have to overcome it, not for Democrats or Republicans but for the American people because this is their exercise in self- government. This is the way they make decisions.

I know these reforms can work because they have worked in Colorado with a bipartisan commission to end gerrymandering, mail-in voting, and automatic and same-day voting registration. The result is that we have the second highest voter participation rate in America. How can that not be good for our democracy?

So my hope is that at some point, when he hears the voices of the American people, Mitch McConnell will relent and allow these bills to come to the floor.

He described this bill last year as a power grab--a power grab--and I will accept that if it is understood that it is a power grab by the American people, which is what it is--an effort to get money out of our politics and to put people back into our politics so we can start doing the work that the American people sent us here to do.

With that, I thank my colleague from Hawaii again for her indulgence.

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