Congressional Record/Volume 167/Issue 4/Senate/Counting of Electoral Ballots/Pennsylvania Objection Debate/Wyden Speech
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.