00:00In defending the integrity and the security of the right to vote in the electoral process,
00:05thrilled to be here with my Maryland colleague Glenn Ivey and my colleague across the river
00:11Don Beyer. We are all mobilized and focused not just in the interests of our own candidates and
00:21party that we want to get elected, but in the general interest of defending the electoral
00:26system and American democracy, I just got back from the mall area. I got to see the reflecting pool
00:38for a moment. Another public institution we're trying to defend and I thought about some of the
00:46analogies between the reflecting pool and also the Kennedy Center and the voting system because
00:52these are great public institutions that have been attacked, assailed, polluted, and contaminated
00:58for partisan reasons and yet the courts are fighting back and the people are fighting back.
01:05In the case of the reflecting pool, that of course was a botched installation as the Department of
01:11Interior itself acknowledged finally in court, but they were in court prosecuting a constituent of
01:18mine, Davey Hearn, who's a three-time Olympic canoeist, 67 years old now and a teacher of kayaking and
01:27canoeing and swimming to generations of young people in Montgomery County, Maryland. And he went on a bike
01:33ride and then dipped his hand in the water to see what all of the conversation was about with the
01:39reflecting pool, which my constituents now call the Strait of Warm Ooze. And so he put his hand in there
01:47and
01:47then a group of federal agents swooped down on him and arrested him. And then he was prosecuted for felony
01:55destruction of federal government property and taken to court where they wanted to send him to prison for 10
02:03years. Unfortunately, he had excellent lawyers in the movement of democratic resistance and renewal in the
02:11country. The charges were dropped, although President Trump wanted to keep the charges going, despite the fact
02:18that his own government had demonstrated that it was his pool guy from Mar-a-Lago who was the one
02:24who
02:25messed up the reflecting pool for everybody else after he got $15 million on that insider no-bid government
02:33contract. Well, it's the same kind of thing going on with the Kennedy Center. Of course, the president wanted to
02:39scrawl and his name all over it and desecrate that institution, that public institution. And people
02:47have fought back and the courts have taken the side of the public against the president. There was just a
02:54huge rally in March of several thousand people on Friday there. And it's basically the exact same
03:02thing that's been going on with public institution after public institution, whether we're talking about
03:07the Department of Education, USAID, the Consumer Financial Production Bureau, or the voting system
03:13of America, the most fundamental public institution and practice we've got. And so I want to thank the
03:20witnesses for being with us today, including my constituent and the former Montgomery County,
03:25Maryland deputy and acting election director, Allie Soon-McLaughlin, as well as Ms. Caporell,
03:33our president knows that he's losing. His illegal unconstitutional war is a disaster. His tariffs have
03:45been a disaster causing inflation across America, driving gasoline prices up over a dollar a gallon,
03:53diesel prices to the highest that they've ever been. And of course, 90% of our food moves on diesel
04:01trucks, which means our price of food is soaring even more, even beyond the costs of the tariffs and the
04:09various imbecilic trade wars the president has got us into. And so with everything floundering
04:16politically and the president's numbers at a record low, he decides to train his sights on attacking
04:23the voting system. But I just wanted to say that constitutional electoral federalism is working.
04:31The state governments are doing their job and are running the state elections and federal elections
04:39in a very effective and secure way. Meantime, every attempt at undermining or overturning or transferring
04:48power over them has been rejected in court after a series of wild scattershot attacks on the right to vote.
04:57The DOJ launched an unprecedented effort to force states to turn over their voter rolls so they could
05:04be cared again measured against the error prone federal databases. And when the Election Assistance
05:10Commission would not follow his bidding to gather citizenship documentation on their registration forms,
05:17he removed every single member of that commission. The president unleashed FBI on his enemies in
05:23Fulton County, Georgia, conducting raids on the election offices, trying to obtain records through
05:30a subpoena from the Arizona State Senate president related to a discredited review of Maricopa County's
05:372020 election results, and on and on. But none of that is working. The Supreme Court followed all the
05:45lower federal courts and rejected the attempt to assert the president somehow has unilateral power to demand
05:54that all of the voter rolls be turned over from the states and then that the post office not
06:02deliver mail-in ballots in the states that are engaged in mail-in balloting. And this was right after
06:09the president himself voted by mail-in balloting. So, you know, it looks more and more like all of this
06:17is just to create as much confusion and chaos as possible. And we are here simply to say that our
06:24electoral system is standing strong because of judicial rejection of all of these maneuvers, the fact that the
06:33state secretaries of state and the attorney generals and the governors have so far been standing very
06:39strong. And most importantly, the people are not having it. We know that President Trump not only claimed
06:47but continues to claim that he somehow won the 2020 presidential election, an election that was won by
06:54Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. But it was the same
06:59thing.
07:00He threw every conceivable plate of spaghetti and lasagna and ravioli at the wall to see what might
07:08work, whether it was a plan to get the vice president to reject Electoral College votes or
07:15calling up the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, and saying, just find me
07:2111,780 votes, which, of course, is an incident of voter fraud, attempted voter fraud,
07:28not an attempt to stop voter fraud, to the incitement and unleashing of a violent mob
07:35against Congress. So this time, the whole country is ready for it. And we know that anything can be
07:43tried. And so we're organized systematically, both in Congress and throughout civil society,
07:50to make sure nobody messes with American elections and that there's no higher duty that any of us has
07:57than to make sure that the election goes forward and is safe and secure and delivers the accurate
08:04results to the American people.
