Ranking Member Morelle Testifies Before Rules Committee

Thank you very much, Madam Chair, to you and to Ranking Member McGovern and to all my esteemed colleagues. It's always nice to be back in the Rules Committee, so thanks for the opportunity to be here and address the bill. And former member of the committee. Yes, I'm sorry, yes, of course, and most importantly. Madam Chair, as I've said repeatedly, House Democrats strongly support a stock trading ban for members of Congress. We also support a ban on the President, the Vice President, and federal judicial officers from trading individual stock as well. But none of that is before us today. Rather, this bill is a crude combination of two completely unrelated bills, the so-called Stop Insider Trading Act and the Voter ID Act, the latter of which is already a crude reformulation of at least three other failed Republican voter suppression proposals. If Republicans were serious about ending stock trading by government officials, they would not have attached a subsection of the Save America Act as a poison pill. And if Republicans were serious about protecting elections, they would not have gutted CISA's election security unit. They would actually fund the work of election workers across the country, instead of indulging the President's almost childlike obsession with the 2020 election. Instead, they echo his criticisms of state and local election administrators, both Republicans and Democrats who patriotically and without favor, do the unglamorous work of securing our democracy. Turning to the bill before us, I'll address both measures individually, neither of them deserves passage. First, the so-called Stop Insider Trading Act. This bill would in fact allow members of Congress to continue to own and trade individual stocks. The bill would let members of Congress keep every single share of stock they currently own. The bill would allow members to liquidate their holdings at any time, profiting off years of ballooning investment portfolios. There is no divestiture required under this bill. And crucially, the bill does nothing to rein in the unprecedented, absurd and deeply offensive corruption currently taking place in the White House. Donald Trump promised a booming economy and no new wars. Instead, he's enriched himself by billions and billions of dollars, picking winners and losers in the stock market while pocketing the profits. I welcome any chance for us to consider legislation to end insider trading in Washington, including at the White House. But again, that is not what this bill does. So we'll have to wait even longer for real progress. And when House Democrats regain gavels in November after this bill inevitably and justifiably fails to become law, and we finally ban stock trading by Congress, by the President, and by the Supreme Court. Now to address the second, fully distinct part of this bill, Voter I.D. Act. I have to say, in the words supposedly of Yogi Berra, this feels like deja vu all over again. We will all remember the long list of failures. Republicans attempted to pass the SAVE Act, then the SAVE Act Part 2 once again, then the SAVE America Act, and now the Voter I.D. Act. All these bills have the same purposes and the same origins. They aim to eviscerate male voting, needlessly burden millions of eligible American voters, and further President Trump's obsession with undermining our elections in aid of Republican Party priorities and Republican politicians. Not to further the aims of this republic, not to assist our democracy, but to do this in a partisan way. The show your papers regimen and regime passed and proposed in this latest iteration would be more restrictive than any in the country currently in use anywhere, including in states like Texas and Florida, those liberal bastions of voting rights. In fact, several Republican officials have appropriately criticized provisions of this bill as burdensome and potentially illegal. Republican Ohio Governor DeWin recently vetoed an anti-vote-by-mail bill almost identical to this one, noting its restrictions would quote, would not discourage fraud, would not add any real security, and would create an additional and significant burden for Ohioans to vote by mail. As I've said before, I support voter identification, but despite its name, the Voter ID Act is not a voter identification bill, it's a voter suppression act. And I might just say, and my dear friend and colleague, I often agree with Chairman Stile, but equating an endless pasta bowl at a chain Italian restaurant with a fundamental constitutional right to vote, I think indicates how seriously we're taking this matter. In our markup, committee Democrats offered a reasonable voter identification provision as an amendment to this bill. In a show of good faith, we even retained a grant-making provision in the original text. Not only did Republicans reject our amendment, but they stripped out the grant-making provision in advance of today's rule. That's right, Republicans removed the only slightly redeemable quality of this otherwise very bad bill. Simultaneously, in a different vehicle, Republicans would instruct the Committee on House Administration to increase the deficit by $10 billion to impose SAVE Act restrictions that have died in the Senate. So I'll tell you this much, it's notable the majority has agreed to $10 billion as a new baseline for federal support for election administrators. I'm going to remind people of that, and I look forward to a more effective, more secure use for that level of funding over the next year. But in the face of these two destructive bills, I would ask my colleagues to show some courage, oppose these foolish measures, and with that, I thank you for the time and I'll yield back.