On Senate Floor, Warren Fights Back Against “Jim Crow 2.0,” Slams Trump’s Reckless War in Iran

March 18, 2026

On Senate Floor, Warren Fights Back Against "Jim Crow 2.0," Slams Trump's Reckless War in Iran

Warren calls for lowering costs for health care, child care instead of funding war

"[I]nstead of changing their policies and actually trying to help the American people… Trump and the Republicans are working to keep as many Americans from voting as possible… Every Senator must vote no."

Video of Floor Speech (YouTube)

Washington, D.C. - Today, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) took to the floor of the U.S. Senate to hit back at Republicans' attempts to disenfranchise millions of Americans through the SAVE Act. Senator Warren also called out the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans for attempting to use the bill to distract the country from Trump's war in Iran and skyrocketing costs for consumers.

"Don't let Trump and the Republicans in Congress fool you…this is not an ordinary voter ID bill. This is not a bill that says everybody has to show either a driver's license or student ID to vote. This is a way to keep American citizens from voting," said Senator Warren.

She pointed out that under the SAVE Act, in 45 out of 50 states, a driver's license wouldn't satisfy the bill's proof of citizenship requirement, and a birth certificate also wouldn't count for married women who have changed their name. Although a passport would count, less than half of Americans own one. Anyone who doesn't already own a passport would have to pay $165 to get one and apply with enough lead time to register before the midterm elections.

"I've heard this bill called Jim Crow 2.0, harking back to the days when states in the South blocked Black people from being able to vote with a whole series of tests and barriers in the way so they wouldn't be able to vote. The Trump bill is Jim Crow 2.0," said Senator Warren.

"[W]hile Donald Trump and Republicans try to spread conspiracies and lie about the SAVE Act, it's important that each and every one of us stays focused on what the Trump administration is really doing…After promising no more wars, Donald Trump dragged the United States into an illegal and reckless war with Iran," said Senator Warren, calling attention to the 200 service members who have been hurt and 13 killed in Iran.

Some estimates say the war is costing around $2 billion a day, with just the first six days costing an estimated $11.3 billion, with an additional $300 million in lost aircraft. Senator Warren pointed out that the rate of spending comes out to $23,000 every second.

In contrast, $30 billion would have paid for lower health care costs for millions of Americans through an extension of Premium Tax Credits. $12 billion would pay for restoring the expanded Child Tax Credit for one year.

"For the same amount the U.S. is burning on just one single day of Donald Trump's reckless war with Iran, we could provide a full year's worth of food assistance for nearly half a million Americans. Or Medicaid coverage for 300,000 children," Senator Warren pointed out.

Senator Warren also called out how Trump's war in Iran has sent prices of gas and food skyrocketing. About one-fifth of the world's oil supply and a third of the world's fertilizer go through the Strait of Hormuz, which has been choked off since the start of the war. Trump's advisors have publicly said the higher costs American families are paying are the "last of our concerns right now."

Last week, a preliminary investigation by the Department of Defense confirmed that it is likely that the U.S. military bombed a girls' school in Iran. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gutted the office that was in charge of preventing civilian harm, which Senator Warren led the charge to establish. Senator Warren reiterated her call for Hegseth to be fired.

"[I]nstead of changing their policies and actually trying to help the American people and not just themselves and their rich buddies, Trump and the Republicans are working to keep as many Americans from voting as possible… Every Senator must vote no," concluded Senator Warren.

Transcript: Floor Speech in Opposition of the SAVE Act
U.S. Senate Floor
March 18, 2026

As Prepared for Delivery

Senator Elizabeth Warren: Donald Trump is trying to stop American citizens from voting.

Why? Because he knows his agenda is unpopular and Republicans can't win based on what he's doing, so he wants to rig the election by picking his own voters.

That's what the SAVE Act is all about.

Don't let Trump and the Republicans in Congress fool you. They'll say things like, "You should have to show ID to vote just like you do to buy a beer."

But this is not an ordinary voter ID bill. This is not a bill that says everybody has to show either a driver's license or student ID to vote.

This is a way to keep American citizens from voting. I'll give you an example.

If this bill passes, then in 45 of 50 states, your driver's license won't count as valid ID.

Let's say you're a married woman who lives in Massachusetts. And let's say that when you got married, you took your husband's name.

Well, when you go to the polls to vote, you can't register by showing them your updated driver's license. Why? Because Massachusetts is one of the 45 states where a driver's license doesn't prove citizenship.

So you bring along your birth certificate? Now can you vote?

Nope. Your birth certificate is still under your maiden name.

Yes, you can use a passport, if you have one. But remember that fewer than half of all Americans have a passport and it costs $165 to get one - and takes a month or two, if everything is working on time.

No passport and no birth certificate that matches your driver's license? Well, Trump and the Republicans say you're out of luck.

And that's just one example of how this bill will actually make it harder for Americans to vote.

Here's another deeply disturbing thing about this bill: it would require states to hand over sensitive information about voters to Trump's Department of Homeland Security, so that some shadowy guys can do whatever they want with it.

Maybe they take you off the voter rolls. Maybe they use that information for something else. No one knows what will happen.

This is an agency whose former leader Kristi Noem said, just a few weeks ago, "we need to . . . make sure that we have the right people voting."

Guess who's going to get swept off the voter rolls? People that the Republicans think are likely to vote Democratic.

So, sweep off Black people, sweep off Brown people, sweep off women, sweep off students, sweep off people in precincts who voted Democratic last time, sweep off people that you think might vote Democratic in the upcoming election.

I've heard this bill called Jim Crow 2.0, harking back to the days when states in the South blocked Black people from being able to vote with a whole series of tests and barriers in the way so they wouldn't be able to vote.

The Trump bill is Jim Crow 2.0.

Noncitizen voting is extremely rare. Republicans know that.

They've seen the data: Voter roll audits in Georgia prior to the 2024 election found only 20 registered noncitizens out of 8.2 million registered voters, or 0.00024%.

A 2024 Michigan audit found only 16 noncitizen votes out of 5.7 million votes, or 0.00028%.

So why do they want to do this?

Lucky for us, Republicans have been saying the quiet part out loud.

Republicans in Congress know they're in deep trouble for the midterms unless they can rig the rules and pick their own voters.

Donald Trump even said it himself: he said passing the SAVE Act will, "guarantee the midterms."

Because the Republicans know, and Donald Trump knows, that the policies they are shoving through right now are wildly unpopular.

So while Trump and Republicans try to spread conspiracies and lie about the SAVE Act, it's important that each and every one of us stays focused on what the Trump administration is really doing.

And here is what the Trump administration is really doing: After promising no more wars, Donald Trump dragged the United States into an illegal and reckless war with Iran. That was lie number one.

Already, at least 200 American service members have been hurt. 13 service members have been killed.

There are American lives lost and families grieving because Donald Trump dragged us into a war based on lies. A war launched without an imminent threat to our country or any end in sight.

Trump promised no wars and said he'd be the "President of Peace." He lied.

The U.S. is spending at least a billion dollars a day on war with Iran.

If we put the money we're using at war with Iran towards health care, we could lower costs for millions of Americans.

Just this week, Donald Trump's own Energy Secretary said, out loud: "We were very aware that we would cause a little bit of increased prices on Americans."

Think about that: Trump and his top officials knew this war would raise costs for Americans and they did it anyway.

In just the first six days of the war, the Trump administration spent an estimated $11.3 billion.

We also lost three F-15 aircraft in those first few days. That will cost us $300 million.

And estimates say that the Trump administration has kept burning about a billion taxpayer dollars a day on the war in Iran. We're on Day 18.

Some estimates look more like two billion dollars a day. That's over $23,000 every second - and something like $11.5 million since I started this speech.

Let's look at "Trump's Warmongering by the numbers":

• $11.3 billion: The estimated cost of the first six days of Trump's war.
• $5.6 billion: The cost of munitions spent by the Pentagon in the first two days of the war.
• $300 million: The cost to replace the three U.S. F-15s lost to friendly fire in the first week of the war.
• $50 billion: How much the Trump administration wants to add to an already massively-inflated defense budget to pay for a war that was never authorized by Congress.
• $1 trillion: The Pentagon's budget this year.
• $1.5 trillion: The total amount Trump is reportedly requesting for the Pentagon budget next year. That means Republicans in Congress want to increase the Pentagon's budget by $500 billion.

To put these numbers in context: The Trump administration will spend $30 billion in just the first 30 days of this war.

That's exactly how much we could have used to lower costs for millions of people for an entire year - people who got knocked off their health care or saw their premiums go up because of Trump's health care cuts.

So instead of going to war with Iran, we could lower health care costs and save lives here at home.

Here's one more: $12 billion is how much it would cost to restore the expanded Child Tax Credit for one year.

In less than two weeks of Trump's Iran war, we spent the same amount of money that would've lifted millions of kids out of poverty.

For the same amount the U.S. is burning on just one single day of Donald Trump's reckless war with Iran, we could provide a full year's worth of food assistance for nearly half a million Americans.

Or Medicaid coverage for 300,000 children.

But there's more we could have done with the $12 billion the Trump administration has spent on war with Iran so far:

• We could have provided housing assistance for around one million Americans.
• Lowered prescription drug costs for millions of people.
• Paid for the entire National Park Service - for more than three years.
• Given Pell grants to 1.6 million students so they can afford college.
• Provided retirement and disability pay for veterans wounded in combat - and still have money left over.
• Helped pay the salaries of more than 100,000 teachers and nurses, two jobs that are crucial and where we've seen shortages.
• Funded Direct File, the program that lets Americans file their taxes online and for free, for 240 years.

Provided humanitarian assistance for countries around the world for almost three full years.

This is an exorbitant amount of money.

And I want to talk about one more thing we could be spending taxpayer money on instead of Trump's reckless war in Iran: making child care more affordable for families.

Here's the thing: People have been getting child care all wrong.

Child care costs are painfully high.

Right now, families are having to choose between breaking the budget, being forced to cut back work hours, or settling for lower-quality care just to ensure that their kids have safe and accessible child care.

In 49 states, families pay more for child care for their two kids than they do for rent.

And the reason why costs are so high is that right now, people think of child care as a privilege or as a service that's for sale.

That's all wrong.

We should be thinking about universal child care as basic public infrastructure.

We should be thinking about it the same way we think about roads and highways.

Why? Because for this country to work, we need to care for our kids - and when parents don't have child care, they can't go to work.

Investing in universal child care is good for our kids' development. And it's good for our economy.

We need affordable child care just as much as we need schools to educate our workers and bridges to connect goods to the market. It's infrastructure.

And up til now, this country hasn't been thinking about it that way.

That's why we need to invest in child care for every family.

It's basic supply and demand.

There are a whole bunch of families who need child care.

But there are a whole lot fewer child care workers.

Normally, when we want to attract more workers, we pay them more.

But child care prices are already sky-high, and families can't afford it. So where does that leave us?

There's a huge gap that the federal government needs to fill.

Imagine if the federal government didn't invest in roads and bridges. We wouldn't have them. That's what's happening with child care.

And it's why we need to invest in universal child care and raise wages for child care workers. They should at least make the same amount as local public school teachers.

In the wealthiest country on the planet, access to affordable, high-quality child care and early education shouldn't be a privilege reserved for the rich. It should be a right.

But instead of talking about lowering child care costs, Donald Trump is delivering a punch to the gut for every parent struggling with those costs.

Donald Trump is spending billions of dollars a week bombing Iran for reasons he cannot explain, but he can't find a nickel to help the millions of people who are struggling to pay for their health care or groceries.

But this is a one-two punch: the Trump administration is spending a tremendous amount of money on war, and the war is also driving up everyday costs for Americans.

Take the price of gas over the last month. For months, Donald Trump has been saying gas prices are going down. He's been loud and proud about it.

Right now, the average price for gas is more than $3.70 - more than 80 cents higher per gallon than just one month ago when Donald Trump started this war.

That's more than a 25% increase in gas prices in a single month, which Donald Trump called a "very small price to pay."

We have not seen gas prices jump this much since Russia attacked Ukraine.

Now, Donald Trump's war is choking off the Strait of Hormuz. That is where about one-fifth of the world's oil and natural gas supply comes through, and right now, it's bottled up.

What does that mean? Trump's war with Iran means gas prices are skyrocketing for American families here at home.

And Donald Trump's response? "If they rise, they rise."

He just doesn't care.

Here's another one: food prices. About a third of the world's fertilizer goes through that same Strait of Hormuz, and the price has jumped up by 30% in the days after Trump started this war.

One U.S. farmer even said his fertilizer suppliers are warning that they just can't get the fertilizer.

Without that fertilizer, they say they can't plant as much food this year - and yes, that means food prices will go up.

So that's gasoline and food. But the prices of clothes, technology, and basically anything else that's moved around by trucks that use gasoline or diesel will go up, too.

Diesel prices are already up by more than 25%, raising the cost of shipping goods, including Amazon packages and food, nationwide.

And jet fuel prices have shot up by 58% since Trump started the war. Airlines are passing these costs onto consumers by pushing ticket prices up even higher.

Donald Trump's war with Iran is gearing up to become another forever war that burns billions of taxpayer dollars and makes life even more expensive for Americans at home.

This is a war that the American people do not want and did not ask for - but they're footing the bill.

And what does the Trump administration have to say about that?

Well, listen to Trump's top economic advisor.

He said: "If the war were to be extended, it wouldn't really disrupt the US economy very much at all. It would hurt consumers, and we'd have to think about what we'd have to do about that, but that's really the last of our concerns right now."

You don't need to wonder why prices are going up.

The Trump administration said the quiet part out loud: the higher costs American families are paying are the LAST of their concerns.

They can't even be bothered to care about lowering costs for the American people.

Lie number two (and three, four, five, and six): Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and other top Trump officials can't keep their story straight.

They have no clear plan and for weeks have failed to tell the American people what the goals are for this war and when this war will end.

First, Trump said the war would be over in four or five weeks.

That was three weeks ago.

Since then, Trump has said all of these things:

• The war is won.
• The U.S. still needs to "finish the job."
• The operations could end "soon."
• The military may need to go "further."

Every hour, the Trump administration's justification for this war sounds completely different.

Why did the U.S. strike Iran?

On March 2, Pete Hegseth said it was to end a 47-year war.

The same day, Hegseth said it's because Iran refused to negotiate.

And in another comment on the very same day, Marco Rubio said it was a response to Israel planning to strike.

And then - yep, on the same day - Donald Trump said it had nothing to do with Israel planning to strike. Trump said, "if anything, I might have forced Israel's hand."

Rubio said Iran would have "so many short-range missiles" in a year.

Two days later, Trump says the reason why the U.S. struck Iran is because he had a "good feeling" that Iran would strike U.S. assets and our personnel in the region.

That's one story after another, and none of them add up. How can the American people trust this government when it can't even keep its own story straight?

And the Trump administration clearly has no plan for how this war will end.

On the very first day of the war, Trump called the attacks "major combat operations in Iran." A week later, Trump called it a "short-term excursion" that we're "getting very close to finishing."

And what's the goal? This administration has no clue.

On Day One of the war, Trump told the American people that he had to attack Iran because Iran posed an imminent threat based on their nuclear capabilities.

But remember: last June, Trump bombed Iran and claimed that Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities had been, "completely and totally obliterated."

Both of those things cannot be true.

And understand this: If Trump believes that Iran's nuclear ambitions are a threat, then he had a chance to curb them.

In fact, the United States had a deal that could have prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

That was President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran - and Trump ripped up that deal and got nothing in return.

Instead of doing the hard work of diplomacy to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, Trump is lying to Americans while dragging us into yet another reckless war that is costing American lives.

If you can believe it, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have even given conflicting takes on whether the war is over.

On March 8, Hegseth said, "this is only just the beginning."

The next day, Trump says the war is "complete, pretty much." But he also said: "you could say both [very complete and just the beginning]."

Trump also said we "haven't won enough" and that we will "go further."

But just days later, he said: "We won. The first hour, it was over."

And then, he said: "we don't want to leave early, do we? We've got to finish the job."

Then last week, Trump said we're ramping up strikes.

On how long the war will go on:

One day after the war, Trump said: "four to five weeks."

The same day, Hegseth said: "more or less than two, four or six weeks." He added: "It could move up, it could move back."

Then Hegseth said: "we'll go as far as we need to go to advance American interest."

On March 10, Hegseth said it's up to Trump. He said: "our will is endless. Ultimately, the president gets to determine the end state of those objectives."

On March 11, Trump said the war with Iran will end, "soon."

This is not a game. This administration is sending young Americans to die overseas.

And that means our government leaders must treat this conflict with life-and-death seriousness.

Instead, they don't even have the decency to level with the American people.

Yet another lie from the Trump administration was about the horrific U.S. military strike on an elementary school in the early days of the war.

Last week, a preliminary investigation by the Department of Defense confirmed that it is likely it was our own military that bombed a girls' school in Iran.

This was one of the most devastating military mistakes in decades.

175 people were killed. Most were children.

Before the investigation, Trump said over and over that the attack was done by Iran.

But even after, Trump kept lying to the American people.

He said he "didn't know" about the investigation - an investigation done by his own military on one of the most horrific military mistakes in recent history.

And remember: Pete Hegseth gutted the office that was in charge of preventing civilian harm.

How do I know? I led the charge to establish that office in the first place.

Hegseth is also purging the military's legal experts - the people who act as legal guardrails - and ordered a "ruthless" overhaul to make sure no one else who might question him is left standing.

It is a betrayal of our service members and a betrayal of the American people that we still don't have answers and accountability.

For starters, Pete Hegseth must be fired immediately.

Hegseth's long pattern of chaos and incompetence has put our service members and the American people at risk.

We haven't even scratched the surface of Signalgate or Hegseth's role in boat strikes that could be war crimes.

Pete Hegseth has got to go - now.

Working families are struggling to pay for basic needs like groceries, housing, health care, and electricity.

Now, prices are shooting up even higher because of Donald Trump's new war in Iran.

Donald Trump's dangerous actions overseas are making everyday life much more expensive, and regular Americans are paying the price.

That's Trump's America in a nutshell.

And instead of changing their policies and actually trying to help the American people and not just themselves and their rich buddies, Trump and the Republicans are working to keep as many Americans from voting as possible.

That's what this bill is really about. Every Senator must vote no.

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