WATCH: Sen. Schiff Dismantles Republican SAVE America Act, Urges Congress to Focus on Lowering Costs Not Disenfranchising Voters

Schiff: "This legislation will not save anything about America, but it will destroy something precious about this country. It is not meant to empower people to determine the direction of the nation, but to deprive them of that power. Not to encourage citizen participation in government but to discourage it. Not to heal a nation that is badly divided, but to cause further division, disunion, and democratic decay."

Washington, D.C. - Last night, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) dismantled the Republican majority's so-called SAVE America Act and urged Congress to focus on priorities like lowering costs for hardworking Americans instead of working to disenfranchise millions of American citizens.

In remarks on the Senate Floor, Schiff urged his colleagues to oppose the SAVE America Act, legislation that will deprive Americans of their right to free and fair elections by making it harder to register to vote and cast their ballot.

Watch his full speech HERE. Download remarks HERE.

Key Excerpts:  

On Republicans choosing to spend $1 billion a day on war with Iran instead of tackling America's cost of living crisis:

[…] We could bring up any number of bills that would lower costs, make our communities safer, bring home our troops from a war that the American people never asked for, but instead, the majority has seen fit to say in the face of all these challenges that instead of solving them, they will simply take away people's right to vote. Because the American people are paying attention. They have noticed that prices have not gone down on day one, as the president promised. They have noticed gas prices climbing higher and higher. They have noticed Republicans saying that this is a sacrifice they should be comfortable making. They have seen their groceries, their gas, their utility bills, their appliances all rocked by mercurial trade policies and on-again, off-again tariffs. They know this Republican Congress's signature accomplishment, the largest health care funding cut in history and billions of dollars in food aid slashed to fund a tax cut for wealthy people and large corporations, has only made matters worse.

On the true aim of the SAVE America Act:

[…] Why make it so hard for Americans to exercise a constitutional right? Because Donald Trump has admitted the true aims of this bill. If the SAVE America Act becomes law, he says the Republican party will, "never lose a race in 50 years." This is what this bill is designed to do. It is designed to lock in a Republican majority for half a century by locking you out of the polling place. Former, or soon-to-be former, Secretary Kristi Noem said that we need to make sure the "right people are voting." Well, who are the right people? The right people, I guess, are people they expect to vote for the president's party.

On the priorities Congress should be focused on:

[…] The answer cannot be to simply take away people's right to vote. We need to address that challenge to make the economy work for Americans again. Anyone working hard in this country should be able to provide for themselves and their family. That is what we should be focused on. That is what the president promised to do. Taking away their right to vote, turning us into some kind of - if not autocracy, something less than democracy. That is not the answer. So, I urge my colleagues to vote against this "Save Our Political Hides Act." To vote in favor of our democracy. To vote to expand the franchise to more and more Americans, not take it away, because of the failure of the president's policies.

Read the transcript of his remarks as delivered below:

The author George Orwell wrote about a dystopian future in which the party in power spoke in doublespeak, a language in which up meant down and down meant up, good meant bad and nothing was as it seemed. In the language of Orwellian doublespeak, to save something meant to destroy it, which brings me to the so-called SAVE America Act.

This legislation will not save anything about America, but it will destroy something precious about this country. It is not meant to empower people to determine the direction of the nation, but to deprive them of that power. Not to encourage citizen participation in government but to discourage it. Not to heal a nation that is badly divided, but to cause further division, disunion, and democratic decay.

Because this is perhaps one of the most cravenly political efforts undertaken by Congress in a generation. The president knows that his policies are deeply unpopular. He knows that his war of choice with Iran is deeply unpopular. He understands he has betrayed the promises he made to the American people to bring down costs and improve the quality of their lives.

He knows that the voters are prepared to hold him accountable in the midterms and vote his party out of power. But rather than address his many policy failures, he wishes instead to prevent people from voting. It is as cynical a device as it is destructive of the foundation of the democracy, the right to vote.

Our nation is facing a series of challenges that are touching every facet of people's lives. They are paying more at the pump. They are paying more on groceries. They are paying more to heat their home, and this summer they'll pay more to cool it. This all from a president that has gone from promising to break inflation on day one to now saying if prices rise, they rise. Imagine that. if prices rise, they rise.

But that's not all. If the cost of oil goes up, he declares, that's good because it means we make more money. Well, maybe he does. Maybe the oil industry friends do. But the American people who are paying through the nose at gas stations all across the country are not making more money. They are spending it on gas at the pump, and they cannot afford it.

This war of choice is costing America billions. More important, 13 brave servicemembers have lost their lives in a new foreign war we were promised would never be started. Now, we've heard a whole host of rationalizations for this war, explanations for this war. None of them add up.

At one point, the president said we had to go to war with Iran because Iran was two weeks from having a nuclear bomb. Well, beside the fact there is no intelligence suggesting even remotely that that is true, the president himself said only nine months ago that we had obliterated Iran's nuclear capability. Well, it can't be both. The president was either telling the truth nine months ago, or he wasn't, or he's telling the truth now, or he isn't. But it can't be both. Of course, everything we know about Iran's nuclear program indicates they are not two weeks away from having a nuclear bomb.

It's also said by the Secretary of State we're at war with Iran because Israel was going to war with Iran and we knew Iran would retaliate against us, therefore we had to go to war with Iran. But the president disputes that rationale for the war. The president says, basically, his Secretary of State is wrong, that he forced Israel's hand.

Okay, so what is the president's rationale then, for this war? We all see it, the president and the secretary say it was necessary to destroy Iran's missile capability because those missiles could soon hit the United States of America, except that isn't remotely true either. The Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that it would not be nine years before Iran would have that kind of capability, it would take nine years for that country to develop missiles capable of hitting the United States. So, there was no imminent missile threat to the United States, there was no immediate nuclear threat.

That leaves regime change. The president has said that he wants Iranians to rise up and challenge the regime. At the same time, it's being publicly reported that he was warned that that would be extremely unlikely. That is, that the Iranian people would have the power to overturn this entrenched, murderous, terrorist-sponsoring regime, that this would not be Venezuela, that you couldn't simply take out the number one mullah and expect to replace him with a number two mullah that would do the United States' bidding, that that was not foreseeable, not likely, not probable.

Instead, the president was warned this could lead to an even more hardline regime. And now, we don't have the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, we have Mojtaba Khamenei, who is supposed to be potentially even worse. This is not about regime change, it's not about the missile program, it's not about the nuclear program, it's not because of Israel. So, what is it that led us into war? What is it that justifies the risks to the lives of our servicemembers? What is it that justifies the tragic reality that 200 of our servicemembers have already been injured in this conflict?

We are left to wonder. We haven't had a single public hearing about this. We have not had the opportunity to put in these administration figures under oath, to explain why we're at war, why the president betrayed his promise to keep us out of foreign wars, to keep us out of regime change wars, to keep us out of another Middle East war, why our servicemembers are bearing the brunt of this, why American consumers are bearing the brunt of this.

There are public reports that General Caine warned the president that Iran might attack our allies in the region, but the president expressed his surprise that this has happened. There's public reporting that the general also warned the president that Iran might seek to close the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran has closed, effectively closed, the Strait of Hormuz, and as a result, we're all paying for that in skyrocketing prices at the pump. All of this was all too eminently foreseeable.

But here we are. Global oil markets and global shipping are seeing the seismic waves of Trump's war in Iran, a war without strategy, a war with a different aim depending on the day, a war some can't even bring themselves to call war, because the moment they do - as the president calls it war, as the Secretary of War calls it war. But the moment that we in this chamber call it war, we're acknowledging our own failure to live up to our institutional responsibility that this is the body with the power to declare war, not the president.

The Founders did something remarkable at the time when they entrusted that power in the Congress, not the president, not the executive branch, because they feared a president who would grow too fond of war, and this is exactly what has happened. Our allies are not standing with us, a predictable outcome since we have not stood with them. The president says that China and Japan and all these other countries are going to join us in ushering ships through the Strait of Hormuz, but none of those countries are volunteering to do that. We are seeing the time-tested proposition of regime change wars - you break it and you own it.

If you travel across California, as I have, you will hear not just about the sticker shock at the grocery store or the gas pump - and grocery prices are going to go up because fertilizer also transits through the Strait of Hormuz, the tariff policies are killing farmers, and the result is we're paying more at the grocery store. But it's not just the grocery store, it's not just the gas station. You'll hear about how there are no homes that average families can afford to buy, no apartments that teachers can afford, or first responders. You'll hear about the fire or the storm or the flood that turned a community upside down, like the fires we had in Los Angeles when, a year later, they're still waiting for the federal help that was promised them to rebuild. You'll hear about the community that's losing its only hospital or having trouble keeping its OB-GYN or recruiting an OB-GYN, its labor and delivery open, because of drastic cuts to health care. And instead of investing in those critical parts of our community, we're spending a billion dollars a day with this war in Iran.

If you listen closer, you hear a mother ready to enter the golden years of her retirement, worried her 401-k won't be enough to get her through, if she's even lucky enough to have a 401-k. Or a father in the prime of his working years, but worried Social Security may not be there when he's finally ready to retire. A parent raising a toddler, unable to return to work because the cost of child care would erase whatever income they would make, a business owner unable to keep up with tariffs that have changed their input costs a dozen times in the last two months. A farmer ready to give in and sell their farm to a big conglomerate after generations of tilling the land because trade wars and immigration raids have made farming impossible. A college student about to earn their degree, seeing a world turned upside down by technological revolution and AI and wondering whether their years of hard work and exams will amount to anything resembling a career. A high school student seeing a world on fire and wondering if their lives will be anything like what their parents enjoyed, if they can ever afford a home or to retire or have access to health care or raise a family or have a job to sustain them, whether they can still live in a democracy, even, or something less, something more sinister, something where Big Brother is watching and listening, where what they say can cost them their job or future.

I have heard a great many examples of these fears. My constituents have shared their deep concerns with me. Linda from Moreno Valley wrote, "Dear Senator Schiff, I am a retired teacher and having to make ends meet by picking up work here and there. 69 years old, and for the first time in my life, my family did not celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays in 2025. Why? I'm hurting and don't have the money. Groceries, food prices are not down. Gas prices are not down. I could not pay the high drug price for prescription midmonth, so I went without. I fix a broken-down car every other month because i cannot afford a new or used one right now. Trump's tariffs have hurt me, and I don't foresee them as doing any good for us in the next three years. Somehow, I just don't feel great. Just sad."

From Lea in Modesto, "While billions are being spent on foreign conflict, many Americans here at home are struggling. I live in California and paid $7.95 a gallon for gas today. Economic inequality is another urgent issue. Current tax policies continue to benefit the ultra wealthy while everyday Americans are left behind. Working families need relief, opportunity, and a system that feels fair and offers 20-somethings hope for a reasonable future, not one that widens the gap between the top and everyone else. My 29-year-old daughter is in college while still working 40 hours a week to survive and is actually thinking about not having children for fear of the inability to provide. That is not the future she wants."

From Sarah in Los Angeles, I heard, "I am writing as a constituent who is struggling under the burden of federal student loan payments that are no longer affordable. Despite working full-time in a helping profession, my monthly loan payment has increased to a level that threatens my ability to meet basic living expenses such as housing, health care, and utilities. This is not a matter of poor planning or lack of responsibility; it is the result of a system that has become financially unsustainable for many working adults. I urge you to use your position to push for policies that recognize the real cost of living and the long-term impact of student debt on mental health, economic participation, and community stability."

Well, Sarah, if we weren't spending a billion dollars a day in Iran, that's a billion dollars a day we could be spending to buy down your student debt, help other kids go to college and be able to afford it or go through training programs to train themselves for this brave new world of technology and AI that we are entering.

From Valerie in Redwood City, she writes, "I am writing because my gas bill has doubled. My gas company indicates that it has gone down, that is not the case at all. I am not able to retire because my bill has increased. I'm over 70 and a preschool teacher. I live in a condo and cannot afford solar panels. I don't turn on heaters often; I use heating pads on the floor. Thank you kindly for your help in this matter."

From Kirsten in Sausalito, I heard, "My husband is a first responder and law enforcement officer with the National Park Service and has served for 18 years. He currently works in the Bay Area, where our income is adjusted for cost of living, but the childcare subsidy is not. Our household gross income is $185,000, with my husband earning $105,000 of that. Reliable child care in Marin County costs over $3,000 a month, and that does not include the basic expenses required to live here such as housing, food, and other necessities. The average cost of a house in our area is over $1 million. If I were to leave my job and stay home full-time, we would not be able to afford comprehensive family health care through his government plan while also covering our basic living expenses. As it stands now, I am essentially working to cover health care for myself and our child with the remainder of my income going toward child care. I would like to see efforts made to modernize and regionalize child care subsidies so that families serving the federal government can realistically afford to live and work in the communities they serve."

From Sasha in Sacramento, Sasha writes, "Rent takes more than 43% of my net pay, and my biggest fear is that my pets will become sick or injured when i cannot afford their medical bills. My grocery bill went up 33% in 2024 through 2025, and that was with me making changes to cut out expensive foods like fish and red meat. As a registered voter, I am asking you to focus your attention to fix the economic free fall we are in."

These are the sentiments, these are the anxieties I hear every day, at town halls and constituent meetings, in college dining halls and at dining room tables, in email after email, letter after letter, and call after call. Our mailboxes are full. People are scared. They are worried. They feel the constant anxiety that leaves them lying awake at night, turning over the numbers in their head and wondering if they will ever truly make ends meet.

We could confront these challenges. We could turn to any one of our legislative committees and take up these issues. We could bring up any number of bills that would lower costs, make our communities safer, bring home our troops from a war that the American people never asked for, but instead, the majority has seen fit to say in the face of all these challenges that instead of solving them, they will simply take away people's right to vote. Because the American people are paying attention. They have noticed that prices have not gone down on day one, as the president promised. They have noticed gas prices climbing higher and higher. They have noticed Republicans saying that this is a sacrifice they should be comfortable making. They have seen their groceries, their gas, their utility bills, their appliances all rocked by mercurial trade policies and on-again, off-again tariffs. They know this Republican Congress's signature accomplishment, the largest health care funding cut in history and billions of dollars in food aid slashed to fund a tax cut for wealthy people and large corporations, has only made matters worse.

And you know what? I know you've noticed it, too. You've noticed these broken promises, and you've noticed that the American people are pissed, and they're ready to exercise that frustration at the ballot box, to send a clear message. But the response of the majority is to try to make it harder to vote. Now that it's their jobs on the line, they're finally trying to make it harder to get fired, but by doing away with your right to vote. That's the SAVE America Act for you. It should be called the "Save Our Political Hides Act" because that's exactly what it is, a bill to supercharge the purging of voter rolls, a bill to give the Department of Homeland Security the power to decide who stays registered to vote and who gets kicked off, a bill to kill online voter registration, a bill to kill voter registration drives, to take away your ability to register to vote at the DMV or by mail, a bill that will reject every common form of identification, even your driver's license, if you want to register to vote. A servicemember showing their military ID? No, that's not good enough if it isn't showing proof of citizenship. If you're one of the millions of people who change their names, their last names, when they got married, sorry, it's going to be twice as hard for you to get your ballot. Online registration, registration at the DMV, registration by mail, all of these methods of signing up to vote would be illegal under this bill.

Four years ago, less than 6% of Americans registered to vote in person, less than 6%. Imagine you live in rural California, now forced to drive hours away for even the chance to make your voice heard in November. A family vacation will now be used to get to the county clerk's office just to get a ballot. Not to mention if you can't afford to take the time off work or if you're not able to get behind the wheel. But let's say you make it to the county clerk's office. The republican majority has sworn up and down that all they want from you is to show a driver's license to register to vote, but guess what? A driver's license won't be enough anymore. If the SAVE America Act passes, neither a driver's license or a military ID or a tribal ID, none of that will be enough to register to vote. What about that Real ID, the upgraded license the federal government has been urging Americans to get for the past several years? Nope, that's not good enough either. If that doesn't show proof of citizenship, that's not good enough either. One in every two Americans don't have the passport needed to register to vote, and millions more won't have another one of the required methods either. Americans born here, voting here all their lives, denied their ability to exercise their constitutional right by this bill.

Let's say you're just like Melania Knavs. You're a naturalized citizen and wanting to vote this November. You may even want to vote for the Republicans. Now you discover you're like 69 million other women who've changed their name when they got married, which means that Melania Trump will now have to not only bring her proof of citizenship, but also her marriage license to prove she's eligible to vote. And so, in this Republican SAVE America Act world, to even try to register for your constitutional right to vote, you might have to pay $165 to get a passport, take the hours it will require of you to get to the clerk's office, the wages you'll miss by getting there, the gas you'll have to buy at a much higher rate now, and inevitably the bureaucracy will make you come back once or twice. But let's assume you get all the way through the process of registering to vote in Trump's new federalized election system. Now you face the prospect of actually casting your ballot. You go to the White House website right now, it'll tell you they plan to use this bill as a basis to ban mail-in voting. That's not hyperbole, whitehouse.gov/saveamerica, read it. That means 47 million voters from the last election will have to find a new way to vote. And it's not just voters in California, which has gone out of its way to ensure your constitutional right is not an impossible one to exercise- nearly three million Floridians voted by mail. And that's not just Democrats. About one in five republicans cast their ballots by mail in 2024. No longer if the president gets his way.

Why make it so hard for Americans to exercise a constitutional right? Because Donald Trump has admitted the true aims of this bill. If the SAVE America Act becomes law, he says the Republican party will, "never lose a race in 50 years." This is what this bill is designed to do. It is designed to lock in a Republican majority for half a century by locking you out of the polling place. Former, or soon-to-be former, Secretary Kristi Noem said that we need to make sure the "right people are voting." Well, who are the right people? The right people, I guess, are people they expect to vote for the president's party.

It used to be in this country both parties sought to increase voter turnout. That we both recognized it as an unmitigated good that more Americans were participating in elections. Not anymore. This is nothing less than a deliberate campaign to undermine confidence in our elections.

The speaker says we have a major voter fraud problem. He cites as his evidence three Republican House candidates in California who he says were ahead on election day, but as absentee ballots came in, they fell further and further behind, and he can't prove it, but to him, it stands to reason there must be fraud. He knows better than that. That is just a pure falsehood. This is a deliberate campaign to undermine confidence in our elections.

The seizing of ballot boxes in Georgia and to undermine confidence in our elections. The subpoenaing of records in Maricopa County meant to undermine confidence in our elections. All the false talk about massive voter fraud, a complete fiction, even according to the conservative Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation. A complete fiction. And they would use this fiction to take away the legitimate franchise of millions of Americans.

Look, we have serious challenges in this country. We have a war that the American people don't want and don't support. We have the cost of basic necessities increasing all the time. We have a challenge we didn't face in the great recession or even the great depression. The problem today is not that people are out of work, although unemployment is rising, the problem today is that people are working and they still can barely afford to get by. That is the central challenge facing our country, and I think until we grapple with that challenge, our democracy will be on fragile ground.

When people see the quality of life their parents enjoyed as something better than what they have. When they look at the future and they find it in doubt for their kids, all too many will entertain any demagogue who comes along promising they alone can fix it.

But the answer cannot be to simply take away people's right to vote. We need to address that challenge to make the economy work for Americans again. Anyone working hard in this country should be able to provide for themselves and their family. That is what we should be focused on. That is what the president promised to do.

Taking away their right to vote, turning us into some kind of if not autocracy, something less than democracy, that is not the answer. So, I urge my colleagues to vote against this "Save Our Political Hides Act." To vote in favor of our democracy. To vote to expand the franchise to more and more Americans, not take it away, because of the failure of the president's policies.

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