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Congressional Daily Record
This section captures a floor statement or debate entry. It mentions members such as Analilia Mejia.
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July 21, 2026
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Download official House Record PDFReturn to issue contextMs. Mejia of New Jersey was recognized to address the House for 5 minutes.)
Ms. MEJIA. Mr. Speaker, I rise today with urgency. Weeks ago, President Trump fired every remaining Commissioner of the Federal agency charged with protecting the integrity of our elections. This Chamber has not reckoned with that fully, and it should.
fair elections in this country. It was structured by law with four bipartisan members precisely so that no single administration could control how our elections are run. That structure is the point.
require a passport or original birth certificate as a condition for voter registration. Millions of Americans do not have ready access to either document.
authority to remove the heads of independent agencies in a case that had nothing to do with elections, the President used that very authority in order to eliminate every Commissioner.
This was not incidental. It was the removal of the officials standing between this President and a policy his own Commission and the courts have rejected.
Last Thursday night, he took his case to national television. In a prime-time address from the White House, the President declassified documents he claimed proved foreign interference and widespread fraud in the election he lost over 5 years ago.
million Americans and that 278,000 noncitizens were registered to vote. Independent fact checkers, who reviewed those very documents, found that they did not support the claim made about them.
This Chamber has now watched the same pattern twice: raise unproven claims of fraud, then use them to justify removing the very safeguards standing in the way; first the Commissioners and now a prime-time address built to manufacture support for legislation his own party could not pass on its merits, the SAVE Act.
tried repeatedly to force it through as a reconciliation amendment, needing only a simple majority, only to see it blocked each and every time.
requirement. Only a passport, an original birth certificate, or naturalization papers would.
Consider what that means: 146 million Americans do not hold a valid passport, and roughly 69 million married women hold birth certificates that no longer match their legal names. When Kansas tried a version of this requirement, 31,000 eligible citizens, 12 percent of all applicants, were blocked from registering—not noncitizens, citizens.
Mr. Speaker, this has never been a matter of election integrity. It is a matter of who holds power in this country and who is permitted to participate in choosing it.
move is rarely to accept that outcome. It is to lay the groundwork in advance so any unfavorable results can be dismissed before a single vote is counted.
surfaces that this is not a defense of democracy. It is a preview of what happens if this administration does not like what voters decide.
Congress has an obligation to respond. We must enact durable, statutory protections for the administration of Federal elections so that no single official can dismantle them by executive action.
limits and enforceable ethical standards because a Court that keeps expanding this President's authority is not exercising oversight. It is, in fact, removing it.
Each of these actions taken individually may appear isolated. Taken together, however, they constitute a sustained effort to narrow the American
on this administration. I will not treat this as acceptable, and I will not stop opposing it.