Ranking Member Morelle Opening Remarks for Joint House Administration and Oversight Hearing on Elections in the District of Columbia

Washington, D.C. – Committee on House Administration Ranking Member Joe Morelle (D-NY) delivered the following remarks during a joint House Administration and Oversight hearing on elections in the District of Columbia:

“Good morning, and thank you, Chairman Steil, for welcoming us today.  And thank you to Chair Comer and my good friend Ranking Member Jamie Raskin and my colleagues on the Oversight Committee for being with us today.

“I would say this is becoming tedious, but I think we passed that point months ago.  For at least the seventh time this Congress, and what is not even six months old, the Committee on House Administration has held an elections-related hearing to discuss this speculative—by all measures entirely unproven—“lack” of integrity Republicans claim exists in our elections. 

“It appears the Committee on House Administration has turned into the Committee on Redundancy Committee.

“The hyper-fixation on the part of the majority concerns me.

“It concerns me, because it appears my Republican colleagues refuse to believe the overwhelming conclusion reached by nonpartisan experts, by multiple presidential administrations—including the Department of Justice under former President Trump—and by scores of witnesses under oath in front of congressional committees and grand juries—our elections are secure.

“Instead, the majority has taken us deeper down a rabbit hole, desperately seeking some justification for their unpopular policies that would restrict access to the ballot.

“Today, they have really gone off the deep end.

“Our colleagues in the majority have brought in our friends from the Committee on Oversight to see if maybe some new faces can help them find what the Trump Department of Justice, the FBI, thorough investigations and audits in Democratic and Republican-led states, federal and state courts across the country, and the Committee on House Administration have all failed to find—any evidence at all that our elections lack integrity.

“But today’s hearing is even more cynical than past, because it has the voters of Washington, D.C.—who already lack full voting representation in Congress—in its crosshairs. 

“I want to be absolutely clear—elections in Washington, D.C. are among the most accessible and democratic in our country.  They are also among the most secure.

“The conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Election Fraud Cases” database lists zero -- let me repeat --  zero instances of voter fraud in Washington, D.C. since 1979.

“But if we are being honest, this hearing is not actually about Washington, D.C.  This hearing, and the entire ACE Act, is about giving Republicans a platform to impose extreme restrictions on voters across this country.

“They know how unpopular these policies are, they also know these extreme restrictions are necessary for them to succeed electorally.

“Because Republicans prefer a world in which fewer people can easily vote, especially people they believe will not support their party’s agenda. 

“Perhaps instead of trying to disenfranchise voters, they should spend more time trying to make themselves more appealing to a broader swath of Americans.

“Which might best explain why they have lost every presidential popular vote since 1988 but one.

“For the Republican majority, these hearings about so-called “election integrity,” are about the past.  About how they cannot publicly accept the outcome of the 2020 election, even though they know it’s the truth.

“But for Democrats, ideas about voter access and voting rights are about the future.  These are two views of the world—one is cynical, and seeks to exclude and impede, to build barriers and keep voters out of the voting booth.  The other—the one House Democrats hold dearly—is aspirational, optimistic, and inclusive. 

“We have a vision of the Constitution so many Americans have embraced since before the Civil War.  Americans who saw the urgent necessity of extending the right to vote to formerly enslaved people, to women, and so many others.  Americans who labored, and organized, and fought to realize that vision.

“My community of Rochester, New York is an essential part of that legacy: the home and burial place of Frederick Douglass who wrote the North Star from Rochester, New York and the location of Susan B. Anthony’s historic vote in the 1872 Presidential Election, where she was arrested for trying to participate in our democracy.

“House Democrats are proud to continue in this tradition to walk the long, but always righteous, path toward real, full enfranchisement that so many, throughout our nation’s history, have walked before. 

“It is disappointing that our Republican colleagues have chosen a very different path.

“Thank you, and I yield back.”

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