Xavier Becerra: “Mr. Speaker, let me give my colleagues a few numbers and see if we can find the connection in these numbers: 25, 161…”

“Mr. Speaker, let me give my colleagues a few numbers and see if we can find the connection in these numbers: 25, 161, 6.5 million, zero, and 93,500. If it does not seem readily apparent, let me connect the dots for my colleagues. Twenty-five represents the number of times that this motion that we are about to debate has come before this House of Representatives in an effort to try to do what the Senate did months ago, which is to try to do what the President said he supported, which was to try to give a number of working, tax-paying families, many of them military families, the same type of child tax benefit that we gave to many other American families, those families having already received checks in the mail for that child tax credit. Twenty-five times. This is the twenty-fifth time we are trying to get the House to do what the Senate did on a vote of 98 to 2. The number 161, that is how many days we have left all of these American families with children from being able to benefit from the child tax credit that other American families, neighbors, in fact, of many of them, many of them right now, fathers and mothers in our military in Afghanistan and Iraq, 161 days they have gone without the benefit through the law that was passed 161 days ago, that many of their fellow Americans received in the mail.”