Political Quotes

“Mr. President, in a moment, I am going to ask unanimous consent to pass the bipartisan Family First Act, to help the hundreds of thousands of vulnerable children and their parents stay together and make the biggest improvement in child welfare policy in decades and decades in America. Right now, Federal policy says taxpayer money can be used to split families apart and uproot the family home. With Families First, our bipartisan bill, terrific work has been done by so many Members on both sides of the aisle. Senator Bennet was here and gave an eloquent address about how important this is. With Chairman Hatch, Chairman Grassley, and Chairman Brady, this has been a bipartisan effort for months for a number of Members for close to 3 years. With our reform, the Family First bill, families will finally see that they will get some assistance to stay together and stay together when it is safe to do so. If a parent can get a leg up with some help if they face a drug addiction or a mental health problem, everybody wins because the family stays together. A grandparent can step in. One of the things I am proudest of is that I wrote the kinship care law as part of welfare reform when I was a new Member of this body. So we know that there are hundreds of thousands of grandparents out there who could step in in those situations, or an uncle, and they could get a little bit of help raising a youngster, again, keeping the family together. Sometimes foster care is lifesaving.…”