Gwen Moore: “I thank Ms. DeLauro for putting together this Special Order. Mr. Speaker, I felt really compelled to come to the floor…”

“I thank Ms. DeLauro for putting together this Special Order. Mr. Speaker, I felt really compelled to come to the floor because 1 minute last night during the tax debate did not seem to be an adequate amount of time to explain why I adamantly opposed the tax bill in its current iteration. Mr. Speaker, what I have been told is that a half a loaf is just better than no loaf at all; that this tax bill was a compromise, and that somehow as a legislative body and as legislators, we ought to be used to compromising, but I just didn't want to capitulate. I didn't mind compromising, but I didn't want to capitulate. It wasn't just that we passed this tax bill that supposedly was an improvement for the child tax credit, but we passed $600 billion of tax breaks for businesses, which is the job of the Ways and Means Committee. Mr. Speaker, I don't know what Members of this body have against poor children. Are we in some sort of Dickensian reality here, like in a novel by Charles Dickens, where 5-year-olds have to go to work to take care of themselves? Part of what is flawed about the so-called improvement in the child tax credit is that it relegates children's well-being and their ability to get a supplemental income based on their parent's income.…”