Source: United States Senator for Colorado Michael Bennet
Washington, D.C. – Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet appeared today on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss the Child Tax Credit (CTC) expansion, infrastructure negotiations, and voting rights. In March, President Joe Biden signed into law a one-year expansion of the CTC, based on Bennet’s American Family Act, in the American Rescue Plan Act. In his American Families Plan, Biden proposed permanent, full refundability of the CTC and an extension of the Rescue Plan’s CTC expansion through 2025.
Bennet continues to work with the administration and his colleagues in Congress to ensure the entire CTC expansion is made permanent.
Bennet on making the expanded CTC permanent:
“…Joe Biden has taken my American Family Act, which is a reform of the Child Tax Credit, in the American Rescue Plan, and passed it. And it will cut childhood poverty in this country almost in half. The way it works is it goes from $2,000 a kid to $3,000, — $3,600 for kids under the age of six. It’s fully refundable which means, for the first time in the country’s history, the millions of children who are the poorest children will receive it, and it will be paid out starting on July 15 on a monthly basis for the next six months. By the way, it’s 65 million children that are going to benefit from this, almost 90% of America’s kids will have this benefit until the end of the year.
“Right now, our fight is to make it permanent, and that’s what we’re trying to do. I mean, we have one of the highest childhood poverty rates in the industrialized world. The population in our country that is poorest are our children — which is a disgrace. And childhood poverty costs our country almost a trillion dollars a year. So, here is an opportunity finally for the federal government to intercede on the behalf of working families, on poor families, and make a difference in their lives. It certainly has made me more optimistic than I have been in the last 11 years that I’ve been in the Senate, and I give the Biden Administration huge credit for leading on this.”
Bennet on the bipartisan infrastructure package in Congress:
“There is good bipartisan work going on right now with the infrastructure bill that I think we’re going to have the chance to vote on in the next couple of weeks. It’s not, in my view, a perfect bill, but it is the product of a bipartisan negotiation that I think is constructive and helpful. I’ve spent the last two months in a room with Republicans and Democrats trying to figure out whether there’s a path forward on immigration, including the DREAM Act. We meet once or twice a week with a group of senators. Lisa Murkowski has actually been part of that conversation. So there are conversations going on. I would say that I think that the big dividing line right now here is that the Republicans in Washington are unwilling to vote to repeal a single cent of the Trump tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and they’ll stretch to every degree to avoid doing that. And that’s going to make it very hard for them, I think in the end, to pass a large bipartisan infrastructure bill.”
Bennet on the importance of protecting voting rights:
“My state has the second-highest voter participation rate in the country, and the reason we have that is [because] we have mail-in ballots, we’ve got opportunities for people to drop off their ballots early. There is no fraud. If you tried to take it away tomorrow, Republicans would fight as hard as Democrats to keep it the way it is and I think the rest of the country ought to look like that.
“If we believe in democracy, we ought to support the right of people to vote, just as we have in my purple state of Colorado — a third Republican, a third Democratic, and a third independent — and I for one do not believe that Mitch McConnell’s, as I said, bastardization of the filibuster and the Senate rules should stand in the way of our ability to make sure that we protect the American people’s right to show up, participate in this democracy, and to make sure that we can actually compete with totalitarian societies around the world. That is what’s at stake, and I think that’s why it’s so important.”
Watch the full interview HERE.