WASHINGTON—At a press conference today detailing how the child care provisions in Democrats’ reckless tax-and-spending bill would negatively impact child care providers and families, U.S. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) called out Democrats for not working with Republicans on legislation that would affect how America’s children are raised—arguing that the Democrats’ “Build Back Better” bill would permanently raise prices for everyone while only temporarily help a small number of families.
His remarks can be found below, and video can be found here.
You heard some concerns about the child care plan which is part of the BBB and might ask yourself, “Why is it that it’s got all these problems.” And I’m going to talk about the process. The question is: Is the right way to write legislation having a few people—in one party only—sit down and write something themselves, without any input from the other party, without hearings, without the back and forth between the two Houses, with Republicans and Democrats working together? Is that the right way to get a piece of legislation done, which affects—in this case—a pretty darn important thing: our children and raising our kids?
Now, we’ve looked at what the Democrats have put together by themselves and have pointed out some of the flaws in it. There are some real problems. But the heart of the problem is that they haven’t been willing to work on a bipartisan basis to see if we couldn’t accomplish something better, something that would be acceptable to both parties, such that if down the road, if the Republican Party happens to be in charge, we might not just throw what they have out and move to an entirely different program.
Now you might say, “Republicans don’t care about this.” Actually, we do. You may not have noticed, but early on, I put out a plan that [would] provide monthly checks for each child, up to five children per household. It was entirely paid for, and I’m not going to go through all the details, but this is the design—not to say that it’s necessarily better than the Biden plan. I think it is, but you may not agree. But the idea is we care about this issue and are willing to work with Democrats to find common ground and to create something that works—with public input, with hearings, with bipartisanship.
The reason BBB does not make sense—one reason it does not make sense—not just because it’s a bad piece of legislation, but because it hasn’t been worked together on a collaborative basis to work for the American people, to represent not just a few people, but to represent all the people of our country. And I hope that our Democrat friends take that into account. I’m working with a couple of Democrats, saying, “Hey, let’s work together, let’s work together on caring for our kids.” I think we can do that, and I hope that we are able to do that next year.