Control Unlawful Fugitive Felons Act of 2017
Floor Speech
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his leadership. Mr. Speaker, this bill is all about Republicans refusing to pay for an important public service that they know works. It is about their meager 6 percent solution, where they decline to extend services that empower families, that support young children and their parents, to extend that to the other 94 percent of eligible Americans, despite the fact that there is evidence-based indication that these services perform so well, and in one area, helped to prevent child abuse. It is about their refusal to respond in a fiscally responsible manner to support this program, despite what their own experts say about the effectiveness of the program.
So, instead of providing a reliable source of necessary funding for public services, Republicans insist upon being willing to remove life- sustaining resources from some of our country's most vulnerable citizens. It is really a punitive, mean-spirited effort to demonize the poor. Let's look at who will be hurt by this retread proposal, because they tried this a few years ago and it was rejected.
SSI, or Supplemental Security Income, is an initiative to help some of our most disadvantaged Americans. The SSI program pays modest cash benefits that can be obtained only by, essentially, showing that you have got nothing--well, not exactly nothing. You can have total assets other than your home of $2,000. You can't have more than $735 a month in income. If you are younger than 65, you must be disabled, perhaps a victim of cancer, chronic heart failure, or blindness.
There is strict enforcement of these standards, with over 70 percent of those who apply being denied. What kind of person will they finance this child abuse prevention program from? Well, the 50-year-old man who had an arrest warrant--this is a true case--that had been issued when he failed to show up for court.
Why did he do that? Shouldn't he be punished? Well, it turns out he was in a coma at the time that the arrest warrant was issued. He was unable to breathe without a long plastic tube surgically inserted in his throat and connected to an oxygen tank on his wheelchair. By the time his case was resolved before a judge, the medical supply company was taking away the breathing equipment.
Or Rosa Martinez, who got confused with another Rosa Martinez, and she had to go to court even though she wasn't the person being accused.
Each of these people and so many others, like those suffering from dementia in a nursing home and who may never have been convicted of anything, are the type of people from whom they will take resources in order to fund a necessary program.
Republicans on our committee are so motivated by their rigid ideology that they would not even permit a discussion with our staff of how to move forward on this initiative unless we committed to funding every dollar by taking it away from some other vital social service program within our committee's jurisdiction.
It ought not be necessary to rob Paula in order to provide valuable services to little Pauline. Even when they know how much is at stake, such as child abuse and disadvantaged children, and even when we have a way to address those problems and prevent that abuse, they won't add a single dollar of additional revenue.
Mr. Davis and I offered a variety of different ways to pay for this program and to actually see it serve more than 6 percent of eligible people.
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You don't have to raise taxes. For one of those different ways, just enforce our current law. If someone receives an alimony payment, require documentation so they will know and the IRS will know that that money is due. That will raise a significant amount of money that would fund much of this reauthorization.
But because they are so opposed to adding a dollar to serve even an effective program, they take from the person with dementia at the nursing home. It is wrong. It demonizes people who deserve to be treated fairly.
We should reject this bill.
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