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Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, the last time Washington Democrats pushed through a huge change that disrupted families' arrangements, it earned President Obama the ``Lie of the Year'' award.

Democrats insisted that if you liked your healthcare plan, you could keep your healthcare plan. It turned out that was totally false. Their reckless government takeover threw many families into chaos.

This year, many of the same Democrats want to write a sequel. They want to ram through a radical, reckless, multitrillion-dollar taxing- and-spending spree between now and Christmas. And a huge part of their bill would completely upend childcare and pre-K as they exist for families all across our country.

If you like your childcare, you can keep your childcare. Well, buckle up, parents. What could possibly go wrong?

The Democrats have written their toddler takeover in ways that would turn families' finances literally upside down and make already expensive childcare even costlier. So let's walk through how they did it.

First, their reckless taxing-and-spending spree would make childcare dramatically more expensive through an avalanche of new mandates, regulations, and micromanagement--the usual Washington, DC, routine.

State and local governments are panicking about the childcare inflation this would cause. Here in the District, as one liberal analyst uncovered, local officials have formally estimated--listen to this--that the per-child daycare cost for a toddler or an infant would jump up $12,000 a year--increase the cost of childcare $12,000 a year; $12,000 more per child per year. President Biden's inflation is coming for daycare.

That is why the other half of their clumsy scheme is to dump subsidies onto some families. They want to borrow and print even more so they can throw money at the same thing they have just made more expensive.

But here is where the bad idea turns literally into a terrible one. The Democrats wouldn't help families directly. This isn't some simple voucher that families can use as they please. My colleagues have produced an insanely tangled scheme where the truckloads of money go from Washington to State governments, to the childcare centers, one leaky bucket after another.

The problems run deeper than that. Democrats want States to sign up for badly underfunded mandates. That is the effect, because the retirement programs would surely last forever; but, for accounting purposes, Democrats are pretending the money stops after a decade. Many States will not be keen to be socialist guinea pigs.

Then there is the fact that the assistance is doled out in incredibly confusing and uneven ways. The subsidies start and stop with no rhyme or reason.

Listen to what a left-leaning organization, the People's Policy Project, has uncovered. They have found that, in year one, a family that earns $1 over their State median income ``will be eligible for zero subsidies, meaning that they will be on the hook for the entire unsubsidized price,'' which they estimate will now cost ``at least $13,000 per year higher than'' it does right now.

The researcher repeats himself because it is so unbelievable. Here is the quote:

Having a family income just $1 higher than [your State's median income] would result in you being ineligible for child care subsidies in 2022 even as the unsubsidized price of child care skyrockets due to the wage and other mandates in the Democratic proposal.

This is obviously a perverse outcome and it's not clear whether lawmakers even realize what they are about to do.

This isn't just one technical glitch. It is emblematic of how ill- conceived their whole experiment is. There are 10 problems like this on every single page.

I should add, the families who even get to participate in the mess I've just laid out, they are actually the lucky ones because Democrats want Big Government to pick winners and losers among different families who make different choices.

Many American families make one set of sacrifices so that both parents can work full time. These are the people the Democrats are trying to reward, although their plan fails in practice.

But Americans are allowed to have different aspirations. Some families make different sacrifices to have a parent at home full time. Others prefer flexible middle grounds that involve part-time work plus in-home childcare. The Democrats' toddler takeover wouldn't give any of them a dime--no diversity, no flexibility. Institutional daycare or nothing. In fact, it is worse than nothing, because a family who wants a provider to come to their house part time or wants to participate in a neighborhood nanny share will now be stuck in an inflated market. They will have to bid against the employers the Democrats have blessed and subsidized.

This is the essence of what the Democratic plan would do: Big Government and Big Labor work together to reward some family arrangements and punish others.

Our all-Democrat government is already botching the things that actually are government's job--projecting strength abroad, maintaining energy independence--but they can't even do that right. Just look at the poll numbers. The last thing families need are for Democrats to appoint themselves national daycare czars and then botch that, too.

I haven't even touched on one of the most sinister parts of this whole proposal.

For parents who do use childcare outside the home, faith-based options are incredibly popular. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates that 53 percent of parents who use center-based care use ones that are linked to faith-based organizations, but the same Democrats who are letting far-left propaganda trickle down from the universities into K- 12 schools are now declaring war on faith-based childcare. Washington Democrats want to unleash the woke mob on church daycare. There are at least two parts of their bill that are direct attacks.

First, liberals are trying to chase faith-based providers out of the daycare industry by denying funds to any facility they deem discriminatory. Of course, today's radical left tosses around these kinds of accusations at any remotely traditional institution. Faith- based childcare centers could potentially get their subsidies ripped away if they don't hire who secular bureaucrats want them to hire, set up their facilities the way secular bureaucrats want them set up, or even--listen to this--if they give preference to kids of their own faith. Orthodox Jewish daycare centers could get kicked out if they say Orthodox Jewish families get first dibs. Evangelical centers could get punished by bureaucrats if the families who belong to the church are accommodated first.

This is a joke. The left is trying to weaponize the word ``discrimination'' to push faith-based childcare out of business.

Another part of their bill goes out of its way to deny money for facility upgrades to buildings that are used for ``sectarian instruction or religious worship.'' If a faith-based center leads kids in prayer or teaches them their families' faiths, they don't get the funding that everybody else gets? We see this over and over from the culture warriors. They pretend they are happy to have religious groups in the public square but only if they check their beliefs at the door.

Now, a few years ago, the Supreme Court had to strike down a similar policy that penalized faith-based organizations. A State had tried to deny a church a widely available grant to fix up its playground. The Court took a look at it and struck down the law 7 to 2.

But the political left is right back at it. Just look at which Federal bureaucrat would oversee this giant mess. Well, of course, it is none other than Secretary Becerra, the hard-left culture warrior who got famous by suing the Little Sisters of the Poor for being too Catholic and by suing crisis pregnancy centers for being pro-life. This is the person whom Democrats want to give sweeping new powers over families' private choices? Secretary Becerra gets a giant slush fund to bring President Biden's inflation into childcare and discriminate against people of faith--just one more way Democrats' reckless taxing- and-spending spree would hurt working families.

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