Effects of H.R. 1 on Women and Children

Floor Speech

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Mrs. GILLIBRAND. Mr. President, I thank the Senator for her leadership.

I rise today to join my colleagues and speak out about the failure that is taking place on the other side of Capitol Hill right now in the Republican-controlled House. The election last November was not a mandate for any one political party or extreme ideology. It was a mandate for action--for solutions that will create jobs and get our economy moving again. But rather than focusing on jobs and responsible budgeting, House Republicans have engaged in an all-out assault on the health and well-being of women, children, and families in America.

The American people voted overwhelmingly for debate on economic solutions that will create jobs. That is what many of my colleagues and I have been trying to focus on during this Congress. But what are the House Republicans focused on? Not creating jobs, not creating ideas for how we are going to create economic growth, but undermining the health care rights of millions of American women and families.

We have an undeniable job crisis on our hands and they are ignoring it. Unemployment is still far too high. Having a national rate of close to 10 percent means real unemployment is closer to 15 or 20 percent when we look at all of those who are underemployed, working less hours, or who are no longer looking for work. Twenty-two percent of our youngest veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are unemployed. That is more than one in five. What are they doing to address those problems?

Rather than debating the solutions for how we create this economic growth or how we spur growth among small businesses and how we help our middle-class families, they are focused on degrading women's rights--basic privileges and health care priorities and safety nets for the women and children who are most at risk in this country. They have shown a heinous disregard for the health and safety of women and young girls, and they have worked to undermine their ability to buy affordable, accessible health care.

Republicans lament at length that government is too intrusive, too large, too overblown. But tell me: What is more intrusive than telling every woman in America that their decisions are going to be made in Congress, not by them, not by their doctors, not by their families?

Let's look at the facts. The temporary budget bill that came out of the House slashes critical funding for prenatal care, that unbelievably important care when a woman is expecting. They have cut nearly $750 million from nutrition programs for pregnant women and their children. They have cut access to lifesaving breast and cervical cancer screenings for more than 5 million American women. Their budget destroys early childhood education, taking nearly $1 billion from Head Start and nearly $40 million from childcare, robbing nearly 370,000 American children of early childhood learning. They have even cut more than $2 billion from job training programs that we need to prepare America's workforce for the jobs of today and the jobs of tomorrow.

What kind of priorities does that demonstrate? It demonstrates a disregard for the future of this country--for our children, for our women, for their health, their well-being, their education, for job training, for the future. This debate is much more than about where the dollar figures lie. It is about what will happen to the women and children they are now disregarding.

Let's look at the single mother who has two jobs and needs this support to feed her children. Let's look at the young women in every State of this country who will now get cancer because they were denied those precancer screenings. Let's look at the children who will never walk through the door of a university because they were denied access to the early childhood education that would have prepared them so that they could achieve their God-given potential.

We cannot slash and burn our way to a healthy and growing economy. It is time these Members of the House get serious about economic growth, about our small businesses, creating access to lending, creating a tax policy that is going to create economic growth. Those are where the solutions lie, not undermining the health, well-being, and future of our women and our children and America's prosperity.

I now yield the floor to my colleague from California.

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