[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 63 (Wednesday, April 18, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H3401-H3402]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         GOP'S WAR ON THE POOR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
Wisconsin (Ms. Moore) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. MOORE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to proudly represent all of the 
welfare queens in the United States of America, all those women who get 
up every day and struggle as mothers, often caretakers for elderly 
parents, who are juggling two and three minimum wage jobs, $7.25-an-
hour jobs a day, and then being told that they are welfare cheats 
because they need food stamps, SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance 
Program, in order to meet the basic food needs of their children.
  I rise, Mr. Speaker, to decry your, Mr. Speaker, agenda and the 
agenda of the majority party to beat up on these poor, hard-working 
people because they are poor, people who find themselves in the 
predicament of having more month than money and need just a little bit 
of assistance to meet those basic nutritional needs.
  We are sick and tired of people exaggerating and claiming that people 
are

[[Page H3402]]

gaming the system to the tune of $65,000, $70,000 a year, and that they 
don't want to work. People want to work, but they are constantly in 
competition with foreign workers who earn $3 a day. We are in a 
postindustrial economy, and often people cannot find work and cannot 
find enough work to meet their needs.
  Often people find work, but those jobs do not provide them, Mr. 
Speaker, with healthcare. But they are being told that they need to 
provide a urine specimen and have a drug test to get healthcare simply 
because they don't have an employer that is able to provide them or 
willing to provide them with healthcare.
  Although the claims, Mr. Speaker, have been refuted time and again 
with facts and research that poor people have dignity, poor people love 
their children, but poor people are just not getting a fair shot 
despite all of this.
  Republicans continue to perpetuate this propaganda and these talking 
points that impose even more obstacles on people who are poor. They 
continue to promote policies that are humiliating, like the ration or 
harvest boxes or peeing in a cup and eliminating basic rights of 
Americans because they are financially poor in the richest country on 
the planet. We are sick and tired, Mr. Speaker, of being sick and 
tired.

                              {time}  1030

  And why do we think this is happening, Mr. Speaker? We think this is 
happening, Mr. Speaker, because you yourself, Mr. Speaker, declared 
that we are going to pay for the $1.5 trillion tax cut that we just 
gave to the wealthiest Americans, corporations, shareholders, all over 
this planet, we are going to pay for them by cutting Medicaid. We are 
going to pay for them, Mr. Speaker, by cutting Medicare. We are going 
to pay for them by cutting Social Security. We are going to pay for 
them by cutting food stamps, thus the need to vilify people who are 
poor.
  Mr. Speaker, how about if we really want to help people escape 
poverty and reduce dependency on the safety net, how about trying to 
raise the minimum wage so that people who are having trouble putting 
food on the table will actually earn enough money to be able to afford 
to pay for basic food needs?
  If we really want to help people escape poverty, why don't we 
recognize that basic healthcare is a human right? And we should be 
trying to fortify the Affordable Care Act as opposed to 60, 70 attempts 
to repeal it.
  Mr. Speaker, I urge Americans to wake up.

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