[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 192 (Tuesday, November 2, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Page S7579]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Government Spending

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, since the earliest days of COVID-19, 
Washington Democrats have admitted they want to use the pandemic as the 
pretext to permanently transform our country. They hope to use the 
temporary crisis as a Trojan horse for permanent radical change. One of 
their massive, ideological goals is a huge series of disruptive changes 
to American families' childcare.
  The story is like Democrats' long march toward socialized medicine: 
take an intimate area of American life, pile on a maze of new mandates, 
regulations, cost increases and subsidies, and push families out of the 
driver's seat so Washington can run their lives.
  Not too long ago, the Democrats' promise that ``if you liked your 
healthcare plan, you could keep it'' was awarded the ``lie of the 
year.''
  Now they want a sequel: If you like your childcare, you can keep your 
childcare.
  Democrats want to sweep the first 5 years of children's lives into a 
new set of top-down, one-size-fits-all, Washington-knows-best 
regulations.
  Their Big Government scheme would make childcare more expensive and 
use taxpayer money to subsidize only some families--those who structure 
their arrangements in ways that Democrats like. Other families would be 
left to fend for themselves, now in an even more inflated market.
  Their bill would give Democrats and bureaucrats massive new authority 
they could use to shape curriculum and standards nationwide. If 
providers don't play along, they could be left out in the cold.
  The Biden administration wants to insert itself into the most 
intimate family decisions and tell parents how to care for their 
toddlers. The entire scheme violates the basic principle of family 
fairness.
  Speaker Pelosi suggested last week that she approves of one kind of 
family structure: ``Parents earning and children learning.''
  She said Democrats want government programs to ``liberat[e]'' 
families so that both parents work full time.
  Well, there are lots of families like that model, but other families 
prefer other models. Not everybody defines ``liberation'' the same way, 
yet Washington Democrats want Big Government to bless certain family 
arrangements and not others.
  Has your family made a different set of sacrifices so a father or 
mother can parent full time?
  Sorry, Democrats want to redistribute money away from your family to 
other households that may earn even more money.
  Has your family built its whole life around a plan for a grandparent 
to provide in-home care?
  Too bad. Grandma or Grandpa would have to fill out paperwork and 
apply for the bureaucrats' blessing or that family could be denied help 
also.
  Democrats could easily end up taxing working-class families with a 
full-time parent in order to subsidize the arrangements of wealthier 
two-income households. They are steamrolling over family fairness, over 
families' choices and options, over the diversity of American families 
and their aspirations.
  By the way, Democrats appear to want to change the law in ways that 
could force faith-based providers to put aside sincerely held religious 
beliefs.
  Just look at who would be administering all this. One key player 
would be HHS Secretary Becerra--the partisan California lawyer who got 
famous by suing Catholic nuns for being too Catholic and crisis 
pregnancy centers for being pro-life--a hardcore culture warrior.
  And this person is going to be the new national czar for early 
childhood?
  Another key figure would be Secretary Cardona. You may recall, a few 
months back, Senate Republicans had to stop our Education Secretary 
from diverting funding for civics education towards woke propaganda 
that had been debunked by historians.
  And this is the same Biden administration whose Attorney General just 
wrote an entire memo singling out concerned parents who speak up at 
their local school board meetings. Now they want to extend their 
Federal control over babies and toddlers as well.
  Finally--get this--this tangled new entitlement would be so mind-
bogglingly expensive that Democrats can't even put a long-term dollar 
amount on it. The estimate is that all this government meddling will 
cost $400 billion over just the first several years. After that, nobody 
really knows what the blank check will add up to.
  Taxpayers are supposed to pony up a blank check for the privilege of 
having less control over family choices. I think the American people 
will take a pass.