[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 2]
[Senate]
[Pages 2778-2779]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




 REPEALING SECTION 403 OF THE BIPARTISAN BUDGET ACT OF 2013--MOTION TO 
                           PROCEED--Continued

  Mr. DURBIN. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Heitkamp). The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Ms. HIRONO. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum 
call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Ms. HIRONO. Madam President, there is overwhelming bipartisan support 
to repeal the COLA reduction for military retirees that was enacted 
last December in the budget bill. The debate now is whether and how to 
pay for the cost of this repeal. I agree with my friend Senator Mark 
Begich of Alaska that our veterans have already paid for this repeal 
with their service to this country. However, there are some Senators 
who take a different view and have offered what we refer to as pay-for 
amendments.
  Today I rise in strong opposition to the Ayotte pay-for amendment. 
The bill before us, S. 1963, the Military Retirement Pay Restoration 
Act, would repeal the COLA reduction for military retirees. This bill 
is sponsored by Senators Pryor, Hagan, and Begich, and I applaud their 
leadership on this issue.
  Cutting military pensions was a bad idea. An even worse idea is to 
set up a contest between providing pensions to veterans and providing 
antipoverty assistance to children. That is the choice Republicans want 
us to make. I wish I could honestly say this so-called choice is hard 
to believe, but I can't. It is like choosing between cutting off an arm 
or a leg from the body politic. Vets or poor children--aren't they both 
in need of fair treatment?
  Again, there is bipartisan support to restore the COLA cuts for 
veterans, but I am told that my Republican colleagues won't allow us to 
have an up-or-down vote on the Military Retirement Pay Restoration Act 
unless we also vote on the Ayotte amendment No. 2732.
  What does this amendment do? The Ayotte amendment would deny 
antipoverty assistance to the children of undocumented immigrants who 
are working and paying billions of dollars in taxes. It would cut this 
child poverty program by more than $18 billion over 10 years to pay for 
the restoration of COLAs for military retirees, which would cost about 
$6 billion over 10 years. In other words, the Ayotte amendment would 
deny $3 of antipoverty assistance to children in order to restore $1 of 
retirement pay to our veterans. That is unconscionable. We should not 
take the benefits we provide to veterans by hurting children in the 
process. Hurting children does no honor to our veterans' service.
  The children targeted by the Ayotte amendment did not decide on their 
own to come to this country illegally. They were brought here by their 
parents. These children are DREAMers--our DREAMers. We should not 
punish them for their parents' decisions. We should help these children 
to succeed so they can contribute to this great country. Their parents 
are doing their part by working and paying more than $16 billion in 
taxes each year, more than $160 billion over 10 years. We should not 
deny them this small measure of help.
  Let me acknowledge that it is politically difficult to vote against 
the offset in the Ayotte amendment. Why? Because the amendment targets 
people who have no political power. These are children of parents who 
cannot vote. These are children of parents who are very poor, who 
themselves live on the edge of poverty or far into the depths of it. 
Their parents work one, two, or even three jobs and pay the taxes they 
owe, but they are barely making ends meet. They are far removed from 
the level of wealth that too often today translates into political 
power. These are children of parents who came to this country the same 
way many of our ancestors came to this country 100 or 200 years ago and 
for the same reasons--to escape poverty, to seek opportunity, and to 
give their children a better life than they had. Their parents are 
working and paying billions of dollars in taxes each year, which is 
extending the lives of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, as 
examples. Their parents are working and paying taxes, but they came 
here illegally, and therefore they must live in the shadows and live in 
fear.
  Put simply, these are children of families who have no political 
power--none. They are the easiest to go after, and that is what this 
Ayotte amendment does. But we should help these families. We should 
help these DREAMers. It is an ancient and universal principle that we 
should help the least among us. To paraphrase the Book of Matthew, we 
should treat the least among us as we would treat the mightiest among 
us. That is why the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops opposes the Ayotte 
amendment. We should not hurt the least among us in order to help our 
veterans.

[[Page 2779]]

  How much money would the Ayotte amendment deny to these children? The 
maximum child tax credit is $1,000 per child, which is about $2.74 per 
day per child. To many of us, $2.74 per day seems like a small amount, 
but to a child in poverty it is literally the difference between eating 
and not eating.
  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2011 the average cost 
of one meal for one person was $2.67. That was the average cost, which 
means that a lot of people spent less than $2.67 on each meal. By way 
of comparison, SNAP benefits average about $4 per person per day--$4 
for three meals, not just one. So our own food program is less than 
what our own Bureau of Labor Statistics says is the average cost of a 
meal.
  So for a low-income child, the $2.74 per day she gets from the child 
tax credit is equivalent to about one meal. If a child is very poor, it 
probably means two meals. Put simply, if she gets the child tax credit, 
she eats. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
  Of course, not every child receives the maximum refundable credit. 
The amount of the refund is determined, in part, on a family's income, 
so poor families receive even less. The average income for the families 
who would be affected by the Ayotte amendment is about $21,000 per 
year. They have to be working and paying taxes to get even one dime 
from the child tax credit program. Their average child tax credit 
refund is about $1,800, which is about $5 a day. That may not be much 
money to the Senators in this body, but that $5 pays for a meal for the 
whole family. It is about 8 percent of their income.
  We should not be denying this basic level of assistance to any child 
in this country, no matter who their parents are or how they came here. 
We should not deny children this assistance when their parents--and I 
am going to repeat it--will pay over $160 billion in taxes in the 10 
years during which this provision is cutting $18 billion. The way the 
child tax credit is structured, only working families who are paying 
these kinds of taxes can claim the refundable portion. It is not fair 
that families work and pay taxes but are then denied help--$2.74 per 
day per child.
  We should not deny children this assistance under the guise of 
combating fraud. Imposing a Social Security number requirement on 
qualifying children will not end the fraud the proponents of this 
amendment have cited. We should go after the fraud, but it should be 
obvious that any criminal willing to commit the fraud described by the 
proponents will not be deterred by having to fill in a 9-digit Social 
Security number. This does not solve the fraud problem.
  The fraud we have heard about involves undocumented immigrants who 
are falsifying where they live and where their children live in order 
to claim their tax credit. We are told about four immigrants using a 
single address, and yet we hear nothing about the 18,000 corporations 
that use one address in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair 
share of corporate tax. Instead of going after working families who are 
paying taxes, we should close the loophole that allows these 
corporations to evade their taxes.
  How many groups in this country is this Congress going to hurt? We 
hurt women when we don't raise the minimum wage. We hurt people who are 
out of work through no fault of their own when we don't extend 
unemployment benefits. Now we are hurting DREAMers. We should not do 
this. I urge my colleagues to oppose the Ayotte amendment.
  I yield the floor.

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