Houston Chronicle

Lawmakers focus on family leave, child care

- By Benjamin Wermund ben.wermund@chron.com

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan duo of Texas congressme­n spoke at the White House on Thursday about the need to work across the aisle to expand paid family leave and child care options, which have emerged as rare spots of agreement between political parties locked in a bitter battle over impeachmen­t.

“Families can’t wait for us to have complete consensus or one party control — they don’t have time for us to do that,” Rep. Colin Allred, a freshman Democrat from Dallas, said during a panel discussion at the White House with other members of Congress, including Houston Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw. “Even in this climate we’re in now, we’re trying to find bipartisan consensus on these issues.” Congress is poised to pass a massive defense bill that includes a gift of sorts for federal employees: up to 12 weeks of paid family leave to all federal employees. The bill passed the House this week and is expected to pass the Senate next week.

It’s one of several major pieces of legislatio­n that lawmakers are working to pass as Congress hits crunch time ahead of the holidays. Also on tap are key spending bills to keep the government running, a sweeping new trade deal with Mexico and Canada, and more.

House Democrats have already pushed through other bills as they try to prove they can work while impeachmen­t proceeding­s roll along. Those include a bill passed Thursday aimed at bringing down the cost of prescripti­on medicine and another to beef up the Voting Rights Act.

But impeachmen­t remains a major hurdle, delaying even legislatio­n that seems to have broad bipartisan backing such as the new trade agreement, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said he won’t bring up for a vote until after the Senate tries the president early next year.

Still, some legislatio­n has eked through, including the defense bill expanding paid leave.

Trump touted it as a win, a “historic deal with Congress” struck by his administra­tion.

Family leave and child care have become rare areas of bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill. Crenshaw, for instance, this year joined a growing group of Republican­s in pushing legislatio­n that would allow families to pull money from future Social Security benefits to help them care for newborns. “If you did this two years ago, there wouldn’t be one Republican sitting up here,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said at the White House on Thursday. He and others credited Ivanka Trump, the president’s adviser and daughter, who has led the administra­tion’s efforts on the issues.

But Crenshaw explained that it’s still a balancing act.

“There’s vast agreement that there should be some kind of program there,” he said. “The question becomes, how do we do it without overburden­ing those same children we want to have with unsustaina­ble debt.”

Allred, who is pushing legislatio­n to allow families the option to receive an advance of up to $5,000 of their child tax credit in the first year of a child’s life or the first year after they adopt a child, said incrementa­l steps are still important.

“Some of these smaller steps we’re taking … I think they’re going to lead us down the road of getting to a bipartisan consensus hopefully around a national program here,” he said.

The family leave boost for federal workers in the defense bill, he said, is a “really big step.”

Still, the president couldn’t avoid playing a bit of politics as he touted a “Republican” child tax credit. The GOP’s 2017 tax overhaul expanded that credit.

“Let’s put the word Republican again,” Trump said. “Let’s emphasize it, because I noticed every time we do something, Democrats try and say, ‘We really did it.’ You know ... they didn’t do it. But we’ll be very nice. We want to be bipartisan.”

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