WASHINGTON – A bipartisan tax bill that included a proposed expansion of the child tax credit fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance in the U.S. Senate on Thursday.
The CTC expansion was a top priority for Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet.
The bill passed the U.S. House in January with broad bipartisan support in a 357-70 vote but has been stalled in the Senate since. Colorado’s delegation voted along partisan lines, with Democratic senators and representatives supporting the bill and House Republicans, including CD-3 Rep. Lauren Boebert, voting against it.
Despite knowing the bill was unlikely to clear the vote, Democrats scheduled the vote days before the Senate’s five-week recess, a maneuver that gives them a chance to criticize Republicans for tanking a bill they say would have helped American families. Republicans voted against the bill, saying they can pass a stronger, more conservative tax bill next session.
Provisions in the bill would have increased the refundable portion of the CTC, phasing it higher for 2023, 2024 and 2025 and adjusting for inflation. The bill would have also allowed families with multiple children to collect credits for each child and allowed families to use current or the prior year’s income to calculate their credit for 2024 and 2025.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated the expansion would lift as many as 400,000 children above the poverty line. Opponents of the provision worried the credit decreases families' incentive to work for income.
The bill also included tax relief for disaster victims, increased tax cuts for businesses doing research and development work, and increased the cap for the low-income housing credit. These cuts would have been paid for by cutting off retroactive claims for the Employee Retention Tax Credit, reducing a major source of fraud for the IRS.
In the lead up to Thursday’s vote, Bennet and other Democrats focused on the expansion of the CTC, noting how it would help lift children out of poverty and help families across the country.
In a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday, Bennet criticized the trickle-down economics approach to tax policy, including tax cuts for wealthy corporations, saying such an approach is responsible for families losing economic mobility and the reason “why our politics are so messed up.”
“We're the first generation of Americans, the people in this Senate, that are actually leaving less opportunity, not more, to our kids and our grandkids. That has never happened before in American history,” he said. “Finally, we have a bill in front of us that doesn't just cut taxes for the biggest corporations and the wealthiest people in the country, but actually cuts taxes for working people.”
Bennet has been a longtime proponent of continuing the child tax credit, authoring the 2021 expansion within the American Rescue Plan. That expansion temporarily increased the maximum credit from $2,000 to $3,000 for children 17 and younger, and upped it to $3,600 for children younger than 6. It also provided the credit in monthly payments and made it fully refundable. That expansion cut child poverty nearly in half, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Since the expansion expired at the end of 2021, child poverty jumped back up, prompting Bennet to continue pushing to make the credit permanent.
“Sen. Bennet will continue to push Congress every chance he gets to restore this lifeline for Colorado families and expand the CTC once again,” a spokesperson for his office wrote in an email to The Durango Herald after Thursday’s vote.
Colorado’s junior Sen. John Hickenlooper has been less vocal about the bill, but ultimately voted in favor of it alongside other Democrats.
“We have a country where there’s a greater divide between the haves and the have-nots than at any time in our history of the country’s 250 years,” he said. “So anything that helps to narrow that divide, I think is not a bad thing.”
The vote comes amid a heated presidential race in which Republican vice presidential candidate and Ohio Sen. JD Vance has turned his focus to the American family.
Facing criticism for comments about “childless cat ladies” and suggesting that childless adults should have less voting power, Vance labeled Democrats “anti-family and anti-children.”
By bringing the doomed bill to the floor this week, Democrats responded to those attacks, highlighting their own work for families. Doing so also allows them to criticize Republicans in the coming weeks for voting against a bill that would cut taxes for families and some businesses.
In the week leading up to the vote, House Republicans and Vance falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris opposed the CTC. Harris supports the CTC and the White House released a statement urging passage of the bill Thursday.
Bennet clapped back on the social platform X, writing that “Trump and Vance would rather give more tax giveaways to their billionaire friends and leave working families high and dry.”
After the vote, Bennet posted on X, calling it “shameful” that 43 Republicans voted against the bill.
He also explicitly tied the CTC to the presidential race, citing the success of the 2021 expansion of the CTC under Biden and Harris’ support for the measure. In an interview before the vote on MSNBC, Bennet slammed the Republican ticket for promising to cut taxes for wealthy Americans and corporations, contrasting it with Harris’ support for the CTC.
“That is a perfect illustration of the stakes that are in this election,” he said, “and why it is so important for us to fight as hard as we can over the next four months to make sure she wins.”
Kathryn Squyres is an intern for The Durango Herald and The Journal in Cortez and a student at American University in Washington, D.C. She can be reached at ksquyres@durangoherald.com.
