Rep. Katie Porter did not mince her words as she demanded that child care & family leave are justifiably considered and treated as infrastructure. As she started speaking, she had the most composed and cute sneeze I’ve seen on cable TV. Yes, I know, fortuitous, but it was so “Katie Porter” in being real.
Katie Porter hits it out of the park as usual.
Congresswoman Katie Porter immediately made the case as she spoke to MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle.
“We need to be asking the president to do what he promised, which is to make child care and investing in women a priority,” Katie Porter said. “That’s what he promised, and now he needs to deliver. What we’ve seen in part one of this infrastructure package which they’re calling the jobs package, a title that I don’t like, is a focus on frankly jobs that are predominantly male. And the good-paying jobs in that package are predominantly male, construction, engineering, transit, all of those jobs. What happened to the investment in child care? What happened to the investment in paid family leave? What happened to those things? They’re coming in part two, which they’re calling The Family’s Plan.”
The Congresswoman then expresses the reason for her angst.
“If women don’t have child care, parents don’t have child care,” Porter continued. “They can’t go to work just as much as a worker who can’t go to work if they don’t have a road. So, I think part of it is to really understand that this is a little different than repairing the roads. This is something we have never done well in the United States. This is the major difference when you look at our economy and the economy of other countries around the world. This is the single major place the United States has never delivered for the American people, and that’s how we need to talk about it. Child care is not something we do for parents. It’s not something we do for women. It is not something we do for children. It’s something we do for our economy just as much as investing in broadband or investing in bridges or investing in engineering or manufacturing. That’s what child care is. So for the goal here isn’t to return to quote, normal. The goal here is to make the investment that is 50 or 60 years overdue in our economy, which means making sure that everyone, regardless of whether they’re a parent, regardless of whether they’re a man or woman, can go to work, work hard, thrive, and succeed.”
The Congresswoman had much more to say in the clip. She hit the nail on the head, and I hope the administration is listening. Women are the largest voting block, and even Republican women love their children and will love that we are finally investing in these policies.