Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) blasted Republican lawmakers on Tuesday for planning to take their Christmas break without funding a health care program for poor children.
Although Republicans have rushed to pass a tax cut bill before heading home for the holidays, the same effort has not been made to fund the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which could leave some kids without health care before the end of January.
"The basic idea in many of these [children's Christmas] stories is that Christmas, Hanukkah, the holidays that we celebrate today aren't about pageantry and they aren't about pomp and circumstance or the presents or material things," Murphy said. "That it's really about celebrating each other. It's about understanding what's important to us and who's important to us."
Murphy, however, suggested that the holiday message had been lost on members of the U.S. Congress. He made his point by reading a passage from the iconic Dr. Seuss poem How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
"He hadn't stopped Christmas from coming, it came," Murphy said, quote the last lines of the poem. "Somehow or other, it came just the same."
The senator continued:
And the Grinch, with his Grinch feet ice cold in the snow,Stood puzzling and puzzling:
"How could it be so?
It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
It came without packages, boxes or bags!"
He puzzled for three hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before:
"Maybe Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a store--
Maybe Christmas--perhaps--means a little bit more."
Murphy added that he hoped lawmakers would learn from the Grinch's lesson instead of ending the year without funding the CHIP program.
"As we begin to go home and share time with our families and our loved ones, we need to think about the crisis that many families are in today," he insisted. "We need to think about the position that we are going to put people in because of our inability to act and pass legislation that prior to this holiday season seemed relatively non-controversial."
"Christmas is about celebrating our love for one another and if we really do believe in brotherhood... then we need to understand that the debates around health center funding or the Children's Health Insurance Program or the status of [Dreamer] children who were brought here by their parents at a very young age from another country isn't about politics," Murphy remarked. "It's not about scoring political points, it's about people and what we will do to people as we head into the holiday season."
Watch the video below from C-SPAN.
