Your trusted source for contextualizing the news. Sign up for our daily newsletter.

Seven months since the House passed a bill that would have expanded the child tax credit, the Senate has killed it. 

In Thursday’s long-awaited conclusion to a debate that was supposed to have been settled by Tax Day, legislators sank a bipartisan bill that would have boosted the amount of the tax credit through the end of 2025 and extended more of its benefits to the nation’s poorest families. Although the vote was close, coming in at 48-44 largely split along party lines, the bill needed 60 votes to pass.

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, and Rep. Jason T. Smith, a Republican from Missouri who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, crafted the deal at the start of the year and secured passage in the House on a 357-70 vote in the hopes of passing it before the start of tax season. But objections from Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee stalled the bill. 

This week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer finally called a vote, in part to force Republicans to take a public stand on the bill ahead of the November election. Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, handed out pamphlets to Republican colleagues suggesting that voting in favor of the bill would “give Harris a win before the election.” He printed out fake checks made out to “millions of American voters” with the memo: “Don’t forget to vote for Kamala!”

Democrats were particularly watching how Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, would vote, but Vance was in Arizona visiting the U.S.-Mexico border and was among the eight senators who missed it. He spoke in support of the bill earlier this year saying it was “by and large good policy,” though he called Republican objections over some of its provisions “reasonable.” 

“We’re the party of families,” Vance said at the time. “I think it’s important to actually [have] a pro-family policy. If you’re raising children in this country, we should make it easier, not harder. And unfortunately it’s way too expensive and way too difficult.”

Earlier this week, he falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has called to end the child tax credit. She has actually supported further expanding it. Harris was in favor of making permanent the changes enacted in 2021, when the credit was temporarily increased to as much as $3,600 per child. But Congress ultimately rejected that proposal, too.

Vance has recently come under fire for his 2021 comments calling Harris and other Democratic party leaders “childless cat ladies” who have no “direct stake” in the nation’s future because they don’t have biological children. In an interview last week with Megyn Kelly, he attempted to walk back those remarks, saying that they were not aimed at childless people, but at “the Democratic party for becoming anti-family and anti-child.” 

On the Senate floor Thursday, Schumer said “Senate Republicans love to talk about how they are the party of family and business. So, it’s very odd to see them come out so aggressively against expanding the child tax credit and rewarding businesses.”  

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued that the bill needed “serious revisions” to get the required 60 votes in the chamber. 

“Today’s vote doesn’t seem to be intended to produce a legislative outcome,” McConnell said. “I’m not so sure the American people are impressed by ‘message votes,’ and I don’t think they give out points for incomplete work.” 

Sen. Mike Crapo, a Republican from Idaho and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee who has been most involved in the back-and-forth on the bill, said it has been “months since any real attempt at outreach or engagement has taken place” on the child tax credit.  

“The bill does get a lot of things right. However, the critical flaw with the bill is that it fails to provide meaningful tax relief to working families and instead goes too far toward the Democrats’ goal of turning the child tax credit into a subsidy untethered to work,” Crapo said.

But Wyden countered that he “offered to make changes.” 

“I met with a significant number of Senate Republicans personally. … It was kind of the old four corners offense: stall and drain the clock,” Wyden said Thursday. “I’ve read lots of comments from Republican senators who say that it’s really time to wait and if Republicans take control of the Senate, they’ll write a better bill. So I would ask: Better for whom?”

The bill that went to the floor vote Thursday was much more moderate than the $3,600-per-child credit that was available in 2021. This year’s deal would have raised the amount of money low-income families could receive from $1,600 to $2,000 per child, the same as families with higher annual incomes. It would have also undone a provision in the current child tax credit that limits how much low-income families receive per child, and indexed the tax credit to inflation. 

While the child tax credit has long enjoyed bipartisan support, Senate Republicans wanted to remove a provision that would have allowed people to use their prior year’s income to qualify for a larger credit, which several lawmakers said would discourage people from working. Some Democrats also opposed the $79 billion bill because it included tax breaks for corporations — and they felt it did not go far enough in supporting children. They instead supported an expansion that looked more like the 2021 version.

Although Thursday’s vote mostly split along party lines, with most Democrats in favor and Republicans against, a few senators broke with their parties. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin and Florida Sen. Rick Scott voted in favor. Independents Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who caucus with the Democrats, split their votes: Sinema in favor, Sanders and Manchin against.

In the final moments of voting, Schumer changed his vote from “yes” to “no” in order to enter a motion to reconsider the vote.

Had this year’s bill passed, an estimated 16 million children would have benefited, including 400,000 that would have been lifted out of poverty, according to an estimate from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank. More than one in three of all Black and Latinx kids under the age of 17 would have seen an increase. 

The fight for a bigger child tax credit isn’t over, however. The issue is expected to come up again next year, when a child tax credit expansion approved as part of former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax bill will expire, forcing lawmakers to consider it again.