"Remember also when women started canvassing and picketing to get the right to vote in the women’s suffrage movement. Remember how many of those were arrested and kicked and dragged off to jail. For what? For wanting to have the right to vote. It wasn’t just men. Some men who were opposed to this. It was the liquor industry, and it was the industrial corporations who didn’t like women at that time organizing to end the brutalized child labor in those dungeon factories because the women believe those children belonged in school."

- Ralph Nader, stump speech in 2000

Lincoln was furious. "Almost 60 percent of the families in my state make under $26,000," she told me. "People say these families don't pay income tax. But they pay a lot of other taxes -- Social Security, sales tax, excise taxes. And those taxes just keep going up. And they buy the same things for their kids -- soap powder, blue jeans -- as I buy for the twins. And pay the same prices."

So she mobilized. With Snowe again her partner, she quickly rounded up more than half the Senate as co-sponsors of a bill to restore the full $1,000 refundability, paying the $3.5 billion cost by closing several Enron-style corporate loopholes.

...

In a rare victory for children and common sense, a bipartisan agreement was reached late yesterday to do what was right. Maybe the women should speak up more often.