March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Senate agrees to overhaul welfare system> Historic vote signals change in 60 years of federal policy

WASHINGTON — Sweeping away six decades of social policy and its own deep divisions, the Senate passed a welfare overhaul bill Tuesday that would cancel the federal government’s guarantee to support the poor and put thousands of single mothers to work.

An alliance of moderate Democrats and Republicans engineered the compromise legislation and gave the GOP blueprint its 87-12 vote, after insisting on billions more dollars for child care and rejecting conservative demands to cut aid to teen-agers and women who have more babies on welfare.

Eleven Democrats and a single Republican, conservative North Carolina Sen. Lauch Faircloth, voted against the bill, which he has called nothing more than a “pot of Pablum.” A second GOP senator, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, did not vote because he was home sick with stomach flu.

Maine’s William Cohen and Olympia Snowe voted yes on the welfare overhaul bill.

GOP conservatives have vowed to push the final bill closer to the House formula, with its outright ban on cash welfare for unmarried teen-age mothers and a “family cap” denying higher benefits to mothers on welfare who have more babies.

But the White House has made clear that President Clinton would veto the House version, and from Jacksonville, Fla., he warned lawmakers against giving in to “extremist pressure” and walking away from “this bipartisan American common ground.”

“If welfare reform remains a bipartisan effort to promote work, protect children and collect child support from people who ought to pay it, we will have welfare reform this year, and it will be a very great thing,” said Clinton.

The first word from the House was conciliatory.

Tony Blankley, a spokesman for House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., said House members would work with senators “to find the strongest bill the Senate can get the votes for, and 218 votes on our side,” a majority in the House.

The centerpiece of the GOP’s drive to return power to the states and its chief social issue, the Senate legislation turns federal welfare and child care dollars to the states in lump sums — known as block grants — with few strings attached.

It abolishes Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, a joint federal-state program begun during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that today supports 4.7 million families and 9 million children.

The bill requires as many as 1 million welfare recipients to go to work by 2000, imposes a five-year lifetime limit on each family’s cash benefits, and ends the federal guarantee to provide a subsistence income to millions of fatherless families. Legal immigrants would no longer be allowed to receive welfare.

Republicans say their plan will encourage state experiments to end dependency and discourage out-of-wedlock births while saving $65 billion to $70 billion over seven years.

“We are not only writing truly historic landmark legislation — legislation that ends, ends, a 60-year entitlement program,” said Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan. “In the process, we are closing the book on a six-decade-long story of a system that may have been well-intentioned, but a system that failed the American taxpayer, and that failed those it was designed to serve.”

Moderate Democrats supported the bill reluctantly, but said it represented an opportunity to turn welfare into a system that supports work. But liberal Democrats called it a reckless assault on poor children.

Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., said the legislation simply transfers pots of money from federal bureaucrats to state bureaucrats.

“The real problems of welfare would remain — the rules that penalize marriage and work, the indifferent local and county bureaucrats who treat people as numbers and do nothing to help people take care of themselves, the brutal job market, the deep cultural forces driving increases in divorce, illegitimacy and teen pregnancy,” Bradley said.

Republicans acknowledged the bill was not a panacea and questioned whether states would ever meet ambitious work requirements for putting half of all welfare recipients into jobs by 2000. But, they said, it begins to unravel social policies that have trapped generations of American families in poverty and dependency.

With Tuesday’s vote, Dole said, the Senate is writing a new story: “A story about Americans who earn a paycheck, rather than drawing a welfare check. A story about an America where welfare is no longer a way of life, and where people no longer will be able to receive endless federal cash benefits just because they choose not to work.”

The House passed its welfare overhaul in March in a whirlwind to enact the GOP’s “Contract with America” campaign promises.

The Senate had been slower to move, as presidential politics flared between Dole and Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, both candidates for the Republican nomination, and GOP moderates fought efforts by conservatives and forces in the Christian right to use the legislation to change the behavior of poor women.

In the end, with Democrats teaming with GOP moderates, the Senate rejected by large margins cuts in aid to unmarried mothers, agreed to set aside $8 billion for child care, and required states to continue to spend some of their own money on welfare.


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