[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 125 (Monday, July 31, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10937-S10938]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             WELFARE REFORM

  Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I appreciate this opportunity to speak 
this afternoon. The President of the United States is speaking about 
the welfare situation. He has promised to end welfare as we know it, 
and it is important, as we approach the debate on welfare in the U.S. 
Senate, that we thoroughly understand the condition in which we find 
ourselves as a result of 30 years during which Washington has dictated 
a radical theory of welfare on America's poor.
  The theory is that bureaucrats in Washington are best equipped to 
solve the welfare problem. Since the mid-sixties, we have spent nearly 
$5.4 trillion on welfare, and the theory that Washington knows best is 
as dead and as hopeless as many of the people it was intended to help.
  Most of America realizes this. Many Members of the Senate realize 
this. But, unfortunately, it does not appear that the President 
realizes this. Today in Vermont, veiled in glorious rhetoric, President 
Clinton announced his intention, again, to end welfare as we know it. 
But he revealed his intention to expand welfare beyond what we have 
ever known.
  Like so much with this administration's public policy, what sounds 
great frequently is different from what is reality. The old adage, 
``signal right and turn left,'' has found new meaning in this 
administration. When you are riding down the highway and someone 
signals right and then turns left, it can be a very difficult and 
dangerous situation, and I am afraid that is what has happened here.
  The reality of the Clinton plan is that it will result in more 
misery, more hopelessness, and more despair in America's poor. It will 
provide a boost to Washington's welfare establishment. The bureaucracy 
will burgeon. We need another way of helping the poor. It is a way 
which recognizes that the States have an opportunity, and should have 
an opportunity, to tailor welfare solutions to meet the needs of their 
citizens.
  Last week, I spoke about Ariel Hill, a 5-month-old child, a victim of 
the welfare system. I am sure she would have said that we needed 
another approach to welfare. Today, I want to talk about another tragic 
story, another personal example of welfare's failure.
  In the picture next to me is Ernesto Ventura, a 4-year-old child who 
was brutally abused and neglected by his mother. Though the crime was 
committed only a year ago, its roots began about 30 years ago at the 
beginning of 

[[Page S 10938]]
a cycle of dependency, a cycle of hopelessness and Government sanction, 
Government approval.
  The story begins in the fall of 1968 when Eulalia Rivera left Puerto 
Rico and came to the Columbia Housing Project in Dorchester, an inner-
city Boston neighborhood. Within weeks after arriving in Massachusetts, 
Eulalia went on welfare to support herself and her family. Her first 
check, instead of providing a solid foundation on which to build, 
became a milestone in her life, marking the first leg of a journey 
which has not ended to this day. ``I remember the first check,'' 
Eulalia told a reporter for the Boston Globe. ``It was for $75 a month 
back then.'' The checks have never stopped and the hope has never 
grown.
  Eulalia never left the housing project where she first lived, and in 
this place she raised 17 children, 14 of whom were still living as 
adults. Her daughter, Clarabel, has abused her son. Of these 17 
children, almost none graduated from high school, and they have 
produced 74 grandchildren, many of whom entered the welfare system 
themselves.
  As you can see on this chart, these are the children of Eulalia, and 
virtually all of them receive at least one form of welfare benefit: 
SSI, due to suffering from a nervous condition, also collects $120 a 
month in food stamps; another child receives: Medicaid, subsidized 
housing, AFDC, food stamps; this child receives Medicaid, subsidized 
housing. Here is Medicaid, subsidized housing, food stamps, SSDI; food 
stamps, SSDI, AFDC. It just goes on in each of these cases. AFDC, SSI, 
Medicaid, subsidized housing, food stamps; AFDC, SSDI; AFDC.
  This is the story of the intergenerational web, the lack of hope. 
Fifteen great-grandchildren now comprise the fourth generation of this 
welfare setting. The type of benefits received by the extended family 
are the alphabet soup of acronyms--all perfectly legal, and just as 
perfectly destructive to the human spirit. Many of Eulalia's 
descendents are considered disabled due to a medical condition 
diagnosed as anxiety attacks. SSI pays these individuals a monthly 
check in lieu of the jobs they are unable to perform. While 
interviewing Clarabel's family to find the motivation behind the 
tragedy of her son's abuse, a Boston Globe reporter found that the 
cycle continues, noting several school-aged children at home watching 
MTV at 1:30 in the afternoon.
  Theirs is a family that has given up hope of finding jobs or 
receiving an education, a family caught in a system which rewards 
illegitimacy and discourages work. Their lives revolve around a monthly 
check, a dangerous public housing project, and empty dreams.
  In the words of Robert Coard, director of the antipoverty agency 
Action for Boston Community Development:

       This family is a classic example of a poverty-stricken 
     class. They are the ones who have given up.

  The tragedy of this story is perhaps most evident in Clarabel Rivera 
Ventura's life. At the time she abused Ernesto, she was 26 years old 
and pregnant, a mother of six, by five different fathers. Even her 
family is not sure about the identities of these men. ``Oh, wow,'' her 
brother Juan told the Globe, ``I have no idea.'' Eulalia gave the same 
answer. ``I don't even know who they are.''
  A young woman caught up in the overwhelming system, Clarabel Ventura 
had no hope, no education, no prospects, and her will to improve her 
lot in life sapped by every check she received. Perhaps she looked to 
drugs as a way out.
  Neighbors said that Clarabel sold food stamps and even the family's 
washing machine to get money to purchase crack--shouting at and 
striking her children in frustration, neglecting the needs of the 
children in order to serve her own addiction. Reportedly, Clarabel 
would send her children out alone after midnight to beg for money, 
cigarettes, and food from other residents in their housing project. 
Finally, something snapped. In a rage, Clarabel plunged 4-year-old 
Ernesto's arm into boiling water, severely burning him. It was nearly 3 
weeks before she sought medical treatment for the wounds. When 
paramedics finally arrived on the scene, they found Ernesto in a back 
room on a bare mattress, smeared with his own blood and excrement. His 
mother, he said, had abused him because she was mad.
  Government-sponsored poverty has a face, it has a soul, it has 
feelings and a body that can be hurt. Every day, children just like 
Ernesto suffer in an environment which Washington has created. They 
have no say. They cannot vote, they cannot read, they often are barely 
old enough to talk. But they pay the price of Washington's arrogant 
demand that the entire country run a welfare system in accordance with 
the bureaucrats' dictates.
  The fact that welfare needs a major overhaul is beyond debate. 
Washington's one-size-fits-all bureaucratic micromanaged welfare system 
has failed, and failed miserably. Unfortunately, President Clinton's 
solution is nothing more than 1988 revisited, rearranging the deck 
chairs on the Welfare Titanic, just as Washington has done in prior 
attempts at reformation.
  In 1988, Washington reformed welfare. The result has been an increase 
in spending for welfare programs of over 40 percent. We have more 
children in poverty today than when the war on poverty began. If there 
is anything we have learned, it is that no one solution from Washington 
has worked in the past or will work in the future.
  We have a mandate from the American people to tackle the welfare 
issue head on. If Congress is going to be serious, we need to do more 
than reform the welfare system. We need to replace it. First, because 
one-size-fits-none, we need to stop the system as we now know it. We 
need to transfer to the States, in a significant way, the opportunity 
to craft real solutions. Bringing the States, under the guise of 
waiver-granting, to Washington, DC to gain the stamp of approval from 
this failed system is the wrong way of doing business and must be 
curtailed.
  Second, Government and dollars alone will not solve the problem. We 
need to bring in nongovernmental, charitable organizations, and 
citizens to be a part of the solution.
  Finally, let me say that as we debate welfare reform in the days to 
come, and as we confront the issue in the U.S. Senate, we have to 
understand that this is not just a debate about numbers. This is a 
debate about families, about human beings, where despair has come and 
hope is gone. We need to involve ourselves as communities and citizens. 
We need to disengage from the idea that Washington knows all and knows 
best. We need to make available to the people of this country the 
opportunity to tailor solutions to this challenge in State and local 
arenas.
  Mr. President, I thank the Chair for the time.
  

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