[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 148 (Thursday, September 21, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S14097-S14098]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    FINAL PASSAGE OF WELFARE REFORM

 Mr. BRADLEY. Mr. President, on Tuesday, I spoke in opposition 
to final passage of the welfare reform bill. Although I was not able to 
complete my statement in the time available, I obtained unanimous 
consent that my full statement be printed in the Record. However, my 
full statement did not appear in the Record of September 19, 1995. 
Therefore, what follows is my full statement from that day.
  Mr. President, I will vote against this bill because it will wipe out 
every protection for poor families with children but would do nothing 
at all to repair what is really wrong with welfare. We have made some 
improvements to the bill, such as eliminating the job-training 
consolidation that never belonged in a welfare bill in the first place. 
And there are sections I strongly support such as the child support 
provisions which I wrote. But the fundamental structure is deeply 
flawed and can only lead to deeper poverty and more dependency.
  All we are really changing with this bill is the one thing that is 
not wrong with welfare--the financial relationship between State and 
Federal bureaucracies. That is not the problem. In fact, block grants 
create a new problem because States that have increasing numbers of 
poor families, because of a bad economy or simple population growth, 
would not have enough funds to assist their people. Federal politicians 
should not simply transfer pots of money to State politicians without 
any standards about what the money would be used for. We do not need to 
transfer money from one bureaucrat to another; we need a commitment to 
individual poor children.
  While this bill would abandon that commitment, the real problems with 
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 deeper cultural forces driving increases in divorce, 
illegitimacy and teen pregnancy. All these problems would remain. Many 
would get worse.
  All this bill does is require States to penalize the children who are 
the victims of these problems. It does nothing to help them avoid the 
bleak circumstances into which they have been born and live today.
  With all the rhetoric about changing welfare, how did we wind up with 
a bill that does nothing to change what is wrong with welfare? The 
answer is politics. Neither party was as serious about really changing 
welfare as it was about capturing ``the welfare issue'' from the other 
party. Democrats promised to ``end welfare as we know it'' by tinkering 
with the levers of government, mostly in positive ways, but not in a 
way that deeply changes the lives of people on welfare.
  Republicans promised to do even better: ``abandon the welfare 
state.'' They would toss aside the Federal responsibility for poor 
families and children altogether. But they did not know how to deal 
with the reality of poverty and welfare. So they came up with the 
solution of handing the whole problem over to States, for them to 
solve. Block grants create an appearance of change, not real change.
  The debate of the last few days, during which we accepted every 
amendment that did not challenge the underlying political rhetoric and 
layered the bill with billions in new Government spending, brought this 
cynical politics into the light of day. It is politics as usual, made 
worse by the fact that it is a transparent deceit. We have not improved 
the bill; all we are accomplishing is to move the bill forward to a 
conference at which every single one of these provisions, including 
this massive last-minute compromise, will be dropped without debate in 
the first 5 minutes. Even if they became law, these ornaments do 
nothing to repair the deep fundamental flaw at the heart of this bill.
  For those who think these provisions improve this bill enough to vote 
for it, 

[[Page S 14098]]
I would like to remind you of what happened last week to my amendment 
that really would have addressed a central flaw in the bill. All I 
proposed to do was to require states to lay out the basic rules of 
their welfare system and assist all poor children who were eligible, 
unless their families were disqualified under the rules. The amendment 
made enough sense that the Majority Leader moved to adopt it by voice 
vote, but the majority staff was so determined to eliminate any hint of 
a reliable protection for children that we had to come back the next 
day and strike the provision on virtually a party-line vote.
  Unless the heart of this bill is changed, the United States will be 
the only industrialized nation in the world that will not guarantee 
basic protection for children from hunger and abject poverty.
  We can do much better than this bill. We can repair most of what is 
wrong with welfare, and over time, much that has gone wrong in our 
society that perpetuates welfare dependency. Instead of starting with 
political slogans, we have to start by looking at what really went 
wrong with welfare, and fixing it.
  We should not only protect families from poverty, but lift families 
into the economic mainstream, by building connections to private-sector 
employers.
  We should not only require teen parents to live at home, but create 
facilities like 15-Month houses for all those who lack a nurturing 
family.
  We should make clear to mothers on welfare that having an additional 
child will significantly worsen their life chances, but also reduce the 
penalties for marriage and savings.
  We should give States more responsibility, but also enlist the 
institutions of civil society--churches, neighborhood organizations, 
and YMCAs--to accomplish together what neither Government nor the 
market can accomplish on their own.
  This legislation does not abandon the mythical ``welfare state,'' but 
it does abandon our society's commitment to protect poor children from 
abject poverty, hunger, abuse, neglect and death. Meanwhile, it does 
nothing to fix the real problems. I would urge all of my colleagues to 
think twice before joining the rush to send this deeply flawed bill 
forward into a process where it will get even worse.

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