[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 150 (Monday, September 25, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H9501-H9504]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         DISAGREEMENT WITH THE SENATE VERSION OF WELFARE REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Tate). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of May 12, 1995, the gentlewoman from Hawaii [Mrs. Mink] is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Mr. Speaker, thank you for allowing me this time 
to address the House.
  Mr. Speaker, this afternoon I would like to provide some insights and 
comments about the welfare reform bill which we read passed the Senate 
last week by a very large vote.
  Commentators on the welfare reform legislation have been forecasting, 
rather uniformly, that because of the Senate action and the very large 
vote that it received, that quite likely, a welfare reform bill will be 
enacted which parallels basically what the Senate did.
  I rise today to take a great deal of disagreement with the Senate 
plan. I, of course, objected very strenuously to the House-passed bill, 
which we did some time in May of this year. I will not take the time to 
recount all of the various disagreements I had with the House plan, but 
for this afternoon I want to concentrate on the points in the Senate 
bill which I find still lacking. As a consequence, I hope that the 
President and his administration will look at it more carefully, and I 
hope that they will come to a decision to veto it.
  As you know, when the House bill and the Senate bill are different, 
what happens is that both Houses designate a conference committee. 
Conferees of the majority party basically come together and try to iron 
out the differences. So the best that we could hope to achieve in the 
conference compromise, so to speak, would be the level of program as 
authorized by the Senate version.
  Mr. Speaker, it is based upon that assumption that the Senate bill 
cannot be improved upon that I make my statement today in disagreement 
and in objection to the Senate-passed bill.
  Recently, we have heard members of the majority party taking the 
well, particularly during our 1-minutes, to exclaim over the fact that 
the Washington Post has now seen fit to support the majority party with 
reference to its efforts to reform the Medicare plan, and denouncing 
the Democrats, on the other hand, for failing to come up with a 
proposal.
  Given the sudden recognition and recognizance of the Washington Post 
as the critique of the day, I want to read for the Record what the 
Washington Post on September 20, said about the Senate-passed welfare 
reform bill.
  In an editorial which is tagged ``Big Majority, Bad Bill,'' the 
Washington Post on September 20, said:

       You might think from the overwhelming vote in the Senate in 
     favor of the welfare bill yesterday, 87 votes for, 12 
     against, that this at long last is the sane, responsible 
     approach to welfare reform. That is not the case.
       The fundamental flaw in this legislation is that it 
     abandons the principle that the Federal Government will 
     maintain at least some basic system of support for the 
     Nation's poor, especially the poor children.
       Wiping out this core guarantee of the Social Security Act 
     is mischievous and should not have been the solution of first 
     resort on welfare. It is true that the Senate did make the 
     deeply flawed welfare bill passed by the House better. The 
     Senate does at least require States to keep up a certain 
     level of spending on the poor in exchange for Federal 
     dollars.
       It does not require the States, as the House bill does, to 
     cut off certain classes of children from welfare; kids born 
     of mothers on welfare and to teen mothers. It includes some 
     money for day care, so that children of mothers required to 
     work will have a modest chance of getting looked after, and 
     at least a bit of the current system's flexibility in 
     responding to economic downturns was preserved by the 
     creation of a special fund for States in economic distress.
       But, the original idea of welfare reform--

  The Washington Post editorial continues to say--

     that the system should be changed to do a better job of 
     moving welfare recipients into work and caring for the 
     children of single mothers, was given second place to the 
     quest for turning welfare into block grants to the States.

[[Page H 9502]]

       Of course, it is good for States to try to find better 
     welfare systems, but Mr. Clinton made the best argument 
     against the bill he now supports: That the Federal Government 
     could continue to guarantee a certain minimum to the Nation's 
     poor children and give States ample room to experiment 
     through waivers.
       The President has yet to explain clearly why the argument 
     was true some months ago, but is no longer true now. And 
     what will the President and all those Senators who said 
     the House will bill was unacceptable do when a compromise 
     is worked out that moves the legislation towards the House 
     version?
       The import of much of the rhetoric from Mr. Clinton, from 
     Democrats who supported this bill, and from many Republicans, 
     is the House bill was awful and that this new Senate bill was 
     about as far as they would go the House's way. Really?
       So many politicians have moved so far away from what they 
     said their principles were on welfare even six months ago, 
     that it is hard to have any confidence that even this line 
     will hold. Do the senators mean what they say? Does the 
     President?

  And that is precisely why I take the floor today, to express my deep 
regret that the Senate really, in fact, adopted the most egregious 
principle that was embodied in the House version, and that is to do 
away with what is referred to here in Washington, in the legalese of 
our vocabulary, as an entitlement program.
  An entitlement program by definition is not something which is bad 
and ought to be gotten rid of. What it does, as does Social Security 
and Medicare and Medicaid, is to provide a guarantee of support for 
every child, no matter what State they are from, if they meet certain 
eligibility requirements. A State cannot decide whether children in 
their States should benefit from the AFDC Program or not, once they 
have decided to participate.
  This concept of individual entitlement and eligibility is critical. 
It is the only way that we can provide a guarantee safety net for poor 
children across the country.
  Once this entitlement safety net is broken, as in both the House and 
the Senate versions now, what will happen is that moneys will simply be 
granted to the States and the States will decide how to establish the 
criteria, what benefits ought to be allocated to the families, and so 
forth.
  Mr. Speaker, I feel that this creation of 50 disparate benefits 
programs for people who are truly in need is not the right way to go. 
The Federal Government should have the right to establish eligibility 
so that the eligibility is uniform throughout the country. That is what 
the basic program is and has been over the 60 years that we have had 
this program entitled ``Aid to Dependent Children.''
  Instead, this year when the welfare debate started, it became a 
contest of how much money could be saved under the program, rather than 
the bottom line of how to provide the services to the children which 
would best guarantee uniformity of application and uniformity of 
eligibility, no matter where that child lived in America. It seems to 
me that principle was very, very important.
  That principle also is included in a similar editorial by the New 
York Times, entitled ``A Stampede to Harsh Welfare,'' which I will not 
read at this time, but I urge you to look it up, because it really 
articulates the fundamental error in the policies adopted by the House 
and the Senate, and, if put into place, if not vetoed by President 
Clinton, I believe will truly be a step backward.
  Over the past 60 years, we have established a fundamental principle 
of caring about our young children. AFDC is exactly what its title is: 
aid to dependent children. Somewhere along the line it has picked up 
this great opposition by the use of the word ``welfare'' and the 
depiction of adults being on welfare and receiving these moneys, 
without any justification, at the taxpayers' cost.
  What is lost in the debate is that in this program are 9 million 
children. Young children, very poor, under circumstances beyond the 
control of most of these families. I feel that the removal of the 
entitlement guarantee safety net for these children is a tragic 
reversal of a policy that has worked well.
  Now, there will be the naysayers who argue that welfare is not 
achieving its purpose because too many of the people remain on welfare 
for extended periods of time. Anybody who would take the time to study 
the statistics would realize that the average time that a welfare 
recipients adult spends on welfare is an average of 11 months. 
Typically, they are in and out of the system in 2 or 3 years.
  Typically, what happens is someone finds themselves in a great 
predicament, comes to welfare, takes the support system that is 
available, in the meantime looks for a job that they can qualify for, 
and then goes off on to the job until another predicament such as 
illness or something confronts that family.
  We do not have evidence to indicate that large blocs of people remain 
on welfare year after year after year. And, so, the hypothesis that 
this is what is being corrected under the new welfare reform bills, I 
think, really yields to the mythology that is out there about what is 
wrong with the welfare program.

  What is wrong with the welfare program currently, which I would like 
to see fixed and which the Republicans did also a year ago, before they 
took over as the majority party, and which the Clinton administration 
also advocated before this year, and that was to try to make it 
possible for these individuals on welfare to find a job.
  Mr. Speaker, I think the overwhelming majority of people on welfare 
would like to work if they could find a job that could support their 
families and provide adequate funds for child care.
  It is the combination of job training, plus the funds for job 
placement and child care, which are the critical ingredients for 
success in this program. Heretofore, only a very, very modest portion 
of the funding by the Federal Government has been directed to so-called 
jobs programs for training and job placement and counseling, and very 
small amounts for the child care support.
  So, the only way for the goals that have been established in the 
Senate bill, of finding jobs and getting the welfare recipients off of 
welfare, can be achieved is by a very strong program in job training 
and job location. Otherwise, all we are doing is coming up with a jobs 
program which replaces the funding with a make-work program which does 
not yield a long-term job prospect once the time limit is up.
  So, cruelly, what will happen is that the 5-year time limit will come 
up. The person may have had the welfare assistance during that period 
in a make-work type program, and because the time has expired, there 
would be no further assistance available. I do not think that is the 
kind of reform that this Nation has been looking forward to.
  So, the difficulty with the Senate bill is, again, it does not focus 
on the necessity for a strong job training program. Well, some of the 
individuals who have commented on this aspect of the legislation point 
to the myriad of job training programs that exist in other pieces of 
legislation and indicate that this would be sufficient to meet that 
requirement. I wish that were so, because right this very moment, 
legislation is working its way through Congress which will limit not 
only the availability of those job training programs, but also the 
funding has been very severely cut back.
  So instead of even keeping an even amount of money going to the 
States for job training, there will be less. There is no targeting of 
that job training program to meet the needs of the very low-income 
person, nor certainly the person who is on welfare.
  In order to have a jobs program really make a difference to the 
welfare family, we need to have a targeted approach which takes these 
individuals on welfare and guides them through job training programs 
which actually will yield a job in the end of that cycle of training 
which can, in fact, support that family.
  This is very, very difficult to do, but that is what has been missing 
thus far and that is really, in my estimation, why so many welfare 
recipients continue to stay on welfare year after year, because they 
are not able to get out there and hold down a job and provide child 
care services to their youngsters, while at the same time earning 
support for their families.
  Mr. Speaker, I certainly hope that there will be a hard look at the 
Senate version. I certainly hope that the Senate will not recede to 
some of the beneficial changes that they have made in 

[[Page H 9503]]
their bill to the House version, but that remains to be seen.
  The block grant approach, which has been adopted by both the House 
and the Senate, on the Senate side assumes the funding level of fiscal 
year 1994. That is 2 years past. So we know immediately that the 
funding will be cut back quite sizably from what the current needs 
might be, as compared to what they were 2 years ago.
  The Senate block grant is roughly about $17 billion, and that amount 
of money will remain steady for over a 5-year period of the bill.
  One virtue of the Senate bill is that it requires the States who 
qualify for the block grant to guarantee that they will spend at least 
80 percent of the State funding for the program. The House bill was 
silent in the maintenance-of-effort requirement, which was a great 
tragedy. It appears from the House version that all that would be 
available for the welfare support program would be what was contained 
in the Senate block grant amounts.
  On the Senate side, at least they have included a requirement of 80 
percent support continuing from State funding.
  The AFDC program has been unusual in that sense, that the level of 
welfare assistance is not identical throughout the 50 States. The 
eligibility and the program benefits are also not exactly identical. 
But the States can decide how much funding to place, for instance, in 
the welfare program.
  States like mine have been quite generous at a level of around $600 
per month for a family of three, whereas other States have come up with 
barely half of that amount, and some as low as $195 per month. So the 
level of State support varies very greatly, depending upon the 
willingness of the State to support the program.
  So to that extent there has been State involvement, State decision-
making, State policies have been articulated by the very fact that 
these amounts of monthly support are set at the local level by the 
States. And the States, then, have a guarantee once they have set that 
amount that the Federal Government will match that amount so that the 
welfare program can be funded by 50 percent State contribution and 50 
percent Federal contribution.
  I am not sure that the formula under the Senate version, even, 
adheres to that policy. It merely says that the State block grant will 
be as it was in fiscal year 1994, and that the State's contribution 
rate must not drop below 80 percent of what has been spent in the 
previous year.
  So we see that there is a very great likelihood that the level of 
support for the welfare program will be severely taxed and that the 
contribution rates will be much lower.
  The Senate has provided funds for child care and I commend them for 
it, because realistically speaking, if we expect these recipients to 
get out there and work and continue to have welfare support for their 
employment, this certainly is not possible unless there is adequate 
child care assistance, child care programs, either provided by Federal 
funds or by the State program.
  The time limits of what a welfare recipient must face is the same in 
both the House and Senate, and so I assume that there will be no 
changes there. That is a 5-year lifetime limit of welfare support as 
provided under this program.
  In the Senate bill, there is the potential of a 20-percent exemption 
from this hard-and-fast rule of a 5-year limit, so that the States may 
exercise some degree of flexibility in terms of deciding who would be 
cut off at the end of the 5-year period.
  The Senate version also has a portion having to do with food stamps 
and reduces the overall appropriations for food stamps by over $17 
billion over a 5-year period. It has cut the level of benefit for the 
families and has also prohibited able-bodied, childless adults between 
18 years and 50 years of age from receiving food stamps beyond the 
first 6 months of their qualification for benefits, unless they work 
half-time or participate in a work-training program. So there have been 
changes in the food stamp program.
  The Senate bill does not include any inclusion of the school lunch 
program. You will recall that there was strenuous debate and 
disagreement over on this side of the Congress with respect to the 
attempt to block grant school lunch programs, and the Senate has very 
judiciously decided to not include the child nutrition programs, and 
the school lunch program in particular, in their welfare proposal.
  In the House side, also, we had a very negative, punitive proposal, 
provision in our welfare bill which said that children who are born to 
a parent receiving assistance could not qualify for additional payments 
to that family. The Senate decided not to include that as a Federal 
restriction. On the other hand, they provided it as a State option. So 
the States may do so with their own program if they deem it necessary.
  With respect to teenage mothers, children born of teenage parents out 
of wedlock, the Senate provision requires that that teenage parent live 
with an adult and participate in educational and training activities.
  Over on the House side, the House included a provision which 
prohibited cash benefits to teenage mothers of children born out of 
wedlock. So there are those two basic differences in that very 
contentious issue.

                              {time}  1300

  There are large changes to the Supplemental Security Insurance 
Program which will in both drafts, the House and Senate draft, mean the 
exclusion of many children, disabled children, from benefits that they 
have been receiving up to the current time.
  Effective January 1997, the Senate provision says that individuals 
with an addiction that has resulted in a disability which qualifies 
them for SSI will be eliminated from the SSI program and Medicaid. This 
is also one of those very controversial measures that came to the 
House, and the House version is similar to that.
  Lastly, I would like to talk about a provision in the Senate bill 
which has to do with legal immigrants. I can understand the furor of 
the country, as reflected by their elected Representatives in Congress, 
on the numbers of illegal immigrants and the burdens that illegal 
immigrants place upon local communities and the States. And so much of 
the debate in the States and the local communities and here in Congress 
has evolved around illegal immigrants and how we must deal with this 
problem constructively.
  In the welfare reform legislation, we do not deal with illegal 
immigrants, because illegal immigrants already are not eligible for 
most of these programs in the welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, and so 
forth and so on. The law specifically prohibits their participation in 
these programs.
  Unfortunately, there has been now a determination by both the House 
and the Senate to set down very specific prohibitions of coverage for 
legal immigrants, people who have followed the process, who have 
submitted their applications, been deemed eligible and admitted to the 
United States from all parts of the world. These legal immigrants are 
now going to be subject to a wide variety of prohibitions and 
limitations.
  For one thing, there will be in the Senate bill a prohibition on 
their receiving any needs-based assistance, no matter what the program 
is, for a period of 5 years. This is done on the assumption that legal 
immigrants come to the United States with sponsors who agree to be 
financially responsible for these individuals.
  What is happening is that this statement of financial responsibility 
is being deemed to adhere to the immigrant and therefore barring them 
from being eligible for any needs-based assistance. So in many 
instances these noncitizens would be ineligible for almost all of these 
programs, whether it is welfare, SSI, or other types of programs.
  The current immigrants would be subject to deeming for 5 years. 
Future immigrants coming into the United States after the enactment of 
these bills, for as long as they remain in the United States, would 
have to have worked for 40 qualifying quarters. In other words, they 
must work for 10 years, even if in the interim period they have become 
U.S. citizens, before they can be eligible for any of these needs-based 
assistance programs.
  I doubt seriously that that provision will be upheld in any court. 
The courts have systematically over the years barred distinctions among 
citizens, whether a native-born citizen or a naturalized citizen. 

[[Page H 9504]]

  But here in this legislation, something that we seldom see, at least 
I have not seen in the years that I have been here, a specific 
delineation of eligibility or ineligibility for benefits to a group of 
citizens of the United States merely because their status was initially 
that of a legal immigrant, subsequently becoming naturalized and still 
being barred from the rights and privileges of citizenship. I think 
that is fundamentally wrong and basically contrary to the Constitution 
that guarantees equal protection and due process.
  I regret that the Senate bill makes that further distinction, not 
just categorizing the legal immigrants as the House bill does. The 
House bill has a series of prohibitions to the legal immigrants, but 
those prohibitions stop just as soon as that individual becomes a U.S. 
citizen. On the Senate side, those prohibitions continue irrespective 
of citizenship. I certainly think that that is a provision in the law 
which has gone too far.
  For the reasons that I have stated thus far, I am hoping that the 
White House and the leaders in the administration that have been 
following this matter will take a hard look at the legislation that has 
just passed the Senate and review it carefully, and if it comes out of 
the conference committee in no better shape than the Senate version, I 
strongly urge that the White House veto that measure.
  Again to reiterate, the most egregious change that has been accepted 
by both the House and the Senate versions on welfare reform is to 
repeal and nullify and rescind the most important aspect of the aid to 
dependent children program, and that is the concept of entitlement 
which guarantees to children, if they meet the eligibility standards, 
to have the support of the program.

  That guarantee has been removed from the legislation in both the 
House and the Senate versions, and they have moved to a block grant 
which leaves to the 50 States the total authority to establish the 
criteria, the benefit package, and the eligibility. So we will have 50 
different programs, 50 different standards, 50 different eligibilities.
  I believe that that does ill service to this Nation that has 
committed over and over again its responsibilities to children. Aid to 
dependent children, that is, the welfare program, is a program for 
children. We cannot dismiss that. We cannot forget it. That is what the 
welfare program is. It is designed to provide care and support and 
sustenance for our children.
  There are 9 million children currently on welfare. It is for these 
children that we have to assume our responsibility as a nation. I 
believe that the Senate version dismisses that responsibility without 
considering what the consequences might well be.
  We have heard so much of late, as we arrive at the great national 
debates leading up to the Presidential elections, about the commitment 
of this Nation to family values. I stand very strongly on that 
commitment to family values.
  That is what I base my whole approach on in analyzing the welfare 
reform bill. How closely does it adhere to my principles of family 
values? To what extent is protection of the child of paramount concern 
in the legislation that we vote for or we support? It seems to me it is 
that guiding principle of the family that has to motivate us in 
drafting legislation.
  What is going to happen to thousands of these families that will not 
qualify for welfare assistance because they do not quite meet the local 
standards of eligibility is that they will be without funds. There will 
be charges made by the States of child neglect because the single 
parents will not be able to provide them with shelter.
  We have read in the newspapers numerous accounts of this already 
occurring, where a single parent is found huddled in an automobile 
somewhere in the suburbs trying to keep their family together, and then 
being arrested by the State authorities for child neglect, and the 
children then being separated from the single parent and being made 
wards of the State and put into either orphanages or foster care homes. 
That is not the scene that I believe a nation committed to family 
values should support.
  Our obligation is to try to continue to the largest extent possible 
the nurturing care that a parent has naturally for his or her children. 
I fear that this principle is being dismissed too cavalierly in favor 
of forcing single parents, most of whom on welfare being women, forcing 
them to work as the moral obligation which we are underwriting in this 
welfare legislation. The welfare legislation will be forcing them to 
work rather than staying at home and providing this family care for 
their children. I think that this is a very egregious mistake.
  If the work ethic is so important and has now become paramount to 
nurturing of our children, then certainly we have to make it possible 
for these individuals to get the training they need, to get the job 
that allows them to support their families without government 
assistance, and the child care that goes along with it.
  So the package of reforms that I see as being compatible with the 
argument of family values is one that is predicated upon our sense of 
responsibility to our children, making sure that if the parent must go 
out to work, that there is adequate child care, and that the 
breadwinner for that family has a job that can support that family 
without government assistance.
  It seems to me that is where reform ought to take us. It seems to me 
that that is what has been wrong with the welfare program thus far. It 
has been lacking in the support elements to enable parents to go out to 
work.
  I look forward to continued debate on this issue. I take great 
umbrage at the commentators who argue that the debate is over and that 
it is merely a matter of the two Houses coming together with their two 
versions and compromising, and the assumption is that the President 
will sign whatever bill comes out.
  I hope that is not the case. I hope the White House reads the fine 
print, and that ultimately the principles of family values will prevail 
in the Congress of the United States for the sake of our children.

                          ____________________