[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 173 (Friday, November 3, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S16675-S16676]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               OPPOSITION TO THE WELFARE BILLS IS GROWING

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, as there will be no rollcall 
votes in the Senate today, some Senators are away and may have missed 
the open letter to the President from Marian Wright Edelman, entitled 
``Say No to This Welfare `Reform,' '' in this morning's Washington 
Post. She writes:

       As President, you have the opportunity and personal 
     responsibility to protect children from unjust policies. It 
     would be a great moral and practical wrong for you to sign 
     any welfare ``reform'' bill that will push millions of 
     already poor children and families deeper into poverty, as 
     both the Senate and House welfare bills will do. It would be 
     wrong to destroy the 60-year-old guaranteed safety net for 
     children, women and poor families, as both the Senate and 
     House welfare bills will do.

  An accompanying Post editorial makes a further point about the Senate 
welfare bill:

       Now here is the part you need especially to know: Mr. 
     Clinton's own advisers have told him that it would likely 
     consign as many as a million more children to poverty, and it 
     would provide several billions less for child care than his 
     own proposal of a year ago. [Their italic.]

  Mr. President, something important is happening here. There is a 
growing recognition that the Senate made a terrible mistake 6 weeks 
ago. We voted 87 to 12 to repeal title IV-A of the Social Security 
Act--with almost no understanding of what the consequences might be.
  Fortunately, the hard evidence has begun to come out. I only hope it 
is in time. Last Friday, the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story 
about a September 14 report prepared by the Department of Health and 
Human Services. The report, which has yet to be officially released, 
concludes that the Senate bill would plunge 1,100,000 dependent 
children into poverty, and would also significantly deepen the poverty 
of children who are already living below the poverty line. I had the 
report made a part of the Record on November 1, and I hope every 
Senator will read it carefully.
  Another analysis will become available in official form early next 
week. The Office of Management and Budget--in response to a request 
from this Senator along with Representative Sam Gibbons and 10 other 
members of the conference committee on welfare--will release a report 
on Monday or Tuesday on the effects of the Senate and House bills on 
children. I fully expect that this new analysis will confirm what the 
earlier estimates indicated: either bill would be Armageddonic for 
children.
  Over the years Congress may have missed opportunities to help 
dependent children, but never in our history have we calculatedly set 
out to injure them. The administration's own analysis shows that this 
is precisely what will occur under either bill now before the 
conference.
  Mr. President, I ask that the open letter to the President from 
Marian Wright Edelman and the editorial from today's Washington Post be 
printed in the Record.
  The material follows:

                [From the Washington Post, Nov. 3, 1995]

                     Say No to This Welfare Reform

                       (By Marian Wright Edelman)


                    An open letter to the president

       I am calling for your unwavering moral leadership for 
     children and opposition to Senate and House welfare and 
     Medicaid block grants, which will make more children poor and 
     sick.
       As president, you have the opportunity and personal 
     responsibility to protect children from unjust policies. It 
     would be a great moral and practical wrong for you to sign 
     any welfare ``reform'' bill that will push millions of 
     already poor children and families deeper into poverty, as 
     both the Senate and House welfare bills will do. It would be 
     wrong to destroy the 60-year-old guaranteed safety net for 
     children, women and poor families as both the Senate and 
     House welfare bills will do.
       It would be wrong to leave millions of voteless, voiceless 
     children to the vagaries of 50 state bureaucracies and 
     politics, as both the Senate and House bills will do. It 
     would be wrong to strip children of or weaken current ensured 
     help for their daily survival and during economic recessions 
     and natural disasters, as both the Senate and House bills 
     will do. It would be wrong to exacerbate rather than 
     alleviate the current shameful and epidemic child poverty 
     that no decent, rich nation should tolerate for even one 
     child.
       Both the Senate and House welfare bills are morally and 
     practically indefensible. Rather than solve widespread child 
     deprivation, they simply shift the burden onto states and 
     localities with far fewer federal resources, weakened state 
     maintenance of effort and little or no state accountability. 
     As you well know, these block grants are not designed 
     primarily to help children or to make families more self-
     sufficient. They are Trojan Horses for massive budget cuts 
     and for imposing an ideological agenda that says that 
     government assistance for the poor and children should be 
     dismantled and cut while government assistance for wealthy 
     individuals and corporations should be maintained and even 
     increased. Do you think the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, 
     Micah and Amos--or Jesus Christ--would support such policies?
       Neither the Senate nor House welfare bill is an example of 
     the good competing with the perfect. Both are fatally flawed, 
     callous, anti-child assaults. Both bills eviscerate the moral 
     compact between the nation and its children and its poor.
       If child investments are unfairly and indiscriminately cut 
     by many billions of dollars, there is perhaps some prospect 
     of recouping the money over time when new child suffering 
     becomes apparent, as it did after the Reagan cuts and as it 
     will this time as pending cuts are many times worse. But 
     longer-term and perhaps irreparable damage will be inflicted 
     on children if you permit to be destroyed the fundamental 
     moral principle that an American child, regardless of the 
     state or parents the child chanced to draw, is entitled to 
     protection of last resort by his or her national government. 
     If any piece of the framework or cornerstone of the laws--
     AFDC, Medicaid, family and child nutrition--is dismantled, we 
     may not get them back in our lifetime or our children's.
       What a tragic step backward for America when so many 
     children already are left behind. Both you and I know that 
     there are lessons from American history, including the end of 
     Reconstruction, when the immoral abandonment of structures of 
     law and equity led to decades of setbacks for powerless 
     Americans and battles we still are fighting today. What a 
     tragic irony it would be for this regressive attack on 
     children and the poor to occur on your watch. For me, this is 
     a defining moral litmus test for your presidency.
       We cannot heal our racial divisions or prepare our nation 
     for the future unless we give poor black, brown and white 
     children a healthy and fair start in life. These pending 
     block grants will make that task so much harder. Together 
     with the proposed tax policies, they widen the income gulf 
     between America's haves and have-nots. You have spoken too 
     eloquently and worked too long for children to wipe it out 
     with your signature now.
       It is nonsense for congressional leaders to argue that they 
     are protecting children from a future debt children did not 
     create by destroying the vital laws and investments children 
     need to live, learn and grow today. That is the domestic 
     equivalent of bombing Vietnamese villages in order to save 
     them. It is moral hypocrisy for our nation to slash income, 
     health and nutrition assistance for poor children while 
     leaving untouched hundreds of billions in corporate welfare, 
     giving new tax breaks of over $200 billion for non-needy 
     citizens, and giving the Pentagon almost $7 billion it did 
     not request.
       The Children's Defense Fund wants welfare reform. But we 
     want fair reform that does not pick on and hurt children and 
     that provides parents jobs and safe child care. We want 
     reform that prepares our children for the new millennium--not 
     reform that pushes them back to past inequities within and 
     among states.
       We want to ``end welfare as we know it.'' But we do not 
     want to replace it with welfare as we do not want to know it. 
     We do not want to codify a policy of national child 
     abandonment.
       Franklin Delano Roosevelt correctly said: ``Better the 
     occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of 
     charity than the constant omissions of a government frozen in 
     the ice of its own indifference.'' Every president since 
     FDR--Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, 
     Carter, Reagan and Bush--preserved the minimal national 
     guarantee of income assistance for poor children. It is a 
     precedent I hope and trust you will uphold. What was right 
     and compassionate in FDR's day is right today and will be 
     right tomorrow.
       There is an even higher precedent that we profess to follow 
     in our Judeo-Christian nation. The Old Testament prophets and 
     the New Testament Messiah made plain God's mandate to protect 
     the poor and the weak 

[[Page S 16676]]
     and the young. The Senate and House welfare bills do not meet this 
     test.
                                                                    ____


                [From the Washington Post, Nov. 3, 1995]

                            The Welfare Fade

       Now President Clinton has walked away from the welfare bill 
     he sent to Congress last year, just as the week before he 
     renounced the tax increase he pushed to passage in 1993. What 
     next? Perhaps he'll say he didn't mean to send up last year's 
     health care reform proposals either. Mrs. Clinton made him do 
     it. It becomes increasingly difficult to know what this 
     president stands for, or whether he stands for anything.
       Mr. Clinton telephoned the columnist and author Ben 
     Wattenberg last week. Mr. Wattenberg is a conservative 
     Democrat who thinks the party has drifted too far from 
     majority values to which it ought to return. Among much else, 
     he thought the welfare plan the president submitted last 
     summer was too weak--and guess what? The president agreed 
     with him. Mr. Wattenberg wrote in a column that Mr. Clinton 
     told him, ``I wasn't pleased with it either.''
       The White House went to its familiar battle stations. The 
     president, after all, wouldn't want the many people in and 
     out of the administration who helped formulate the plan, to 
     say nothing of the many in Congress whom he had urged to 
     support it, to think he was abandoning them. His spokespeople 
     therefore once again had to scurry to explain what it was 
     that he had really meant. What he had really meant was that 
     the budget made him do it, his press secretary said. For lack 
     of child-care money, he hadn't been able to draw up a plan to 
     force as many mothers off the rolls as he would have liked. 
     But that's not what really happened. It's a misleading and 
     self-serving, not to say self-deluding, account of the 
     history of this bill, as fictional as was the president's 
     account of the history of the tax increase.
       Campaigning in 1992, Mr. Clinton suggested that he would 
     force people off the welfare rolls after two years; that was 
     the top of the message, which people heard. It was followed 
     by all kinds of footnotes saying he would force them off only 
     under certain conditions. The government, as part of the 
     process of moving them off the rolls, would offer increased 
     support in the form of training, an extension of their 
     Medicaid, child care--even a job itself, if necessary. The 
     families would be off ``welfare,'' but government spending on 
     their behalf would meanwhile go up, not down. That's how it 
     has to be, of course, but in the campaign, that not-so-
     popular part of the message was played down. One still could 
     have hoped and even believed he meant it, of course.
       In office, the task of marrying the slogan to the footnotes 
     fell mainly to the Department of Health and Human Services. 
     The secretary hired some of the best people in the country to 
     do the work. They did it well. Last summer the president 
     loved it, or seemed to. ``If we do the things we propose in 
     this welfare reform program, even by the most conservative 
     estimates, these changes together will move one million 
     adults who would otherwise be on welfare into work or off 
     welfare altogether by the year 2000,'' he said in announcing 
     its submission.
       But the president's plan was swept aside by Republican and 
     other congressional conservatives who pocketed his proposal 
     for time-limited welfare and went beyond it. Mr. Clinton 
     started and in a sense legitimized a process that he then 
     lacked the votes and stature to stop. No action was taken on 
     welfare last year; this year, with Republicans in command of 
     both houses, the House and Senate have passed much tougher 
     bills than Mr. Clinton proposed.
       Both are bad by the standards the president enunciated last 
     year. They are punitive, would pull the federal floor out 
     from under welfare, could lead to the breakup of the food 
     stamp program as well, and would likely end up stranding some 
     of the most vulnerable people in the society. Most of those 
     are children. The president has nonetheless climbed aboard 
     and said he would sign the Senate version. Now here is the 
     part you need especially to know: Mr. Clinton's own advisers 
     have told him that it would likely cosign as many as a 
     million more children to poverty, and it would provide 
     several billions less for child care than his own proposal of 
     a year ago. But, well, it's better than the House bill, and 
     surely you couldn't ask a president who promised to end 
     welfare as we know it to begin the election year by vetoing a 
     welfare reform bill that he himself did so much to beget.
       Mr. Clinton could have fought for the right result on 
     welfare. He knows the issues by heart; he has the power; and 
     when he still had the courage to voice them, he had the 
     better arguments. What he has done instead is acquiesce for 
     political reasons in the wrong result--and then give false 
     reasons for the acquiescence. He thinks he gains by such 
     behavior, but he diminishes himself.

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