[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 207 (Friday, December 22, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S19225-S19227]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        THE WELFARE REFORM BILL

  Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I would like to make a few comments 
about the vote today on the welfare reform bill. Several people have 
talked to me about it and have expressed concern that we did not 
receive the bipartisan support in this piece of legislation that we had 
in the original Senate bill. I want to reflect on that for a few 
moments and discuss how we might be able to bridge the gap and what 
kind of gap it is that now keeps us apart on the welfare issue.
  First, I would like to thank the Members of the Senate on both sides 
of the aisle who supported the conference report. I think they will be 
very proud of the vote they cast as a real step forward for moving this 
country toward a kind of reform in the welfare system that the American 
public and the people who are now in the welfare system or may find 
themselves at some point in time in their life to be in need of the 
welfare system have been asking for for a long time.
  My impression of what went on--just from listening to the debate and 
the comments of Members who eventually voted against the legislation--
was that for the most part Members who voted against this legislation, 
on the other side of the aisle in particular, were people who felt that 
they had to vote against it and they were sort of looking for a reason 
why.
  You say, what do you mean they had to vote against it? The President 
came out yesterday morning and said he was going to veto the 
legislation. I think I understand why the President did that. I am not 
too sure I think that the President is vetoing this legislation because 
he substantively disagrees with it on so many counts, but more that I 
think he sees welfare as being included in these negotiations that are 
going on right now in the budget package, and to sign a separate 
welfare bill sort of takes welfare off the table in the bargaining 
between all the other programs that are being considered in trying to 
balance the budget.
  I think what the President wanted to do--and I think many Members on 
the other side agreed with it--is they wanted to keep welfare in play 
in the greater negotiations, and to sign off on one package without 
having the interaction of the other programs yet to be determined 
would, in their estimation, be an unwise move. So I will say to them, 
it is my firm belief that is what is going on here--I will explain that 
later--that this was more of a tactical move in opposition to this 
legislation than it really was a substantive move that this legislation 
somehow did not meet the test of welfare reform as defined by most 
Members on both sides of the aisle.
  It was interesting for me to note that the people who debated the 
welfare reform bill here on the floor the last day, last night and 
today, by and large were the 12 people who voted against the 
legislation when it first came through.
  So the principal opponents, at least the most vocal opponents, on the 
other side of the aisle were all people who voted against the Senate-
passed bill, which got 87 votes; and in fact, the only two people that 
I can recollect who debated the bill this morning who had previously 
supported the bill did so on very narrow and limited grounds.

  In fact, I have had discussions with those Members subsequently--at 
least one of them--and think some of the grounds on which they base 
their opposition actually did not square with the facts. I am not 
saying that the Senators misrepresented the facts. I am not saying that 
at all.
  I think in this case, because this bill was moved over here so 
quickly, a lot of the factual information that was in the bill did not 
get out in proper fashion, and there were changes made to the bill in 
the last couple of days that were simply not disseminated to the other 
side. I think there was some misunderstanding, particularly in the area 
of child care funding, and a look at the facts, I think, would satisfy 
some of the concerns of Members on the other side of the aisle.
  I want to go through the points that were made about the welfare bill 
as reasons for opposing it and try to explain why those concerns may 
not have been as legitimate as some would have originally suggested. 
Some, I believe, are legitimate.
  I think there was one concern in particular that I know concerned 
Members on this side of the aisle and, I think, was the result of the 
two negative votes over here and, I think, concerned many Members and 
could be a legitimate reason to, in a sense, hang your hat on 
opposition to this proposal and actually speaks for including welfare 
in the larger budget package. What I am referring to is the Medicaid 
portion or the Medicaid reference in the welfare bill.
  It was asked by the Governors and others who were negotiating the 
Medicaid portion of the Balanced Budget Act that we, for purposes of 
welfare, do not guarantee anyone who is on AFDC, guarantee them 
coverage under Medicaid automatically. That is current law, that if you 
qualify for AFDC, mothers and children automatically qualify for 
Medicaid.
  Governors have said that now they are in the process during this 
budget debate of working out amongst themselves and Members of Congress 
to give some more flexibility in establishing who must qualify for 
Medicaid and allowing them the flexibility to make some of their own 
determinations.
  So they asked, for purposes of this bill, do not lock them in quite 
yet on guaranteeing Medicaid coverage for AFDC recipients when, in 
fact, they are negotiating that very issue in their Medicaid 
discussions. So, as a result, because this bill moved ahead of the rest 
of the package, we left that provision out and said that is to be 
negotiated with Medicaid, not with welfare.
  As a result, many Members seized upon this and said, ``Oh, what we're 
doing here is unprecedented. It was not in the House bill, it was in 
the Senate bill. We are cutting off, in the welfare bill, all these 
people from Medicaid.'' Well, in a sense that is not completely true. 
But it certainly makes for a very good reason to vote against this bill 
even though you can make several arguments against that point.
  One is the obvious one I think I have already made in detailing what 
the problem was; that that decision is going to be made later, and, in 
fact, it may very well say in the Medicaid bill that AFDC recipients 
are covered. That is a decision that is going to be made later. It is 
not that we are making the decision here affirmatively; it is a 
decision that will be made, but this was not the appropriate vehicle to 
make it. That does not soothe, I know, a lot of people, but it is in a 
sense an accurate description of what is going on.

  The other point is--or several other points--according to the 
Congressional Budget Office, all of the children who are on AFDC today 
would otherwise qualify for Medicaid even if the current legislation 
which just passed here were signed by the President. That is, children, 
poor children, would qualify under the Medicaid statute, not under the 
AFDC statute, and therefore would be eligible for Medicaid even if they 
were not automatically eligible as a result of receiving AFDC. So 
children would have been covered anyway.
  So to say, as some Members said, we are cutting off children by this 
is not 

[[Page S19226]]
an accurate description of at least what the Congressional Budget 
Office interpreted. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office scored 
this welfare bill as having all the existing children eligible for 
Medicaid.
  For example, the Congressional Budget Office said that approximately 
half of the women--again, most AFDC recipient parents are women--half 
of the women on AFDC would automatically--or I should not say 
automatically--would otherwise qualify for Medicaid because of their 
status without the automatic qualification under AFDC.
  So that leaves a block of about half of the women who currently 
receive AFDC, who qualify under AFDC, who would not otherwise qualify 
for Medicaid. That is a legitimate debate, and I think Members cited 
that. It is a legitimate debate as to whether this is the right 
approach to take.
  My only point was--and I will go back to the first point I made--that 
is an issue to be decided in the Medicaid debate, not in the welfare 
debate, and it is in the process of being decided.
  So we have that as, I think, the principal stumbling block and the 
reason that most Members will be able to go back and say this is why 
this bill was substantively different than the bill that passed the 
Senate because, if you look at everything else, if you look at all the 
other provisions of the welfare reform bill and match it up against the 
welfare reform bill that passed here with 87-87 votes, there is nary a 
reason for a dissenting vote of anyone who gave assent the first time. 
In fact, I would suggest that most of the concerns--or many; I should 
not say most--many of the concerns that were raised on the other side 
about the potential toughness of the welfare reform bill were solved by 
the addition, for example, of 1 billion extra dollars in child care.
  Some comments were made by Members on the other side that child care 
funding was cut. The Senator from Massachusetts and I had a discussion 
about that last night, and I attempted to clarify that. I will do it 
one more time. The Senate bill that passed last--I guess a few months 
ago; I do not know exactly the month--had $8 billion for child care, 
mandatory child care spending for the first 5 years and $2 billion in 
the sixth and seventh years combined; so a total of 10 billion in 
mandatory entitlement child care dollars.
  Under the conference bill, in the first 5 years, there was $7.8 
billion, not $8 billion as in the original bill, but $7.8 billion, $200 
million less, in the first 5 years. However, in the next 2 years, 
instead of having $2 billion for child care, there was $3.2 billion for 
child care. So in a sense, we took $200 million and shifted it forward 
to the sixth and seventh year and added an additional billion dollars 
for child care.
  So there is, overall, more money over the 7 years, just $200 million 
less in the first 5, but we shifted it, we did not lose it; we shifted 
it to the sixth and seventh year.
  Why did we do that? We did it because the Governors asked us to do 
it. You say, ``Why would the Governors ask for the money further out?'' 
The reason is because the participation standards--now what is that? 
That is the percentage of people who go on to welfare who are going to 
be required to go to work.
  Not everyone who goes on welfare is going to be required to go to 
work. In fact, in the first year, I believe the number is 20 percent of 
the people who go on welfare, the States will collect only 20 percent 
of the caseload and say, ``You will be in the time-limited program, the 
other 80 percent will be in the old welfare program.'' That will phase 
up 5 percent a year until we reach 50 percent.
  When this program is fully phased in, 50 percent of the people who 
come on to the welfare rolls will be put in a time-limited welfare 
program. The other 50 percent will be in the existing program, no time 
limit.
  But because it phases in over time and because anyone who is in a 
time-limited program when you go in--if you are one of the 20 percent 
next year that goes into the welfare program, under the law as drafted, 
you get 2 years of AFDC without having to work. So no one will be 
required to work under this law--since the block grant in this bill 
does not go into effect until October 1, 1996--so the first person who 
walks into the door on October 1, 1996 who is now subject to this law, 
2 years later is October 1998, that is the first person who has to work 
under this law. And, again, 20 percent of the caseload will have to do 
that, and many of those 20 percent, obviously, will have found work or 
gotten off the program anyway, so it is only a small percentage of the 
20 percent.
  What am I saying? The reason they want to backload it is because as 
participation rates increase, the number of people who are going to 
need day care because of the work requirements will increase in the 
outyears. So they really do not need day care funding as much next year 
or the year after or the year after. It is not until the year 2000, 
2001, 2002 that the day care funds really are needed in larger amounts. 
That is why we pushed the money back.
  So I think it was somewhat--well, let us just say erroneous for some 
reason for Members to argue that there were cuts in day care funds 
when, in fact, we added more money and put it in the years where we 
believe the money was to be needed.
  So the two major criticisms that I heard on the floor, one being the 
Medicaid issue and the other being the issue with child care, I think, 
were not necessarily made accurately.
  If I can just make a couple more comments about the Medicaid issue. 
The one other thing I wanted to mention on Medicaid is that there are 
several States that have gotten Medicaid waivers already to be able to 
determine eligibility. They have gotten waivers from the Federal 
Government to enact their own Medicaid plan and to create their own 
eligibility standards for who qualifies for Medicaid.

  All of the States that have done that have actually expanded 
eligibility. Let me repeat that. States who have actually gotten 
waivers and have been given the opportunity to redetermine who is 
eligible or not have actually not cut people from the Medicaid rolls 
but have actually expanded the Medicaid rolls.
  So the concern that somehow or another if we do not require AFDC 
recipients to be included in Medicaid that States will immediately rush 
to cut them off is not borne out by the experiences of the States, like 
Tennessee and others that have gone forward with their own Medicaid 
waivers.
  That is just an additional point that I think should have been noted.
  There were a couple other things that were mentioned that I want to 
discuss. Those are the two major issues.
  So you can see from the discussion that we are really not that far 
apart on the big issues. In fact, I suggest we, in fact, moved in their 
direction on one of those two issues, and the other one is going to be 
debated in the Medicaid debate.
  The Democratic leader said that there were cuts in the EITC, the 
earned income tax credit. That is true. There was a cut in the earned 
income tax credit. When I say cut, we reduced the rate of growth. That 
program is expanding tremendously, and we cut back somewhat in the 
growth in that program, but it is not in this bill.
  I do not know whether he suggested that it was or that it is coming 
later, but he did mention in his statement we cut the earned income tax 
credit. I just wanted to state for the record that the earned income 
tax credit is not in the welfare bill; it is not in the bill we voted 
on. I think that just needs to be clarified for the purposes of the 
record.
  The other comment that I heard on the floor was that we changed the 
SSI provisions to reduce benefits to some children and knock off the 
SSI rolls other children. Two comments.
  With respect to knocking off children who are on SSI right now, SSI 
being supplemental security income--children who have disabilities 
qualify for SSI and who are in poor families. They qualify for roughly 
$458 a month, plus Medicaid, plus food stamps and other services.
  What we have done is something that was in the original Senate bill 
that passed with 87 votes, as far as redetermining who are truly 
disabled and should be eligible. That provision passed in the Senate 
with 87 votes. It was included in the Democratic substitute welfare 
proposal. That exact language was included in the Democratic 
substitute, both in the House 

[[Page S19227]]
and the Senate, I might add. The House had the same language. It got 
the support of every Democratic Senator at one point in time.
  So I do not think there is a dispute that these children who came in 
and got on SSI as a result of what were individual functional 
assessments, that those children should no longer be covered under SSI. 
In fact, there was never even an amendment offered to change that 
standard. So we can put that issue aside.
  The other issue is a legitimate one, and that is that we have reduced 
payments to some children who are still considered disabled under SSI. 
Let me explain to you how that occurred.
  In the Senate bill, all children who qualified for SSI received the 
full $458 a month. That is an SSI benefit. That is an SSI benefit 
whether you are an adult or child. SSI was originally created to be a 
supplemental income program. That is what it is, supplemental security 
income. It was supposed to be a supplemental security income program 
for adults who are disabled and, obviously, not able to work. So we 
provided this money for them to be able to support themselves.
  Children have been included in that but get the same amount of money 
as an adult who, with that money, must support themselves. Obviously, 
children do not have to support themselves. Many of the families of 
children who are on SSI are on AFDC and other government support 
programs. Some of them are working families, working poor, and qualify 
as poor and, therefore, their children are eligible for SSI. So that is 
not the sole source of income to support that child, yet they get the 
same amount of money as an adult who must use that as their sole means 
of support.
  So what we said in looking at how we could compromise with the 
House--and what the House had done was take children who qualified for 
SSI and divided them into two categories: The first category being 
those who needed 24-hour care or care that if they did not get would 
have been institutionalized. They would continue to receive cash. 
Everyone else would get no cash. They would still be eligible for SSI, 
but they would get no cash. What they would get is they would be 
eligible for amounts of funds that were then going to be block granted 
to States, and the States could provide services to them to meet the 
needs of their disability.

  Well, there are many Members on this side of the building who had 
problems with no cash for these less severely disabled children, and we 
did not like the idea of the block grant. A lot of disability advocates 
did not like the idea of a block grant. So what we did is--and Senator 
Chafee worked very hard on this, and I gave him credit for that last 
night when I talked--we fought very hard on this to keep the cash 
assistance for all disabled children. But we recognized--and this is 
the concession we gave to the House--that there were varying degrees of 
disability, and a child with disabilities that did not require 
additional attention from the parents to be able to stay at home and 
live at home, obviously, did not need the kind of cash resources like 
the more severely disabled children. So we created a differentiation 
between those who need more constant home care from the parent, which 
would, in a sense, take the parent from the job market and require them 
to stay at home, and the children who were disabled but do not require 
that kind of constant attention, and that is therefore not as much of a 
drain on the parents to provide for them. So we created that very small 
difference, which is a 25-percent reduction in benefits. They still 
receive cash assistance, but they only receive 75 percent of the full 
SSI payment. We think that was a very reasonable compromise. I can 
understand how some Members would like to see the full 100 percent. But 
we think that was a reasonable compromise between what the House and 
the Senate had come up with.
  The final point I wanted to make is in the area of child protection. 
There were comments made about how we are taking foster care and 
adoption and family protection services and slashing them under this 
bill. I will state for the Record, again, that under the House bill, 
this area was block granted completely. All of the services provided 
under that title were block granted and cut by $2.3 billion over the 
next 7 years. In the Senate bill, we did not have any provision on this 
issue, except that we cut $1.3 billion from this area to help finance 
the rest of the bill. We did not deal with any reforms in the area. We 
simply took some money out of one section of the child protection area; 
$1.3 billion was the cut here.
  In the conference report, we did not cut $2.3 billion, we did not cut 
$1.3 billion, we cut $400 million. So the bill that Members voted for 
here--87 Members voted for it--actually cut the area of adoption and 
foster care and child protection more than the bill that they now 
objected to as cutting too much. So, again, I question whether all of 
that information really was sufficiently discussed and debated and 
gotten to Members on both sides of the aisle before their votes were 
cast.
  The other point I wanted to make is that the entitlements to 
maintenance payments for adoption and foster care remained entitlements 
in the conference report. They were not in the House bill, but we 
negotiated and maintained the direct payments to children for adoption 
and foster care as an entitlement under this bill, which we think was 
very important, and was a step in the direction of those who had 
concerns about the block grant. The area we block granted, I say to 
Members, is that in the child protection area, 50 percent of all the 
money spent in that area is spent on administrative overhead expenses. 
Fifty percent does not get to the children. It is all very overhead-
intensive. What we have done is given the States the flexibility, 
through the block grant, to eliminate a lot of this overhead expense 
and get a lot more direct services to the children in need. We also 
allow for agencies like the police and the social service agency to 
communicate with each other, which is not allowed under current law.
  We think we have taken dramatic steps forward in this area in which 
we have seen some miserable results in recent months, from the Chicago 
case to this horrible tragedy of this young girl, Alyssa, in New York, 
to other tragedies which we are all familiar with in our States. So we 
believe this is an area that is ripe for new developments and changes. 
We allow for that in this bill.
  In conclusion, I want to say that I think the real differences 
between the Republicans and the Democrats on the welfare issue come 
down now to more tactical reasons for not supporting this bill than 
they do substantive reasons. Again, I am not questioning whether or not 
it is a legitimate reason to oppose the bill. In fact, I say it very 
may well be a legitimate reason to oppose this bill. All I am 
suggesting is that those who voted against this conference report 
examine it for the particulars that are in here, and look at it in 
terms of not saying that we have to scrap this and start all over 
again, when, in fact, I think we have substantial agreement here, and 
that if we can make some modifications in a couple of the areas that I 
suggested, and that, in fact, we can find a workable compromise that 
not only will many Members on the other side of the aisle and, 
hopefully, all our Members on this side, will be able to support 
enthusiastically, but one that the President could support and one that 
we can include in the Balanced Budget Act of, hopefully 1995--maybe 
1996, the way things are going.
  I thank the Senator from Georgia for his indulgence. I know he has 
been waiting.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. NUNN addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia is recognized.

                          ____________________