[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 17 (Wednesday, February 7, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1062-S1063]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       THE BUSINESS OF THE SENATE

  Mr. ASHCROFT. It is a matter of interest and of concern to hear 
questions raised about the business of the Senate. We have much 
business to conduct. I should just point out that if we are worried 
about the cost of interest or worried about the finances of this 
country, if we are worried about the financial well-being of America, 
the full faith and credit of the United States, nothing could be more 
important than balancing the budget and moving this country in a 
fiscally responsible way toward accountability. We must cease the 
practice of displacing to the next generation the responsibility of 
paying for the programs to which we seem addicted.
  We have spent a year working hard to try to do that. It is a little 
bit troublesome to hear individuals from the other side of the aisle 
suggest that the work has not been hard. It has been very hard. Last 
year, we voted well over 600 times. In the first 5 years of this decade 
we voted about 320 times on an average per year. I think if we really 
care about the future of this country, if we really care about interest 
rates, we will balance the budget. We will enact an amendment which 
will structurally require us to balance the budget and the full faith 
and credit of the United States will not be dependent upon the 
activities of the Senate and the House. They will be guaranteed by the 
structure of the Government which we have.
  I believe that if we are concerned about the debt limit, we ought to 
take the steps necessary to make sure we do not unreasonably incur debt 
and that we do not irresponsibly continue to displace the costs of 
those things which we seek to have to the next generation. I am 
perfectly willing to work hard and to stay late, and I believe we all 
are and we all ought to be. But we all ought also to work in good 
faith. When we see a bill like the farm bill come up and we see a 
threatened filibuster and several hundreds of amendments proposed, with 
a view toward making it difficult to pass and enact the measure, I 
think those who are concerned about the way in which we spend our time 
here ought to speak clearly in those instances as well. Because when we 
have filibustering, whether it be done formally through time spent 
speaking in the Chamber or through efforts to delay passage of 
legislation merely by proposing redundant amendments which have nothing 
to do with the legislation, sense-of-the-Senate amendments that are not 
really germane to our activities, those also impair our progress.
  So I do believe that we have a great job to do. I think we have to be 
realistic about doing it. We have to be consistent in working toward 
it. We have to understand if we are, indeed, worried about the cost of 
interest and the cost of capital in this country and what it does to 
our citizens, we should understand that balancing the budget of the 
United States would very likely reduce the average cost of housing in 
this country to families by a couple thousand dollars a year, and 
reduce the average cost of a car loan by $1,000 or more.
  That is important. That can happen by balancing the budget. So we 
ought to do our work. There are tasks that have been left undone, and 
we must focus on them. I am eager to get them done.
  I rise today to point out one of those tasks which remains undone. 
This task does not remain undone, however, because the Congress has 
failed to act. The task of welfare reform remains undone because the 
President of the United States has vetoed the work product of the 
Congress, and has preferred the status quo, a rather bankrupt welfare 
system, the tragedy of which is to be measured most importantly in 
human lives and human costs, not in terms of the actual resources in 
dollars and cents, although they are not inconsequential.
  At the time our Republic was coming into existence, Madison 
envisioned, in Federalist Paper No. 57, a Congress ``with a habitual 
recollection of their dependence on the people.'' He wanted Government 
to be dependent on the people. I am afraid we have inverted that. We 
have people who are now dependent upon Government. And perhaps today's 
business in the agricultural area was a clear indication of that--
farmers who clearly would not know how to plant, could not understand 
whether the Government would allow them to plant or not allow them to 
plant until we passed a new agriculture bill.
  It is a shame that instead of having a Congress habitually aware of 
its dependence on the people, the people could not even do the most 
fundamental things that citizens are supposed to do without first 
looking to the Congress. I have to say that I was pleased that the 
agricultural act this year moves us away from that system of 
dependence.
  It is the freedom to farm act. It begins to say to individuals, 
``Government will not be dictating when you plant, when you reap, 
whether you plant wheat or whether you plant corn, when you inhale, 
when you exhale. The Government does not want you dependent on 
Government.'' We need to have a farm program and a system of 
agriculture in America that initiates its activities based on the will, 
the desire, the creativity of individuals and the demands of the 
marketplace. So today we took a step away from dependence by the 
agricultural community on Government. We tried to take a step away from 
dependence by many people on Government with welfare reform, moving 
people from the dependence of welfare to the dignity of industry and 
work. The President of the United States vetoed that.
  It is a tremendous problem that our welfare system has encouraged 
dependence on Government. Welfare law has conditioned assistance on 
dependence and irresponsibility rather than promoting the virtues of 
work, independence, and integrity.
  We have sent the wrong message. We have said to individuals, ``No 
matter how irresponsible you are, we will continue your payments.'' As 
a matter of fact, it has been worse than that. We have said, ``The more 
irresponsible you are, the more children you bring into the world, 
children whom you cannot support, we will increase your payments.'' We 
have actually provided an incentive for irresponsibility.
  That has been a pernicious, negative impact of our welfare system 
that instead of moving us toward the value of independence, it has 
moved us deeper and deeper into the mire of dependence. The tragedy of 
dependence has not only been in the numerics of a budget that is out of 
control, in an entitlement system, it has been in the tally of 
individual lives, families and entire communities.
  When I served as chairman of the National Commission on American 
Urban Families in 1992, I went to some communities where 80 percent of 
the children were without fathers. That was shocking. But it was almost 
impossible to comprehend that in some neighborhoods children were born 
and raised who did not know a child with a father. In other words, in 
some of the neighborhoods in those communities, fatherhood was 
nonexistent. That is a tragedy. That is a consequence of a welfare 
system that demands reform, a welfare 

[[Page S1063]]
system which we sought to reform, and the reform of which would have 
changed it substantially to avoid and avert that human tragedy. But 
when the rescue was on the way, the reform was vetoed by the President 
of the United States.
  The number of individuals receiving AFDC has more than tripled--more 
than tripled--since 1965. The rescue program designed to assist people 
and lift them from poverty has mired them deeper and deeper in the mud.
  More than 3 million of 5 million welfare recipients will be on the 
rolls for more than 8 years. The average length of stay is 13 years. 
Programs designed to lift people and help them up have held them down. 
The hand up has become a web of dependency. You know, a net can either 
be used as a safety net or a snaring net. Unfortunately, the welfare 
system in the United States of America has been a net of snaring rather 
than a net of safety.
  Fifty percent of unwed teenage mothers receive welfare within 1 year 
of having a child. Children born into welfare families are three times 
more likely to be on welfare when they reach adulthood.
  This tragedy of a welfare system, which is uninterrupted and 
continues unreformed because the President of the United States has 
vetoed the work product of this Senate and of the U.S. House of 
Representatives, is a tragedy in no uncertain terms. Perhaps the 
tragedy is compounded in the way that interest compounds on debt--when 
you cannot pay the interest, you begin to pay interest on unpaid 
interest, and it snowballs.
  When you have a welfare system that is intergenerational, you have a 
snowballing impact of a welfare tragedy, the human cost of which is 
staggering.
  I give you an example. Ernesto Ventura, a 4-year-old child from the 
inner city of Boston, MA, was brutally abused and neglected by his 
mother. He is a third generation welfare recipient. His mother Clarabel 
was 26 years old and pregnant, a mother of six, by five different 
fathers--I should say men because I am not confident they were fathers. 
A crack addict, she sold food stamps and even the family's washing 
machine to get money to purchase drugs.
  One day Clarabel went into a rage and plunged Ernesto's arm into 
boiling water. He did not get any medical treatment until paramedics 
found him 3 weeks later in a back room of his project housing, smeared 
with his own blood and excrement.
  Ernesto's family is the story of an intergenerational web of welfare. 
It is not a web that is a safety net. It is a net of ensnarement. 
Fifteen great-grandchildren now comprise the fourth generation of this 
welfare web. The type of benefits received by the extended family are 
the alphabet soup of the acronyms of Washington--all perfectly legal, 
and just as perfectly destructive to the human spirit. They were 
designed to help, but seem to destroy the one fundamental ingredient in 
the recipe for recovery that is absent from our welfare system, and 
that is hope.
  Ernesto Ventura's grandmother Eulalia has 14 living children, 
virtually all of whom receive a variety of at least one form of welfare 
benefits from AFDC, SSI, food stamps, Medicaid, subsidized housing. 
This does not even count what the grandchildren and great-grandchildren 
and others receive.
  It is time for us to understand that we need to move welfare reform 
to the top of the agenda. We need to insist that the President 
reconsider his veto of the reform measure which would have dramatically 
changed this tragedy.
  Yes, it is a problem whenever we threaten the fiscal integrity and 
financial security of the United States. No question about it. There is 
a need for us to be fiscally responsible, financially accountable. But 
there is something even more tragic when we threaten the safety and 
security of the lives of individuals born in this, the greatest nation 
on Earth, but ensnared in a web of welfare, a net which was meant for 
safety but which becomes a net of entrapment.
  We need to replace the dehumanizing dependence of Government with the 
dignity of work and hope. It is clear that we have had a system for the 
last several decades which emphasizes debt instead of discipline; it 
has emphasized the dehumanizing dependence instead of the dignity of 
industry and work. It has provided for decadence instead of decency, 
and the real cost of our approach has been in human lives.
  Welfare reform would fundamentally redefine this culture. It is 
something about which we must be concerned immediately. From a culture 
of dependence, we must switch to a culture of dignity and hope. And 
dignity and hope come in the dignity and hope of work.
  We enacted a 5-year limit on benefits to say that welfare was a way 
of helping people up, but not of providing a career. The President 
vetoed our intentions. We said that there should be no entitlement that 
exists forever based on the ability of people to qualify, but instead 
we should give the States the opportunity to structure welfare reform 
plans which elicit from individuals the kind of behavior that would 
bring them out of welfare. That therapy was similarly vetoed by the 
President.
  We asked that there be a requirement for work and that people prepare 
themselves for work, that they develop in themselves the capacity to be 
productive, to lift themselves and their families out of the web of 
welfare dependency and out of the snare, the entrapping snare of the 
so-called net of safety, which has become a net of capture. And 
requiring work was vetoed by the President of the United States when he 
vetoed the welfare bill.
  We passed a welfare bill which confessed the fact that Government 
alone is very unlikely to be able to inspire people to the kind of 
ethics and values that will result in their rescue from the tragedy of 
welfare. We passed a bill that would invite charitable organizations to 
deliver services because the compassionate capacity of these 
organizations meets the deeper needs of individuals, and these 
organizations tend to view individuals not just as statistics who 
qualify for a governmental program, but as worthy human beings who have 
the potential of industry and the potential of opportunity and the 
potential of service to themselves and others.
  Our welfare reform measure included that, and that as well was vetoed 
by the President of the United States.
  We cannot allow the veto by the President of the United States to 
extinguish the flame of hope that is within us and needs to be 
rekindled across this Nation from county to county, city to city, State 
to State, a flame of hope that says we can do better than what we are 
doing.
  The wretched tragedy of the welfare system as it now exists is not 
something with which we must live. It is something which we can and 
ought to change. It is not simply a debate about restructuring a 
Government program. It is a debate about how we will save the 
opportunity for America to continue to reach its potential. It is a 
question about rescuing our children and our culture from tragedy.
  The human costs of what the welfare system has occasioned are beyond 
speaking, and the examples are hard to recite. But unless we confront 
them, we will never understand the desperate need we have to change the 
way in which we do business.
  Every day we fail to reform the welfare system, we are nourishing the 
seeds of cultural disaster in our country. We have the ingredients for 
reform in the bills which we have passed. I believe it is time again 
for us to act and to call upon the President to change his mind on 
welfare reform and to endorse a reform which will save a generation and 
provide an opportunity for security and success in this society in the 
next century.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Ashcroft). Without objection, it is so 
ordered. The Senator from Iowa.

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