[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 81 (Wednesday, June 5, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H5927-H5928]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             WELFARE REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Barrett] is recognized for 
10 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. BARRETT of Wisconsin. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow the House of 
Representatives will be considering a bill dealing with the W-2 
Wisconsin Works Program. I would like to spend a few minutes talking 
about that bill tomorrow, because I think it is a bill that is frankly 
a bill that should not be before the House of Representatives.
  Mr. Speaker, when I am home in my district in Wisconsin, one of the 
questions I am asked most often is, Why cannot the Democrats and 
Republicans get along better? Why does every issue have to turn into a 
partisan issue? I think that this issue is an excellent example of a 
time when an issue that should not be a partisan issue has become one, 
and it has become a partisan issue unfortunately, and I think 
unnecessarily.
  Several weeks ago President Clinton in his Saturday weekend radio 
address announced that he supported the waiver request that would be 
coming from the State of Wisconsin. In essence, he offered an olive 
branch to the Republicans. He said, I agree with you. What is happening 
tomorrow is that the Republicans are taking this olive branch, they are 
breaking it in half, and they are sticking it in the President's eye. 
They are trying to embarrass him, they are trying not to work together 
at a time where I think Republicans and Democrats can work together. 
Again, I think that that is very unfortunate.

  I think the people in this body should have a little history of the 
W-2 legislation that passed the State of Wisconsin. This is legislation 
that passed the State legislature earlier this year and was sent to the 
Governor. At that time the Governor of the State of Wisconsin used his 
partial veto power 97 times; 97 times he lined out parts of this 
legislation that affected 27 different areas of this legislation. He 
then took 5 weeks to prepare some waiver requests, and last week he 
announced at a press conference that he would be delivering these 
waiver requests to the President of the United States. The following 
morning, he took the waiver requests to the White House.
  That day, I called his office and called the office of the Department 
of Health and Social Services in the State of Wisconsin, since I 
represent the district that is most affected in this entire country by 
the W-2 program. I asked for a copy of the waiver requests. Those came 
yesterday. It is interesting that those came yesterday, because we are 
going to be voting on this legislation tomorrow.
  Let us get to this legislation, because for the first time that I 
have been able to discover in the history of this country, we are going 
to have a freestanding bill and the Congress of the United States is 
going to grant waivers to a State without any prior hearing, without 
any public input, without any chance for people who are affected by 
this program to have any input, to have any recourse with their elected 
officials. The people who are affected by this program are in essence 
being told, you are shut out of the process.
  Mr. Speaker, this is arrogance at its worst. This is an arrogant 
misuse of power and it is an arrogant misuse of the process of this 
institution.
  Now, what should happen? Mr. Speaker, tomorrow there is going to be a 
substitute amendment that is going to be offered by the gentleman from 
Wisconsin [Mr. Kleczka]. That amendment is going to do several things. 
First, it is going to encourage the Secretary of the Department of 
Health and Social Services to grant these waivers, but it is going to 
encourage the Secretary to do so after the public has been given an 
opportunity to have their input. That is what normally happens.
  What is ironic about this is that this is a situation where the last 
time a waiver request was granted by a President without this due 
process, without the 30-day public hearing period, the courts struck it 
down. They said, you have to have the public hearing. What is happening 
here is we are trying to circumvent that process. We do not want the 
people of this country to have the ability to hear and have the 
legislators hear what they have to say.
  The legislation that is offered by the gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. 
Kleczka] is also going to say that this waiver should be granted if the 
W-2 waiver requests that have been submitted to the President of the 
United States are consistent with the public representations that the 
Governor of the State of Wisconsin has made. That is all we are asking.
  We are asking two things: First, that the public have an opportunity 
to have their concerns mentioned; and second, we are asking that the 
Governor of the State of Wisconsin, who has made representations on 
this issue, that the waivers are consistent with those representations. 
I do not see where that is any great disservice to the people who are 
pushing this waiver.

  I would also like, Mr. Speaker, to talk a little bit about the merits 
of the plan. Welfare reform is something that everyone in this body is 
interested in. People from both sides of the aisle recognize that the 
current welfare system is not working. But as we seek to improve this 
welfare system, we cannot ignore the fact that real people are involved 
in this system, that real people are the ones that may be hurt if we 
act cavalierly.
  The Governor of the State of Wisconsin said, oh, yes, there are going 
to be speed bumps in this process. Mr. Speaker, our job as legislators 
is to make sure that real people are not those speed bumps, and I 
represent the district in this country that is going to be most 
affected by this plan.
  I would like to point out just a couple of things about this plan. 
This plan requires women who have given birth to return to work after 
12 weeks. I am not going to debate the merits of that. There are people 
here who think that is a good idea; there are people here who think 
that is a bad idea. But what it does not recognize is that by pouring 
literally thousands more children into the child care system in 
Milwaukee County, it is going to overload the system. The system is not 
equipped at this time to deal with that.
  What is going to happen? These women are going to be given a choice. 
They are either going to put their children in substandard care, or 
they are going to stay home and lose their benefits. We are talking 
about 4-month old babies here who are going to be put in substandard 
care or their mothers are going to lose their benefits.
  Now, that is under the merits. But I do not want to spend all my time 
on

[[Page H5928]]

the merits, because what we are seeing tomorrow is one of the worst 
abuses of the legislative process that I have seen since I have been in 
this body. The first time in the Nation's history we are going to have 
a stand-alone waiver request. And are the committees of jurisdiction 
going to be asked to consider this? Absolutely not. Are we going to 
have any public hearings on this? Absolutely not. Is a single public 
American going to be able to have their concerns addressed? Absolutely 
not.
  This morning, Mr. Speaker, I was on a radio program in my district 
and the question came, well, what happens to the Indians in the State 
of Wisconsin who are affected by this? What if this violates one of the 
treaties? Have you looked at that? I explained to them that there is 
not a single legislator outside of the State of Wisconsin who has ever 
looked at these waiver requests. There are 600 pages of waiver requests 
that are going to be approved by this body tomorrow, and no one had 
looked at them and there has been no public hearing on them.
  All we are doing is denying the people of the State of Wisconsin and 
the people of every other State in this country the ability to have 
their voice be heard. That is not the way this institution should 
operate, Mr. Speaker. That is not the way this Government should 
operate.
  Now, when this piece of legislation passed the State of Wisconsin's 
legislature, it did so on a bipartisan basis. But the Governor changed 
it in some significant ways, but at the time that he signed it, the law 
of this land was that this body, or this Government more correctly, the 
Federal Government, would examine those waivers to make sure that they 
were consistent with the U.S. Constitution, that they were consistent 
with Federal law.
  Now the majority is saying, forget about it, it does not matter to us 
whether they are consistent with the U.S. Constitution. It does not 
matter to us whether they are consistent with Federal law.
  But perhaps the most galling part of this entire process, Mr. 
Speaker, is that this is a situation where the State of Wisconsin has 
come to this administration numerous times asking for waivers, and each 
and every time it has come to this administration asking for waivers, 
what has happened? President Clinton has granted the waivers.
  We are not dealing with a situation where President Clinton has been 
unresponsive. We are not dealing with a situation where he has denied 
the request for flexibility or the chance for States to act as 
laboratories of democracy. No. He has worked together on a partnership. 
He has worked together to allow the State of Wisconsin to experiment. 
But that is not enough, because now we are dealing with Presidential 
politics.
  So instead of the State and the President working together in a 
partnership to try to improve the lives of the people of Wisconsin, we 
have the President of the United States who has offered an olive 
branch.
  Some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle probably did not 
like the fact that he agreed that he should have the waiver request 
approved. They did not like it because they felt that he was stealing 
their issue, that welfare reform is somehow a Republican issue and 
President Clinton has decided that he agrees with this experiment in 
the State of Wisconsin. They feel like he pulled one over on them.
  But there is not what the American people want. The American people 
do not care if it is a Republican issue or a Democratic issue; they 
care if we are making progress.

                              {time}  2330

  So it was wrong, Mr. President. When President Clinton offered an 
olive branch, the Republicans should not have taken that olive branch, 
broken it, and stuck it in his eye. That is not the way this body 
should operate.

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