[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 101 (Wednesday, July 10, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H7243-H7244]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2145
PRESIDENT CLINTON'S FAILURE TO SIGN THE WISCONSIN WELFARE REFORM WAIVER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Campbell). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from California [Mr. Riggs] is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. RIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I rise during special orders to point out 
that today the countdown is up. Today marks the day that President 
Clinton should have signed the Wisconsin welfare reform waiver. Why is 
this important to me as a Californian? Because our Governor and State 
legislature have also requested from the Federal Government, 
specifically the Department of Health and Human Services, certain 
waivers to allow us in California to reform and streamline our welfare 
service to California residents.
  I think we can all remember that a month ago the President said 
publicly that he approved of the Wisconsin reform plan. He did not just 
mention his approval of the plan in passing. This is the plan that was 
originally known as putting families first, or now, as it is known 
simply in Wisconsin, W2. The President devoted an entire weekend radio 
address to this subject.
  Immediately after, though, he made those remarks his administration, 
encouraged by their liberal allies here in the Congress, Democratic 
allies, began to backtrack. Now it appears that the deadline today has 
come and gone with no waiver for the Wisconsin plan. I cannot really 
say that that surprises me too much, but I do not want to allow my 
cynicism to show too much. I actually had some hope that the President 
might at least in this one instance keep his word to the people of 
Wisconsin and the country.
  He may someday sign this waiver, but not until Wisconsin has had to 
go through all kinds of contortions at the mercy of the Department of 
Health and Human Services. Wisconsin's difficulties in obtaining this 
waiver are not unique. As I mentioned, California and many other States 
have had to come to Washington, hat in hand, and beg for a waiver to 
implement their welfare reform plans. Some States, including 
California, have had to wait months upon months for their waivers to go 
through.
  In fact, again in the case of California, we are still waiting to 
hear regarding three major welfare reform waiver requests to the 
Federal Government. The changes that are then required by the 
Washington bureaucrats have watered down so many of these State plans, 
of these State waiver requests,

[[Page H7244]]

that in some instances the Governors and the State legislatures which 
initially requested those waivers no longer want to implement them. In 
South Carolina, it cost millions of dollars to go through the waiver 
process, and when that waiver was finally approved it was so modified 
that the State of South Carolina deemed it no longer effective.

  We Republicans in Congress over the last 18 months, as the new 
majority in the Congress, have twice passed genuine welfare reform that 
would eliminate the need for States to have to go through the 
cumbersome counterproductive waiver process. But President Clinton, who 
as Candidate Clinton in 1992 promised to end welfare as we know it, has 
vetoed the welfare reform legislation not once but twice.
  This welfare reform controversy illustrates a key difference between 
Republicans and Democrats and between Bob Dole and President Clinton. 
Bob Dole and Republicans think it is absurd that the States, which 
really are the laboratories of democracy nowadays, and where the only 
genuinely successful welfare reform efforts have taken place, must come 
begging to Washington, to the very people who are the architects and 
protectors of the failed status quo, our current welfare system. It is 
Washington's disgraceful mess, after all, that the States are having to 
clean up.
  Mr. Speaker, although Wisconsin has been the Nation's leader in 
successfully reforming welfare, witness again the President's promise 
in his radio address a couple of months ago, and again President 
Clinton and congressional Democrats still think that Washington knows 
better than the people of Wisconsin how to fix their welfare program. 
They think that power, money, and resources should stay in Washington.
  The American people are sick of our disgraceful welfare system, which 
traps people in lives of dependency, illegitimacy, and despair, and 
which has led, according to the most recent statistics in America going 
back to 1993, to almost one-third of all births, 31 percent of all 
births being out of wedlock. The American people are sick of a heavy-
handed Federal Government that thinks it is so much smarter than 
everybody else. And most of all, they are sick of a President who will 
say literally anything that the polls tell him the people want to hear, 
and then turn around and do just the opposite.

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