[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 4]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 4445-4446]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




    PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY, WORK, AND FAMILY PROMOTION ACT OF 2003

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                           HON. RAHM EMANUEL

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, February 13, 2003

  Mr. EMANUEL. Mr. Chairman, I rise today in opposition to H.R. 4, the 
Personal Responsibility, Work, and Family Promotion Act of 2003, and in 
support of the Democratic substitute amendment.
  For twenty years, a complicit agreement regarding welfare existed 
between conservatives and liberals in this country. Conservatives 
refused to devote more money to the program, and liberals refused to 
demand anything of recipients. We lost two generations of Americans to 
this failed system of dependency.
  I am a long-time believer in welfare reform. I worked in the White 
House and with the Congress to help enact the welfare reform 
legislation of 1996--and I was proud to be a part of the strong, 
bipartisan reform that legislation created. I applaud my colleagues in 
the House on both sides of the aisle who helped to pass what has been a 
landmark of successful reform. The 1996 reforms broke from the past 
with a new approach that grounded the welfare system in the values of 
work and responsibility. It was a bold and daring experiment that 
worked.
  Instead of simply handing needy families a check, we created new 
opportunities for families on welfare. By providing access to education 
and training, we helped welfare recipients to get better and more 
lucrative jobs. Recognizing recipients' need to care for their young 
children, we helped them to get child care, and allowed mothers of 
young children modified work requirements. Realizing that many low-
paying jobs do not provide health insurance, we instituted transitional 
medical assistance for families coming off welfare.
  Since enactment of the 1996 reforms, enrollment has plunged more than 
50 percent. The percentage of welfare recipients who work has increased 
five-fold over the past decade, and states now spend more on work 
support than on cash benefits. Thanks in large part to welfare reform, 
8 million people left poverty in the 90s, teen pregnancy dropped by 
more than 20 percent, and child support collections doubled. We are 
moving in the right direction because we were true to our common 
values.
  The most important thing we've accomplished with welfare reform has 
been to connect a generation of children with the culture of work. Most 
of us grew up watching our parents go to work. We internalized the 
value of work and now are passing these values onto our own children. 
Today, millions of children who would otherwise have grown up in a home 
where work was alien, now are being raised in a home where they are 
learning the routine of work.
  In my state of Illinois, caseloads dropped 74.9 percent between 1996 
and 2001, and, despite the recession, continued to fall an additional 
23.7 percent in 2002. Many credit our strong success in caseload 
reduction to the state's innovative use of the flexibility in the 
original legislation, allowing Illinois to provide appropriate support 
for families making the transition from welfare to work. The proposed 
reauthorization will have a particularly disastrous effect on states 
like Illinois that have taken advantage of family support provisions to 
make notable progress. By removing the support system that has allowed 
many to get off and stay off welfare, this legislation is likely to 
create major setbacks in the progress of reform.
  The Democratic substitute amendment builds on the success of the 1996 
reforms. It retains the strong work incentives that not only help 
individuals go back to work, but provide then with greater job security 
by helping them become better educated, and train for better jobs. It 
recognizes the importance of giving mothers with young children the 
flexibility to

[[Page 4446]]

take care of their children. It eliminates the current exclusion of 
legal immigrants from the system.
  The Republican legislation represents a return to the failed 
ideologies of the past. It is not realistic to count the number of new 
hours of work mandated by this bill, and call reform a success. In 
voting for this legislation, you are voting against education and 
training to help current welfare recipients get out of dead-end jobs. 
You are voting for standards that will create hardships for working 
mothers, and add thousands to waiting lists for child care. You are 
voting to continue to exclude legal immigrants from participating in a 
program that would help them to contribute to this country rather than 
being simply a drain on the system.
  In fact, I find the title of this legislation ironic: The Personal 
Responsibility, Work, and Family Promotion Act in fact stifles personal 
responsibility, discourages work, and creates hardship for families. 
Inherent in the concept of personal responsibility is making the choice 
to work towards self-improvement. By mandating more hours of work while 
limiting the training and education options are available to workers, 
this bill removes all incentive for personal responsibility.
  Promoting work is not as simple as increasing work hours. There are 
likely to be countless individuals who, because they do not have the 
time, health, or child care resources to work forty hours each week, or 
simply cannot find a job where they are permitted to work forty hours, 
will choose instead not to work at all. If this legislation aims to 
promote work, it must do so by making work more realistic for workers 
and their families, not by imposing mandates that make working more 
difficult.
  Lastly, the legislation creates untold hardship for families. By 
increasing mandated work hours, while eliminating the current 
accommodation for women with young children, the bill will vastly 
increase the need for child care, without providing resources to the 
states to pay for it. Beyond this, the fact that the legislation limits 
opportunities for education and vocational training will keep many 
individuals in dead-end, low-paying jobs, with limited possibility to 
create better opportunities for their families.
  Creating bipartisan compromise on welfare reform is never easy. It 
took us three tries to find a bill that worked in 1996. However, in 
this time of economic hardship for our nation, and our states in 
particular, it is even more essential that the Congress works in a 
bipartisan fashion to forge compromise on a welfare reform 
reauthorization that works. Welfare reform succeeded in 1996 when we 
stopped making it a political issue, and devoted our selves to passing 
meaningful legislation.
  I have no illusions about what is going to happen today. However, I 
am disappointed that this Congress has chosen to take an enormous step 
backwards, prioritizing politics over pragmatism on an issue on which 
we have allowed good principles to rule in the past. I know that there 
are good people on both sides of the aisle, with good values, who have 
seen reforms we created improve the lives of people back home. To those 
in this Congress with whom I worked in 1996, let us not walk away from 
that we have accomplished. We have a mutual obligation not to let bad 
politics undo our good work.
  I am confident that there will be no shortage of politics and 
partisan fights this session--about their tax cut, the deficit, 
Medicare reform, prescription drugs. To give up on proven success on 
welfare reform to engage in another unnecessary partisan fight is 
wrong.
  Welfare reform is about demanding responsibility, encouraging work, 
and making work pay. Over the past six years, we as a nation--and 
millions of individuals--have benefited from our willingness to move 
beyond the old politics. This legislation represents a return to the 
failed politics and policies of the past. It is not compassionate nor 
is it conservative. It does a disservice to millions of families who 
have moved from welfare to work, and to the millions still struggling 
to do so. And it does wrong by our value as Americans.

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