The single greatest legislative achievement of the much-maligned 104th Congress was welfare reform. The new law ends the federal welfare entitlement for single mothers and requires states to get an increasing percentage of their welfare recipients to work.
But last week, two House committees approved an array of measures that would undermine the work requirement.
One amendment allows states to meet the “work” requirement by putting recipients in a classroom for training. It’s been tried already, and it doesn’t work very well. Another amendment, pushed by organized labor, declares welfare recipients can only fill jobs that don’t interfere with the duties, work rules, or “promotional opportunities” of existing (read: unionized) government workers. In effect, it would forbid hiring welfare workers for any job that some government employee is doing, thus encouraging the proliferation of bogus make-work jobs. “If these two provisions are applied to welfare reform,” says neoliberal welfare analyst Mickey Kaus, ” then the liberals and the unions will have succeeded in substantially crippling the Republican effort to put welfare recipients to work.”
These changes have only been approved at the committee level, which leaves time for sanity to return on the House floor. But there’s little reason for optimism. Republicans have been spooked by the charge that they’re a bunch of misanthropes. Most of them are not, of course, and in this case the tough original reforms were even politically popular. Let liberals defend soft welfare policies. Newt Gingrich might want to intervene now before any more damage is done to his party’s signal legislative achievement.
