Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

presented testimonials from women who had moved off welfare under his plan in Arkansas, and they described how much better they felt about themselves and about their children’s futures.

Bill was invited to the ceremony in October 1988 when President Reagan signed into law a welfare reform bill that included many provisions he and the Governors had sought.

By 1991, when Bill launched his campaign for President, it was clear that the reforms weren’t producing much change because the Bush Administration didn’t fund the new programs or aggressively implement them in the states. Bill promised to “end welfare as we know it” and to make the program pro-work and pro-family.

At the time Bill took office, America’s welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, received more than half of its funds from the federal government but was administered by the states, which contributed between 17 and 50 percent of the payments. Federal law required coverage of poor mothers and children, but the states set the monthly benefits. As a result, there were fifty different systems that provided benefits ranging from a high of $821 for a family with two children in Alaska to a low of $137 in Alabama. AFDC recipients were also eligible for food stamps and Medicaid.

On the legislative agenda of 1993 and 1994, the economic plan, NAFTA, the crime bill and health care took precedence over welfare reform. And when the Republicans gained control of Congress, they had their own ideas about how to reform the system.

They advocated strict limits on how long people could be on welfare; block grants of welfare funds to the states, including Medicaid, school lunches and food stamps; the cessation of all benefits to legal immigrants, even those who were working and paying taxes; and, as introduced by Newt Gingrich, a system of orphanages to house and raise children born out of wedlock to teen mothers. The Republican plan provided minimal support to help people make the transition to work.

Bill and I, along with members of Congress who wanted productive reform, believed that people able to work should work. But we recognized that assistance and incentives were necessary to help people move permanently from welfare to employment and that successful reform would require large investments in education and training, subsidies for child care and transportation, transitional health care, tax incentives to encourage employers to hire welfare recipients, and tougher child support collection efforts. We also opposed cutting off benefits to legal immigrants and shipping children of poor parents to orphanages.

In late 1995, the administration and Congress began serious efforts to pass legislation.

Much political posturing ensued. I think many Republicans were hoping that if they kept enough “poison pills” in the bill, they would put the President in a lose-lose situation. If he signed the bill, he would disappoint key Democratic constituencies and leave millions of poor kids vulnerable. If he vetoed it, the Republicans would have a popular issue in the 1996 election with voters who wanted reform and didn’t know the details of the legislation.

Some in the White House urged the President to sign whatever reform the Congress sent him. To do otherwise, they argued, would incur huge political costs for both the Administration and congressional Democrats in the upcoming election campaign. Many disagreed, arguing that the only solution was for Bill to outmaneuver the Republicans and convince the public that reform was his issue. My feelings about welfare ran deep and were probably more complicated than my husband’s. I believed that the system desperately required reform, but I had spent time as an advocate for children and women caught up in the system, and I knew that welfare was often essential as a temporary support for poor families. Yes, I had seen it exploited; but I had also seen it rescue people who used it to weather a rough period. Although I had privately argued against Administration decisions before, I had never publicly opposed an Administration policy or any of Bill’s decisions.

Now, however, I told him and his top staff that I would speak out against any bill that did not provide heath care through Medicaid, a federal guarantee of food stamps, and child care assistance for people making the transition off welfare. I also believed that these kinds of supports should be available to the working poor to lift them above the poverty line too.

The Republicans passed a bill with strict time limits on welfare, no supports for the transition to work, no benefits for legal immigrants, an end to federal oversight and accountability in how states spent federal welfare money. In short, the states would be free to determine what to offer in monthly payments, child care, food stamps and medical care or whether to offer them at all. After a vigorous debate inside the White House, the President vetoed the bill. Then the Republicans passed another bill with only minimal changes. I didn’t have to lobby hard with Bill, who knew he could not sign this one either.

Bill vetoed it, insisting that all poor children were entitled to child care, nutrition and medical benefits.

The third bill passed by Congress had the support of the majority of the Democrats in the House and Senate. It contained more financial support for moving people to work, offered new money for child care and restored the federal guarantees of food stamps and medical benefits. But it cut off most benefits to legal immigrants, imposed a five-year lifetime limit on federal welfare benefits, and maintained the status quo on monthly benefit limits, leaving the states free to set benefit limits. The federal welfare grants to the states were set at the amount states received in the early 1990s, when welfare rolls were at an alltime high. That meant the states would have the financial resources to provide the safety net that true reform required, and incentives to allot significant funding to programs that supported and encouraged work and independence.

The President eventually signed this third bill into law. Even with its flaws, it