Expressing the sense of the Congress that continuation of the welfare reforms provided for in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 should remain a priority.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

We have before us today a Republican resolution that should be backdated to the last Democratic President, if it is to be honest, because when America actually made great strides in decreasing poverty it was during that administration. But that is not what we are about today. This is a PR event.

H. Con. Res. 438 is a Republican attempt to take a victory lap on something they have done right. I mean on the war and gas prices and everything else, they cannot say anything. But in the run-up to this election, they are borrowing the vision and the success under the leadership of Mr. Clinton.

The resolution is not about reducing poverty. It is about increasing Republican poll numbers. America's poor and disadvantaged deserve a fair shake, not a glad hand.

It is unmistakably clear that domestic priorities under the current Republican administration and Republican Congress have focused on the rich, not the middle class, not the working class, and certainly not the disadvantaged class. And the record will show the great strides we have made to reduce poverty peaked in the year 2000, the beginning of the Bush administration, and they have been on a downward spiral ever since. The rate of poverty has been climbing during the Bush administration. The number of two-parent families living in poverty has increased during the Bush administration, and the number of American children living in poverty has also increased during the Bush administration.

Now, you have to draw the line somewhere; so I intend to vote ``no'' because I want a real agenda for reducing poverty in America. Congress needs a renewed commitment, not a disingenuous celebration. It was the pre-Bush economy that boosted the value of work. And that is not all. This resolution ignores the domestic priorities championed by Democrats that have made a meaningful difference in the lives of ordinary Americans, like the earned income tax credit.

Instead of a resolution meant to increase the poll numbers, we ought to be passing legislation to increase the minimum wage. We have tried and we have tried, and you can really do something for poverty if you would do it. In one stroke we could do more to reduce poverty in this country than all the resolutions that you have offered since the President took office 6 years ago.

That is an honest assessment of the situation. There is a concurrent resolution I authored with Mr. Levin. Since the Republicans will not allow us to consider it, let me take a moment to discuss it. It offers an honest assessment of where we are today. It highlights the progress made in the second half of the 1990s on poverty and unemployment. It also makes it clear that poverty has increased since 2000 with more than 5 million more Americans falling into poverty, including 1.5 million children. If you call that success, it is a strange success.

The percentage of single moms who are working today has declined by 4 percent since the beginning of the Bush administration. And we are sticking the States with new unfunded mandates; so there will be much less money available in the next several years to deal with this growing problem. That is the Republican solution.

Our resolution makes reducing poverty a national priority, not wishful thinking, by supporting the States,

who are the Nation's first responders in fighting poverty. We would like to have a great debate over whether or not America's best interest is served by a Republican resolution created for the campaign trail or by a Democratic resolution created to meet America's needs. As it now stands, the debate is about Republican photo ops and press releases, which I am sure have already been mailed.

This resolution is designed by the Republicans so that they can try to take a victory lap after some successes in the welfare. But there cannot be a victory lap because the race is not over. Poverty is up, wages are down, and the working poor are losing in the Bush economy.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Stark).

(Mr. STARK asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin).

(Mr. LEVIN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Neal).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey).

Mr. Speaker, could you tell us the time remaining?

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, we go through a policy like this in 20 minutes. The Republican policy toward children is, you have no entitlement to anything. The point of welfare reform was to take away the entitlement of health and welfare, and housing and food from children, to take away the entitlement and put it to 50 States to whatever they want to do.

And we have 50 different plans in this country. The Republicans define welfare, people, those eligible for TANF, in such a way that you can drive down the numbers. You can push people off into work. And there is nobody on this side who has not worked in their life, who does not think it is a good idea to work.

But what we believe is that you ought to work for a wage that is fair and provides a decent living. The Republicans for the entire period this has been in place have refused to raise the minimum wage.

You want to drive people into poverty, and you did drive them into poverty, because when they are in poverty you can make them do anything. That is the way you keep the costs down in business, have a workforce of people who have to work for the minimum wage, and that is it for them.

Now, you have cut Medicare. Medicare in every State in this country is

in a terrible mess. There are 300,000 children eligible for child care in California who do not have access because there is no money. You say to the mothers, go out and work. Leave your kids at home, leave them a package of graham crackers, leave them a television, and leave them with their 12-year-old sister. That is the Republican plan.

You also take away their housing benefits. When they go off of TANF they do not get access to those housing benefits they had before. So you take away every single piece of security for a child who knows they have a home, who knows there is going to be food on the table, who is going to have a parent there when they come home from school. And then you ask yourself why you have a drug problem in this country. Why you have kids getting in trouble everywhere, why the prisons are full.

This is the result of a public policy that says we do not believe in the common good. We cannot tax the rich, oh, no, no, we must not tax the rich, they need another wall around their compound. But you can put kids out on the street, with their mother working down at the local motel cleaning beds for $5.15 an hour, that is all right with you. It is that that we object to.

It is not that we do not think people should work, we just think they should work for a decent living, a decent wage, and you will not give them that. You want to define success. The press release will say, we have reduced the welfare rolls from 5 million, as it was in 2000, to about 1.9 today.

But you will say nothing of the human misery you have created by these policies. The reason none of us voted for the reauthorization was, you put no additional money in for child care. And you cut the benefits for health care. And you do not take care of the needs of the kids. This is not about adults. Adults can make it. But it is a question about whether we as Americans, as a part of the common good, think children are entitled to a decent and safe childhood.

And your answer is, we cut the welfare rolls, raise the flag, let's march around and have a big parade and we will send out press releases, we cut the welfare rolls. But poverty has increased. You have 5 million more people in poverty since Mr. Bush became President of the United States.

That is not an enviable record; 1\1/2\ million more children are in poverty. How can you celebrate that?

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Delaware (Mr. Castle), who has a different view of welfare reform as the Governor of a State who did a tremendous job in that capacity at the time we were changing welfare reform and the way it served America.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished member of the Ways and Means Committee, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. English).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, it is amazing, the gentleman who just left the well, when he would say this is a partisan resolution. I don't think the Republican name is in this resolution whatsoever. It is a figment of his imagination.

This was a team effort. President Clinton did sign this bill. This is not a partisan resolution. So why don't you join with us and rejoice in what we have accomplished.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Linder), a distinguished member of the Ways and Means Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I would remind the gentleman in the well that it is rare today that people work for minimum wage. But those who do earn $10,700 a year, they also get an earned income tax credit of $4,000. They also get food stamps worth $2,000. They get rent subsidies which varies.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania (Ms. Hart).

Mr. Speaker, I would like to point out to the gentlewoman who just spoke that the poverty rate among children has dropped 13 percent since the passage of this resolution, and, Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I don't know quite where to start in correcting the gentleman from Washington. First of all, he said that we didn't increase child care. Well, we had just done over a $1 billion increase, and that is just within the last few months. I would say that the gentleman's memory is a little short.

He also talked about a secret Republican agenda. I was in charge of this bill 10 years ago, and I insisted that we did not do any of that. In fact, I don't know of anybody that was trying to do that. I maintained that we had to keep up the food programs, we had to keep up the Medicaid payments, taking care of the health care. We had to take care of the kids. We had to produce child care, in addition to all of this and all of the other programs that go along with the poverty program.

But what did we expect? We expected people to climb out of poverty. We are going to help them, but they are going to help themselves.

The problem of those who still oppose welfare reform is they have no faith. They didn't have any faith in the human spirit. We did have faith in the human spirit, and I can tell you the real champions, the real heroes of welfare reform are those who pull themselves out of poverty.

It is not the Members of Congress or the Senate that are sitting on this floor. It is the single mom, and she is the hero.

We started this program about 15, 16 years ago. We worked hard on it for many, many years. At every turn, we recognized the fragile nature of those that we were trying to rescue. Oh, we had a poverty program that was being guarded so carefully by those that wanted to pay people not to work, not to get married and have kids, the most destructive behavior you could possibly have.

I remember when we came to this floor and debated this bill. Some of the comments that were made back then, and I will read one of the worst ones, and I won't even mention the Member's name because I think it is so bad. It says: read the proposal, read the small print, read the Republican contract. They are coming for our children, they are coming for the poor. They are coming for the sick, the elderly and the disabled.

That is the stuff we were listening to on this floor when we were on a rescue mission. Through the debate on July 18, 1996, after several of the Democrat Members, some of whom have spoken today, spoke against the bill, President Clinton announced that he was coming on to television. We retired back into the Cloakroom to see what he was going to say. He looked right into the TV cameras, and he said, I am going to sign this bill.

Well, that brought about some Democratic votes, and it made it truly a bipartisan bill. Since then, the statistical information that is out there is history. Let me run down just some of the things that welfare reform has accomplished.

Welfare caseloads are now down by 64 percent, as nearly 8 million parents and children no longer receive welfare. The overall poverty rate dropped 7 percent, the child poverty dropped 13 percent, the poverty rate of young children in female-headed families, the group most likely to go on welfare, dropped 15 percent from 1996 to 2004.

Compared with 1996, 1.4 million fewer children lived in poverty in 2004. That is a victory. That is a victory for the human race. That is a victory for the poor Americans. The number of adults on welfare who work has more than doubled since welfare reform. More broadly, the work of all never-married mothers has surged 34 percent since 1996.

I will never forget, at one of our hearings, and I think, Mr. McDermott, you were there, when one of the welfare workers came in and was bragging about one of her clients who went to school. One of the young kids had gone to school, and he raised his hand to get the attention of the teacher. The teacher finally looked down and said, What do you want? He says, My momma went to work today.

What a wonderful thing. That mother who had nothing to do all day but sit around for the postman to come and bring her a check is now a role model for that child. What a difference that this has made.

Yes, this was a rescue program. We paid a lot of money for job training and things in order to accomplish this welfare reform package, and it has worked.

I can tell you I was stunned when the President said he was going to sign it, because all of a sudden I realized, my God, look what we have done, look what we have done. Now I can look back with great pride and see what this Congress did, what we accomplished, that rescue mission that took so many people out of poverty.

Mr. Speaker, I urge passage of the bill.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 438) expressing the sense of the Congress that continuation of the welfare reforms provided for in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 should remain a priority.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and to include extraneous material on the subject of the concurrent resolution under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of House Concurrent Resolution 438. This resolution does something we don't do enough of in this institution: It takes a look back at what Congress tried to do in the previous years and assesses whether we got it right. As the text of the resolution suggests, many people, including some former critics, think we got it right.

Mr. Speaker, the results of the 1996 welfare reform are remarkable in terms of achieving and in some cases exceeding the goals the Nation laid out when Congress took on this challenging issue. Former Wisconsin Governor and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson has called welfare reform one of the most successful social policy changes in U.S. history, and I think he is right. In terms of reducing dependence, promoting work and earnings, and reducing poverty, it would be hard to mask the outcomes of these reforms.

I would also like to thank my colleague Clay Shaw for his steadfast leadership and tireless work to enact these remarkable reforms. Welfare reform did not happen overnight. And it would not have happened without his strong leadership.

Ten years ago today, this House passed what went on to become the landmark 1996 welfare reform law. At that time nearly 12 million parents and children were dependent on the government. Today, after 10 years of reforms and much success, that number is down to fewer than 5 million individuals dependent on welfare checks for support, a decline of an unprecedented 64 percent, almost two-thirds. Millions of those families now collect a paycheck instead of a welfare check. Since welfare reform was enacted, we have seen a sharp increase in work among welfare recipients. This is a stark contrast to the Nation's former welfare program under which there was no incentive to work. In fact, the prior program actually punished work. But today, because of welfare reform, work among those on welfare has more than doubled. And to support working families, the amount taxpayers provide for child care has tripled from $4 billion to nearly $12 billion today.

Back in 1996, welfare reform opponents argued that if enacted, this law would result in millions of additional children living in poverty. However, they were wrong with this prediction as they were with all their other predictions about what this law would accomplish. Compared to 1996, 1.4 million fewer children are in poverty today. This is a direct result of the pro-work, pro-family policies passed in 1996 and which are still in place today.

Earlier this year, the House accompanied by the Senate sent President Bush legislation to extend and strengthen the 1996 reforms to help even more low-income parents go to work. All States are now busy revamping their programs to meet that challenge. Based on the results of the 1996 reforms, we should have great confidence that millions more families will succeed in finding and keeping jobs in the years ahead. That is something every Member and, indeed, every American should support.

Again, I would like to thank Clay Shaw for all his work in this area over so many years. I look forward to continuing to work in the years ahead to support all families in their efforts to end their dependence on government assistance.

I urge all my colleagues to support this resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

It would be nice if today we could all work in a bipartisan way to take credit for something that Congress has done which has been so incredibly successful. I really regret the negative tone I hear from my good friends on the other side of the aisle.

They made the comment that President Clinton had signed this. I think we should let the history speak for itself.

The fact is, after the Democrats opposed this legislation every inch of the way, opposing it in subcommittee, opposing it in the full committee, opposing it on the House floor, voting against it, and then having President Clinton vetoing it, not once, but twice, and only before the election where he was afraid that maybe the people might throw him out if he continued to oppose it did he finally sign it, did we finally get it. And after these dire predictions that the sky was going to fall in, that we have these incredible results that we have, again, it would be nice if we could all take credit here for something we have done well. It is regrettable we can't.

Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Shaw) and ask unanimous consent that the gentleman control the time.

Mr. Speaker, the majority says they want to recognize the past. What you are doing in this resolution is to twist it. So let me say again what the facts were.

The bill was vetoed by Mr. Clinton, by the President, because of inadequate child support and inadequate health care provisions. He so stated. He had started this effort to reform welfare, but the inadequacies in the bills that came before him required a veto.

What was the result of the veto, of the two vetoes? Money was put in for child care and for health care. It is ironic that this resolution brags about the amount of money for child care. Without those vetoes, a lot of those moneys never would have been in welfare reform.

The same is true of transitional Medicaid.

So come here, but don't, for totally partisan electoral purposes twist the history of this. You are twisting it. Maybe you think it will gain you a few votes, but you lose your credibility and you lose any chance of proceeding on a bipartisan basis.

You did the same thing in the bill that was passed just some months ago on welfare reform. You cut child support. This resolution talks about child support collections increasing; but in the bill that was passed recently, you made arrangements for a reduction in child support estimated by CBO to be $8.4 billion over the next 10 years.

You talk in this resolution about giving States ``great flexibility in the use of Federal funds.'' That was one of the advantages of the 1996 legislation and that is one reason why a good number of Democrats voted for it.

In the 2006 legislation, you reduced the flexibility of the States. I want to just refer to some of the programs that the States have used that would probably be disentangled by this 2006 legislation:

The Portland Program, that has some strategies so that people can upgrade their skills and get out of poverty. The Corpus Christi Employment, Retention and Advance Program. The Maine Program, that does rely on some higher education, including a 4-year degree. And also the Utah Program, that was very advanced in terms of addressing substance abuse and mental health. So you essentially have reduced the flexibility of the States.

Let me talk for a moment about poverty and what was the main problem with the 2006 legislation. The data that we have show this, more or less, that 60 to 70 percent of the people who have moved from welfare to work have been earning less than 42 percent of the median average wage in their States.

We were hopeful in the 2006 legislation that we would take a further step in welfare reform, that we would help people not only move from welfare to work, but from welfare to work that would take them out of poverty.

You, on a strictly partisan basis, did not even bother to talk to us. You made no effort. You would not even work with us to try to provide a law that would help people move from welfare to work.

So I regret your spurning any effort to make this resolution bipartisan. I think instead of recognizing the past, you are mainly twisting it; and there has been a failure of this Congress to take the next steps in welfare reform so people move from poverty into something beyond it when they move from welfare to work.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time.

Mr. Speaker, this marks the 10th anniversary of the passage of the 1996 welfare bill, a measure I voted for. And the legislation certainly was not perfect, but the system that it supplanted

was even worse. Ten years on, instead of having a pep rally for TANF, I think what we ought to be doing is having a serious conversation about whether the program is being implemented in a way that effectively and realistically moves everyone who can work into a job so that they might support their family.

With Bill Clinton, the TANF program rightly demanded that able-bodied people do everything possible to find and keep a job. But it also recognized the fact that single moms needed help with child care and transportation in order to successfully and permanently transition out of public assistance. So the Clinton budgets provided that traditional assistance.

The Clinton budgets also made enforcement of child support payments a top priority, which gleaned billions of dollars, that pulled thousands of women and children out of poverty. Bill Clinton insisted on an increase in the minimum wage and an expanded earned income tax credit, which helped people earning the lowest wages support themselves.

And the results spoke for themselves. Even as welfare caseloads dropped, poverty rates fell for every year that Bill Clinton was in office. So what has happened in the last 5 years? Child care, cut. Food stamps, cut. Medicaid, cut. Child support enforcement, cut.

So it is a disappointment but not a surprise that poverty rates are once again on the rise. According to the Census Bureau in 2004, there were 13 million children living under the poverty line. Almost one American child in five grows up in a family that cannot pay for the bare essentials of life like food, shelter, and clothing.

How can we let this happen? Today I want people to listen to this. Today a minimum wage worker in America who puts in 40 hours a week and never takes a vacation day, listen to this, they earn, at minimum wage, $10,700 a year before taxes.

That is not enough for a single mother with one child to clear the poverty line. But I think it is the new face of compassionate conservatism. That is a full-time working mom who cannot possibly make ends meet for herself and her child. One in five kids in this country grows up in poverty.

The welfare bill was supposed to counteract these trends, and when Bill Clinton was in office it was doing a good job. But the programs that helped welfare reform demonstrate progress like child support enforcement, child care assistance, have been eviscerated by this Congress and this administration. But we always have time here for tax cuts for rich people. If we cannot take care of Paris Hilton, who can? This welfare bill was a good start, and if properly implemented, it was during the Clinton years, we would still be on the path to reform.