Mr. President, is there any limit on time? Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, I have come to the floor this afternoon to speak on the welfare reform legislation that the Finance Committee has worked on. I compliment Chairman Grassley…
Mr. President, is there any limit on time?
Thank you, Mr. President.
Mr. President, I have come to the floor this afternoon to speak on the welfare reform legislation that the Finance Committee has worked on. I compliment Chairman Grassley and the Senator from Montana for their hard work in bringing this important piece of legislation forward.
I am going to comment on two aspects of the bill.
Iraq
Before I do that, Mr. President, I have been sitting here listening for a while. I think it is important to complete the story of what the Senator from North Dakota was saying.
Let me be specific about this. As I heard his remarks, he was basically saying the President of the United States made a mistake when he decided the United States should use force to change the regime in Iraq.
I suppose one could come to that conclusion. There were some in the Senate who did. But I think it is important, if we are going to begin to read quotations and comments from those who have come to that conclusion today, that we finish the story, as Paul Harvey said.
Here is the rest of the story. Here is what others were saying, others were thinking, at the time President Bush had to look at the whole world and look at this different world that we are in and make a decision.
It is true that it has been against the traditions of the United States to make a preemptive strike. That was a major discussion during the Cuban missile crisis. Bobby Kennedy brought that up in the councils. He was right to do that. And I am sure in President Bush's councils that was discussed.
But, suddenly, we were facing a different kind of enemy. We were facing terrorists. And we had just experienced an unexpected attack. There are some even today who say that someone should have imagined that a handful of men would hijack two airplanes and fly them into the World Trade Center. Maybe someone should have. But I can assure you that during the 1990s, there was no one running for President of the United States who expressed that thought or who had that thought in the remotest back of his mind that such a thing like that could happen. Terrorism, yes. But that kind of attack? No.
So, suddenly, we are in this new environment. And the President of the United States is doing what I would hope any President would do of either party when confronted with radically different circumstances. He asked some questions and he took some action.
Now, it is important for us to remember that at the same time the President was making decisions about whether we should invade Iraq to defend ourselves, to prevent a terrorist attack--because there was a threat there to American lives and American safety--there were others in our Government who also had a chance to consider that information, and to talk about it, and to vote on it.
We voted on it here. I was not here yet, but I remember the overwhelming majority--bipartisan majority--in this Senate that authorized the use of military force against Iraq. And I can remember very well what was said.
So if the issue is whether a prudent President--who is sworn to uphold the oath to defend the United States of America--made a wise judgment to challenge Saddam Hussein, whether he could have done that based upon the facts presented to him, let's take a look at what other people, other well-informed people were saying and thinking at the time.
The distinguished Senator from North Dakota read some quotations. Let me read some more. Here is a member of the Senate's own Intelligence Committee, the Senator from West Virginia, Mr. Rockefeller, one of our most distinguished and wisest Senators, a man who has been a Governor, with whom I have served, a man who is also on the Foreign Relations Committee. Here is what the Senator from West Virginia, speaking on the Senate floor, said on October 10 of the year 2002, about the time the President of the United States was looking at this information. Senator Rockefeller said:
There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is
working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will
likely have nuclear weapons within the next 5 years. He could
have it earlier if he is able to obtain fissile missile
materials on the outside market, which is possible--difficult
but possible.
We should also remember we have always underestimated the
progress that Saddam Hussein has been able to make in the
development of weapons of mass destruction.
Now, that was not the Vice President of the United States. That was not Secretary Rumsfeld. That was not President Bush. That was the Senator from West Virginia, a member of our Intelligence Committee, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, who was coming up with his own conclusions.
Here is another quotation made on the Senate floor on October 9, 2002, about the same time. This came from the distinguished junior Senator from Massachusetts, Senator John Kerry:
I believe the record of Saddam Hussein's ruthless, reckless
breach of international values and standards of behavior,
which is at the core of the cease-fire agreement, with no
reach, no stretch, is cause enough for the world community to
hold him accountable by the use of force if necessary.
That was Senator Kerry, at about the time that President Bush was having to make this terrible decision.
I want to move on to other issues. But I don't think it serves our purpose as a country to dredge up comments that show some second- guessing, some second thoughts on one side, but not look back at what other distinguished, fairminded reasonable men and women were saying.
Here is what Senator Biden said at about the same time on the Senate floor, October 9, 2002:
If the world decides it must use force for his failure to
abide by the terms of surrender, then it is not preempting,
it is enforcing. It is enforcing, it is finishing a war he
reignited, because the only reason the war stopped is he sued
for peace.
And finally, here is what the Senator from New York, Mrs. Clinton, said on October 10, 2002:
In the 4 years since the inspectors left, intelligence
reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his
chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery
capability, and his nuclear program. It is clear, however,
that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to
increase his capability to wage biological and chemical
warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Those are the conclusions of the distinguished Members of the other side who know a lot about this, the same conclusion President Bush had. We don't have to listen to what the administration tells us here. We have our committees. We travel the world. Some of us have been in other administrations. We read. We listen. We talk. We come to our own conclusions. The conclusions of most Senators was the same as the conclusion of the President, that as terrible as it was, this was a time we needed to act.
There is one other quotation I would like to mention before I turn to the Welfare Reform Act. This is a comment of a former President of the United States who has, to his great credit, not backed away insofar as I have heard from this remark. President Bill Clinton said, on February 17, 1998, in an address for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Pentagon staff:
Now let us imagine the future. What if he fails to comply
and we fail to act or we take some ambiguous third route
which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this
program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press
for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the
solemn commitments that he made. Well, Saddam Hussein will
conclude that the international community has lost its will.
He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to
rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day,
some way, I guarantee you, he will use the arsenal. And I
think every one of you who has really worked on this for any
length of time believes that, too.
That was President Clinton in 1998 in an address to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Pentagon staff.
The No. 1 issue on all of our minds is the war in Iraq. But I would hope we could look forward and not look backward in recrimination. That is not too much to hope in a Presidential election year. I believe the people of this country want President Bush and Senator Kerry to say where do we go from here, how do we win the peace, how do we secure freedom, how do we get the men and women home from Iraq and Afghanistan, what can we do to help
their families. That is what the focus ought to be rather than reading long, incomplete lists of second-guessing quotations to try to pin the blame on a decision that was broadly and widely shared based upon information that had been piled up over 10 or 12 years. That does not serve our process well.
I came to the floor today on another matter. I am glad I had a chance to mention former President Clinton in terms of doing it. I remember well. In my second term as Governor in the mid-1980s, I was privileged to serve as chairman of the National Governors Association and created the first welfare reform task force. I asked then-Governors Pete DuPont and Bill Clinton, who was vice chairman of that association, to be the co-chairs, working with me to figure out something better. And we did, and they did most of that work and that leadership.
The work that the Governors started that year continued. Ten years later, when Bill Clinton was President in 1996 and there was a Republican Congress, Congress passed the landmark welfare reform legislation which today we call TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
That 1996 welfare-to-work legislation was very controversial at the time. It was controversial because it got us out of the rut that we had been in for 30 or 40 years of creating a permanent class of welfare and caused us to rethink that. It is possible that it only could have been done with the President of one party who had immersed himself in the subject and who talked about it and believed in it and a Congress of another party. It was that big a change.
It changed the way we think about welfare, from a program that fosters dependence to a program that serves as temporary assistance, a program that restores dignity and encourages people to stand on their own two feet. That welfare-to-work program that President Clinton and the Republican Congress created 10 years ago--many Members of the House who were there at the time are now in the Senate--has been a very successful program and one in which they can take pride.
From a high of 5 million in 1994, welfare caseloads have dropped by over 50 percent. But since 2000, the national caseload has leveled off at slightly above 2 million. In more than half the States, including my own of Tennessee, caseloads are growing. And in every State, the remaining 50 percent on the welfare rolls present a bigger challenge.
There are some other warning signs. The number of families is rising who have exhausted their 60-month or 5-year time limit for Federal aid under TANF. We have a 5-year limit. We don't want permanent welfare. And a number of families have exceeded that 5-year limit so they are off welfare.
Another warning sign is the remaining caseload holds a rising proportion of Black and Hispanic families. Another is that unemployment among single mothers, which declined sharply in the early years of our welfare-to-work program, went back up in 2001 and 2002.
Finally, another warning signal is in response to their own fiscal crises--we can remember we had to send a $20 billion welfare check of our own to the States last year--some States have recently had to restrict cash benefits and support services, spreading limited resources even thinner.
The President and the Congress recognized from the beginning that helping people go from dependence to independence would be expensive in the short run. It would take some money. If you are saying to somebody who is down and out and in the third generation of welfare dependence, we want you to change your lifestyle and we are going to offer in exchange for that childcare, education opportunities, job training, counseling, removal of barriers to work, offering all that, that takes people, that takes work, and that takes money.
We have provided money over a period of time. One of the most successful of those programs has been the childcare voucher. Not everyone likes to call it a voucher because some people don't like vouchers. The Pell grant is a voucher for college students, the Stafford student loans is a voucher for college students, and the childcare grant is a voucher. It is money that goes through the States--I think it is about $8 billion or so--to more than 2 million persons who are getting off welfare. As we say, largely to women who have children: We want you to go to work. They may say: What about our children? And we say: Here is a childcare grant that you may take to any accredited institution that you can. That is what we mean by voucher.
That has been a big success as well. That is the reason why even though the Senate committee, in my judgment, has done an excellent job of bringing to the Senate the reauthorization or renewal of this welfare reform bill and has increased the amount of money available for childcare, I agree with Senator Snowe of Maine that we need to increase the money for childcare more.
Senator Snowe spoke about that today at great length, so I don't feel the need to go into great length about it. Basically, the Snowe amendment, which I am glad to cosponsor, adds an additional $6 billion over 5 years for childcare. Both the House and the Senate versions of the welfare reform bills we are considering increase both the hours the parents are required to work each week and the number of welfare parents each week who are required to work.
If we are going to require that the only parent who is at home go to work, and if that person is poor, and if that person is still on welfare after we have been working for 10 years to try to get as many people as possible off, we certainly are going to have to say as part of our deal we will help with childcare if you will go to work. That is the whole idea.
Childcare is the linchpin between welfare and work. Studies show former welfare recipients who receive childcare assistance are 82 percent more likely to be employed after 2 years than those who don't; 65 percent of mothers with children under the age of 6 and 79 percent of mothers with children ages 6 to 13 are in the labor force in our country today. As I mentioned earlier, about 2.5 million children receive our Federal childcare vouchers through the State. Childcare is expensive. It costs as much as a 4-year college--between $4,000 and $10,000 per child annually sometimes.
I got a personal dose of learning about this in 1996 when I was under the mistaken impression the people of the United States wanted me to run for President of the United States. I got the message earlier that year that they preferred Bob Dole, the former majority leader. I went home to Tennessee. I received a call from Major Werthy of the Salvation Army. He said, ``I have been hearing what you had to say.'' I had been saying a lot about personal responsibility. He said, ``I am calling to draft you and put your feet where your mouth has been for the last few years.'' So I went to work for the Salvation Army in Nashville and helped create something called the Red Shield Family Initiative. This basically became Nashville's way of implementing the Federal law.
Congress and the President decided we are going to change things. If you will get off welfare, we will give you help, childcare, job training. We will knock barriers out of the way and counsel you about drugs and work with you. Then somebody has to actually do all that. In Nashville a whole group of people got together, led by the Salvation Army. It included the metropolitan government, the State of Tennessee, all sorts of social services, and it included childcare centers. Down in the area of town where we have the most difficult circumstances, we had almost a mall, such as a shopping mall that exists to create a one- stop place for a mom on welfare who wanted to get off, so they could then be helped. There have been some wonderful stories that have come out of that Red Shield Family Initiative, but I can tell you they came out slowly, one by one.
Tamika Payton was in the ninth grade. This is an example Major Werthy talked to me about. In the ninth grade, she was a ward of the State when she had her first child. She grew up with an abusive mother who was addicted to drugs. She was removed from the care of her mother and placed in the care of her aunt, who was also abusive, so she ran away. This is Tamika's story, but it is a story that occurs all over America. She had two more children before becoming connected to the Family First Program, which is what we call Tennessee's welfare-to-work program. Because of the
childcare certificate, the vouchers she receives through the Tennessee Family First Program, the ones we pay for with Federal tax dollars, she now has a full-time job, she is working on her GED, her high school degree, and her children attend the McNealy Child Care Center, a nationally accredited childcare agency in the area where this Red Shield Family Initiative of the Salvation Army exists.
In Tennessee, the State pays $105 a week for Tamika's 1-year-old, $105 a week for her 2-year-old child, and $90 a week for her 4-year old child. In Nashville, the average cost of a quality childcare center ranges between $100 and $150 a week. These vouchers we are voting for come within that range. Tamika's dream is to get her high school degree and then to attend Tennessee State University.
In other words, what is happening with Tamika Payton is exactly what the Republican Congress and President Clinton hoped would happen in 1996 when this started. But as we consider the welfare reform legislation, I think it is very important that we remember in Washington, DC, while we may create large frameworks and set standards and provide money, it is people such as the Red Shield Family Initiative in Nashville, in Portland, in Austin, in New York City, who are doing the work--they have got to work one by one by one. So I will support and vote for Senator Snowe's amendment to add an additional $6 billion over 5 years for child care, because if in this welfare reform authorization we are going to require the only parent in the house to work away from home--more work than we have required before--then we will have to pay more for more childcare. We cannot require more work without paying more for more childcare.
There is one other concern I have. It will be the subject of an amendment I intend to introduce along with Senators Nelson, Carper, and Voinovich later this week. We are working with the chairman and his staff to try to make certain it is consistent with the objectives of the general legislation, which we believe it is. This amendment would create a 10-State demonstration project designed to test the premise that if States had greater flexibility, States could do a better job getting people off welfare and becoming truly self-sufficient. Senators Nelson, Carper, Voinovich, and I are all former Governors. We know the importance of reducing welfare rolls. We all served as Governors of States in the AFDC days, when we had Aid to Families with Dependent Children. We all strongly support the welfare-to-work concept. But especially with this last group of men and women--mostly women--who are moving from welfare to work, we have the tougher cases. It will be harder for us to decide from here exactly how each of those persons we are trying to help can get from where they are to where we want them to go. We should not presume to have all of the answers.
Here is how our demonstration project would therefore work. The Secretary of Health and Human Services would approve plans for up to 10 States. These plans would include what we call measurable outcome goals. In other words, in plain English, are we helping this person move toward self-sufficiency, toward independence, to get on their own two feet and off welfare? We would, in those 10 demonstration States, enforce the 60-month time limit for TANF benefits and require, as in the Senate bill, the self-sufficiency employment plan for each recipient. In other words, each individual would have a plan for that person's progress.
We agree with the idea of no permanent welfare. While work continues to be at the heart of what we expect States to focus on, States will need to decide how best to meet each person's need, is taking into consideration individual circumstances. As wise as we may hope we are, each one of us is not going to be able to meet each Tamika Payton and make a judgment as to how Tamika can get on her two feet with her three children, succeed in life, and never receive a welfare check again. So in exchange for greater flexibility, we will ask the States to achieve better results and be measured against true outcome goals, a feature neither in the current law nor in the Senate and House bills.
These are the kinds of goals that our legislation will include: One, work, employment, growth in the percent of recipients employed in that State; two, removal of barriers to stable employment. By that I mean drug treatment success. That is a barrier to stable employment. Education level, that is a barrier to stable employment. Attainable marketable skills, that is a barrier to stable employment.
I remember visiting a welfare human services office in my State in 2002. I asked them what worked best. What they told me was: Get them into school. If we get them into school, we never see them again. What the welfare office hopes for from its clients is they do not see them again, at least they do not see them again in terms of assistance and checks. They want them to be on their own.
Job retention is a measurable outcome goal. Earnings is a measurable outcome goal. Child well-being--whether the children of that mom have prenatal care, and for the pregnant mother--immunization rates of the children, the percent of children in child care, overall improvement in the children's education, test results.
Within those specific measurable outcomes--employment, removing barriers to employment, job retention, earnings, and child well-being-- a State's plan would say: We believe we know better how to get to the goal of sufficiency; give us a chance to do that. Each State would be required to enter into a performance agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services to meet certain targets to coordinate with other programs, to work with the Secretary to demonstrate that a reasonable workforce participation rate is being maintained, to have an evaluation plan that includes accountability for the benchmarks.
This will test the best way to help those on welfare today get off welfare for good.
It would help some of those we now see in Tennessee who we were able to help because our State has unusual flexibility, but without that flexibility, we believe we would not have been able to serve them as successfully.
Mr. President, there are many examples in my own experience, and I am sure in every State's experience, of how local ingenuity, local caring, working with persons who are in trouble, one by one, has helped them succeed.
I would like to see us take this next step with welfare reform. I believe since it had a bipartisan origin with a Democratic President of the United States who invested years in trying to understand it, and a new Republican Congress that made it a priority, that we owe this important legislation, this welfare reform bill, our full attention for a few days. We can surely put aside some of these other issues long enough to help men and women get on their own two feet in this great country of ours, particularly to continue a program that for 10 years has worked so well.
My goal will be to do what I can as one Senator to make sure we focus on welfare reform; No. 2, to support the Snowe amendment that makes sure that if we require more work, we provide for more child care; and, No. 3, to work with the committee to try to see if we can find a way so that a limited number of States during this 5-year period can have somewhat more flexibility in working with these difficult cases so when this comes back around again in 4, 5, or 6 years, we can see what we have learned.
Too often as programs go on, the restrictions from Washington pile up. I would like to see a countervailing effort, countervailing movement within this legislation that continues to increase flexibility because, after all, it is stated right at the beginning of the 1996 law, giving States more flexibility is key to the success of welfare reform.
I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.