GOP Welfare Proposals Becoming More Conservative : Public aid: The move could complicate Clinton’s effort to achieve bipartisan agreement. GOP turns the focus to out-of-wedlock births instead of work.

Under fire from conservative intellectuals, Republicans are toughening their welfare reform proposals--a move that could complicate President Clinton’s hopes of building a bipartisan legislative coalition on the issue.

House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) has asked a GOP task force that drafted the House Republican welfare proposal last fall to study the possibility of incorporating sterner measures into the bill to discourage births out of wedlock. The measures would be modeled on conservative analyst Charles Murray’s call for reducing the rising number of such births by denying cash benefits to single women who bear children.

At the same time, Rep. James M. Talent (R-Mo.) is circulating a competing reform bill that would deny welfare benefits to any parent under 21 and impose work requirements more broadly than either the existing House GOP bill or the plan under development by the Clinton Administration.

“I think the political landscape has changed since the Republican bill was developed,” Talent said. “It is now possible to go much further than I thought it was possible to go four or five months ago. . . . The possibilities are open-ended now.”

Within Republican circles “there’s a sense that the whole spectrum has shifted right,” one House leadership aide said. “What seemed about as far out as we could be and still be in play legislatively (in our proposal) seems to be about middle-ground right now.”

With many liberals still suspicious of Clinton’s call for “ending welfare as we know it,” the rightward movement within the GOP will complicate the Administration’s task of building a centrist coalition for reform.

None of the Republican initiatives is likely to become law. But as the more conservative proposals rise in prominence, it becomes more difficult for Clinton to attract significant bipartisan support for his plan, which is to be released next month.

This movement follows a pattern that has emerged on other issues, such as crime: As Clinton has tried to steer the Democratic Party toward the center, Republicans have moved further right.

For years, conservatives were the champions of requiring welfare recipients to work. But now that Clinton has called for mandating work after two years on the rolls, the center of conservative opinion is moving to the argument that deterring out-of-wedlock births, not demanding work, is the key to real welfare reform.

“If you’re dealing with different premises, different analyses and fundamentally different proposals, it makes it more difficult to get a Clinton coalition” to pass welfare reform, said Peter Wehner, policy director at a Washington conservative think tank, Empower America. “But if you concede at the outset (that) the Clinton premise is right, you may get a bill--but you don’t get a bill that really deals with the issue.”

The hope, Talent said, is that, by moving to the right, Republicans will “hold Clinton to his commitments” against pressure from liberal Democrats to dilute reform. But more moderate welfare reform advocates question whether the real conservative goal is to deny Clinton a legislative victory on the politically polarizing issue.

“One of the nightmare scenarios for Republicans is that they join with the President to solve the welfare problem that has bedeviled the Democrats for decades,” one left-of-center welfare lobbyist said.

In the Senate, Republican thinking about welfare reform has not coalesced as much as in the House. The principal Senate Republican welfare proposal, built around an immediate workfare requirement for all able-bodied recipients, has attracted just 19 sponsors.

In the vacuum, GOP calls for more radical change are emerging. On Monday Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.) proposed turning over responsibility for welfare, food stamps and the Women, Infants and Children nutritional program entirely to the states, in return for the federal government eventually assuming all costs for Medicaid, the joint state-federal health care program for the poor.

Kassebaum said Monday that her plan would allow states flexibility to redesign the welfare system in basic ways. “I do not think Washington can reform welfare in any meaningful, lasting way,” she said.

Like Clinton’s evolving plan, the House GOP bill places primary emphasis on moving welfare recipients off the rolls by requiring them to work. And like the expected Clinton plan, the bill would require recipients to work after two years on the rolls and provide government jobs if no private employment is available.

The bill attempts to discourage out-of-wedlock births by preventing teen-agers on welfare from establishing their own households--as Clinton is likely to propose. But the Republican plan would go well beyond Clinton’s to say that states could not provide benefits to parents under 18, or to women who had additional children while already on the rolls, unless they pass legislation specifically authorizing such payments.

When House Republicans introduced their bill last November, 162 of the 175 GOP members endorsed it. And with its broad similarities to Clinton’s approach, some legislative observers thought that it created the possibility for a broad welfare reform coalition. But that prospect is being clouded by the intense counterattack against the legislation within Republican circles.

In a process reminiscent of the toughening stand among GOP legislators against health care reform, this reassessment on welfare is being driven primarily by criticism from outsiders, such as Murray; Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank; former Education Secretary William J. Bennett, and Bill Kristol, founder of the Project for the Republican Future.

The conservatives have strafed the bill on policy and political grounds.

The principal policy criticism is that it focuses too much on expensive workfare programs and does not do enough to discourage out-of-wedlock births. Conservatives have been urging at least experiments with the idea of cutting off all cash aid, except medical assistance, to unwed mothers since Murray wrote a Wall Street Journal article late last October presenting that as the best way to stem the tide of out-of-wedlock births--expected to reach 40% of all births by the end of the decade.

“I do not understand why these people think getting poor women into the job market is going to solve the problem,” Murray said. “You’re still going to have urban centers where you don’t have any fathers, and that’s the source of the problem.”

Almost all observers consider Murray’s idea too Draconian to pass Congress, but it is shifting the center of debate.

It is likely, sources said, that the GOP will amend its bill to allow states to experiment with Murray’s proposal. It may also stiffen the measures allowing states to cut off welfare benefits to young mothers--for example, by raising the age beneath which benefits would be terminated.

But Rep. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who led the task force that drafted the House GOP bill, signaled that he is likely to resist too many changes.