Senate Rejects Proposal to Amend Welfare Package : Congress: During failed Democratic bid for changes, Dole hints that the GOP is near an agreement on a blueprint for reform.

Moving a step closer to a long-delayed and potentially contentious debate over federal welfare reform, Senate Republicans on Thursday peeled away a set of Democratic proposals designed to blunt the impact of the GOP’s more stringent plan.

By a near-solid party-line vote of 54 to 45, the Senate rejected a series of Democrat-backed amendments to the welfare reform package sponsored by Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.). And Dole suggested that Republicans are near agreement on an alternative. Although united as rarely before on many issues, Senate Republicans have had difficulty finding common ground on this issue--especially the question of how severely to treat welfare mothers.

The Democrats’ proposal would have set a five-year time limit for single mothers receiving welfare payments, but would have granted recipients a package of benefits that included child care, education, training and jobs.

In two days of impassioned floor debate, the Democrats argued that the GOP plan amounted to heartless posturing inspired by presidential politics and charged that it would put millions of poor women and their children at risk.

“We put parents in jail for leaving their children alone at home,” said Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.). “Why in welfare reform shouldn’t child care be absolutely a requirement? Yes, it costs more, but you can’t have work without child care.”

Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) agreed, arguing that if the federal government failed to allocate money for child care, welfare reform is doomed to failure. “The problem is that all too often, what happens is you go to work and you try to work out a child-care arrangement but you can’t afford it,” he said during a voluble floor debate.

“We’re not investing resources in child care. You get more money to work at zoos than to take care of children in the United States of America,” Wellstone said.

The Dole-sponsored plan also calls for a five-year limit on welfare payments, but would replace the federal payments with block grants that would give state legislatures greater authority over who gets welfare and the amount of their benefits.

“States should design and run their own work programs,” Dole said before Thursday’s vote. “One thing is certain about welfare reform--no federal bureaucrat will ever come up with a blanket program which works well equally in all 50 states. Through block grants to states and not waivers, the federal government can provide resources to fight poverty without imposing the rules and regulations that ban innovation.”

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Efforts to draft a GOP plan ran aground earlier this year as Dole and Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), who is challenging Dole for the GOP presidential nomination, squabbled over whether to bar states from giving welfare benefits to non-citizens and whether states would be permitted to use federal money for benefits to unwed teen-age mothers.

A compromise was reached over the summer recess allowing states to decide whether single mothers would lose federal benefits.

Dole suggested the GOP could approve a welfare blueprint as soon as next week.