Sacrificing Kids on the Altar of GOP Ambition : Welfare ‘reform’ would revoke a national commitment, putting states in a meanness contest.

Love the fetus, damn the child.

Just before running off last week to pledge their “pro-life” commitment to the Christian Coalition convention, Sens. Bob Dole and Phil Gramm cut a cynical deal that will make abortion a compelling choice for poor women.

A denial of funds for children born to women on Aid to Families With Dependent Children is the key to the Republican welfare “reform” program now set to clear the Senate. Dole also added an “illegitimacy bonus,” which gives additional funds to states that lower their out-of-wedlock births.

Perhaps Dole’s bill should also provide funding to send the governors to China to learn from the example of families that drown unwanted babies. It’s as humane as abandoning infants to what Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted would be death by freezing on a subway grate. The New York Democrat and dean of serious efforts to reform welfare--he first wrestled with the problem in the Nixon White House--is a hard-eyed realist, and for that reason his warning should haunt us: “If in 10 years’ time, we find children sleeping on grates, picked up in the morning frozen, and ask, ‘Why are they here, scavenging, awful to themselves, awful to one another,’ will anyone remember how it began? It will have begun on the House floor this spring and the Senate chamber this autumn.”

What Moynihan was referring to is the revocation of a federal commitment dating back to the New Deal to provide the necessary sustenance for life to any child who needs it. Any child, whether born in the Mississippi Delta or the Salinas Valley, was “entitled” by the U.S. government to the bare necessities of life. Not any more. With the passage of this bill, for the first time in our modern history, the government of all of us will no longer guarantee the needs of the least of us. Instead, it will be left to the states to set the standards.

The likely result is a meanness derby in which state governments attempt to balance their budgets by driving poor people across their borders. States already compete in lowering their contribution, and it is only the federal benefits floor, which the Republicans would now eliminate, that prevents disaster.

Moynihan knows this better than anyone because he was the author of the Family Support Act of 1988, which is the only truly serious attempt we have ever made at welfare reform. That bipartisan program featured an ambitious jobs component for moving recipients off welfare, but it has been subverted by the states’ unwillingness to fully match federal funding.

Serious welfare reform cannot save money in the short run. In particular, it is unrealistic as well as immoral to require poor mothers, 60% of whom have children under the age of 5, to go to work without providing child care. The states have long waiting lists for subsidized child care, yet the Dole bill provides no additional funding. Indeed, its whole purpose is to slash the federal commitment to AFDC by $70 billion over the next seven years.

This in the same week that the Senate voted to give the Pentagon $7.5 billion more than it asked for. That included funding for the B-2 bomber and the Seawolf nuclear attack submarines, two Cold War-era weapons systems that no longer have a strategic function. The funding for the B-2 could cost taxpayers $80 billion.

Military welfare is still in; child welfare is out. Dole and the Senate he heads were expected to be the moderate bulwark against Newt Gingrich’s assault on welfare, which has passed the House. But as Sen. Arlen Specter warned, “The primary for the Republican nomination is being conducted on the floor of the U.S. Senate.” This lone Republican moderate among the presidential candidates added that we should “make sure that welfare reform does not make victims of children who come into this world innocent.”

Specter was excluded from the Christian Coalition convention because he is “pro-choice.” But it is the Christian Coalition that has betrayed the pro-life position. As the Catholic bishops and many other religious leaders have pointed out, one cannot be “pro-life” and at the same moment be indifferent to the survival of children. Isn’t it high time for those who are truly “pro-life,” bishops or feminists, to agree to disagree on abortion and launch a common crusade to defend the child?

And where is Clinton in this debate? Moynihan accused the President of complicity through “silence” in not stating clearly that he would veto the Dole bill. I don’t know if such a veto would help or hurt his chances for a second term, but if he fails to veto this legislation, Clinton doesn’t deserve reelection.