Senate, House on Own Paths in Welfare Debate : Congress: Upper chamber’s provisions suggest it is not as attuned to the conservative groups seeking support for ‘family values’ legislation.

In a crucial series of votes amid the ongoing welfare reform debate that will dominate Capitol Hill until sometime next week, the U.S. Senate demonstrated a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the conservative revolution that has swept the House.

By rejecting provisions intended to discourage single women from having babies, the Senate put the Christian Coalition and similar grass-roots groups on notice that it disapproves of the House’s proclivity to mandate family values through legislation.

During floor debate this week, the Senate first voted to excise a “family cap” provision that would have forced states to freeze cash benefits for welfare recipients who have more babies. It then voted down a proposed amendment that would have denied cash assistance to unwed teen-age mothers.

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The absence of these provisions will be the most striking difference between the Senate welfare bill, scheduled for a final vote Tuesday, and the competing House measure, approved by a party-line vote in March. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole said Friday that he expects the Senate bill to attract enough Democratic support to get an affirmative vote “in the 70s” in the 100-member Senate.

Such bipartisan support would not have been possible if the Senate had retained the family cap and adopted the amendment to deny benefits to teen-age mothers. Those proposals not only are prominent in the House welfare measure, they are central elements of the legislative strategy devised by socially conservative Republicans to try to use legislation to change people’s behavior.

This week’s votes suggest that the Senate is not as closely attuned as the House to the Christian Coalition and other conservative groups that blitzed the Capitol throughout the summer in an attempt to win support for the provisions.

Moreover, both sides in the emotional welfare debate say that the Senate action underscores the fundamental differences between the two houses of Congress.

“It’s the perfect case study of the glaring differences between the House and Senate,” said Andrea Sheldon, who lobbies Congress for the Traditional Values Coalition, an Anaheim, Calif.-based organization representing 31,000 Protestant churches. The House, she said, is a “lean, mean machine” that “gets a new infusion of blood” every two years, while the Senate is full of “stodgy old men who don’t seem to understand.”

Sheldon, who participated in a months-long effort by conservative lobbyists to win support of the values provisions, said that their efforts were largely ignored in the Senate.

Ralph Reed, president of the Christian Coalition, said, “We never expected to have the votes to pass” the amendment to deny benefits to teen-age mothers, Reed said.

But the advocacy groups who fought for inclusion of the proposals in this year’s welfare legislation have not given up. They intend to muster all their influence to resurrect the rejected provisions when a House-Senate conference committee meets to reconcile differences between the two versions of welfare reform.

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Although it is unlikely that the Senate would reverse itself and accept both proposals, congressional insiders predicted that the final bill could contain a softer version of the family cap. But it is considered doubtful that the measure will deny benefits to teen-age mothers.

And there are signs that the House might be willing to meet the Senate halfway.

“Even the Senate bill is a big step in the right direction,” House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) told reporters, noting that it would still allow states to impose family caps or restrict benefits if they so choose.

In the House, the family cap and teen-age benefit cutoff were elements of the GOP “contract with America” and Republican leaders were committed to securing their approval. Most members obligingly toed the line.