Uncompromising Spirit on Welfare Reform Could Be the GOP’s Undoing

Many complex issues remain to be resolved as the House and Senate confront their differences over the massive welfare reform bill that the upper chamber approved last week. But all of these decisions will be shaped by one overriding question: Did the Republicans learn anything from the Democrats’ mistakes in the last Congress?

In 1994, congressional Democrats repeatedly failed to resolve their internal disagreements, even when that made it impossible for the party to fulfill President Clinton’s key campaign promises from 1992. Liberals thought they were advancing their political interests by holding up action on crime and welfare reform legislation. Conservatives thought they were entrenching themselves at home by opposing health care reform; both sides believed they were defending their institutional advantages by delaying campaign finance reform.

But the cumulative effect of these maneuvers was to produce a record of gridlock and chaos that undermined support for Congress as a whole. By refusing to recognize their common interest in reaching reasonable compromise, the Democrats summoned the deluge that swept them from power and turned over control to the GOP.

Now welfare reform, an issue central to the Republican campaign in 1994, presents the new GOP majority with the same test that the Democrats flunked.

The Senate has produced a bill that doesn’t go nearly as far as the House in cutting overall federal spending on welfare, or attempting to discourage out-of-wedlock births, or allowing states to reduce their own spending on the poor. Many conservatives, already frustrated by Senate refusal to adopt other key elements of the “contract with America,” view the upper chamber’s welfare reform product with something close to disdain.

For their part, Senate Republican moderates see the House Republicans as overly enthusiastic about social experimentation on a grand scale. It will be like threading a needle to join that innate caution and the House’s revolutionary impulses into a final bill that can pass both chambers.

In its ideological alignment, this year’s Republican debate over welfare presents a mirror image of last year’s Democratic struggle over crime.

In 1993, the Senate passed a centrist crime bill with a bipartisan majority of 94 to 4. Then House Democrats spent months pushing it to the left. The final bill that emerged from the conference committee conceded too much to liberals--and became an easy target for a conservative uprising that led to its rejection on the House floor in August, 1994. Although President Clinton resurrected the bill after exhaustive negotiations with congressional Republicans, its initial failure contributed as much as any other event to the rout of the Democrats in last November’s election.

The same pattern--a centrist Senate contending with an ideological House--has marked the first rounds of this year’s action on welfare. Last spring, the House Republicans passed--on an almost strictly party-line vote--a welfare plan bristling in its conservative fervor, particularly in its efforts to discourage out-of-wedlock births. The House plan prohibited states from using federal money to pay cash benefits to women under 18 who gave birth out of wedlock, or women who had additional children while already on welfare.

As on crime in 1993, the Senate this year steered closer to the center and passed its welfare bill with a sweeping bipartisan majority. The Senate rejected the mandatory cutoffs to underage single mothers and women who had children while on welfare. Unlike the House, it provided $8 billion to fund day care for women with young children who would be required to work under the bill. And it incorporated innovative ideas from the Democratic Leadership Council to pay states performance bonuses for placing welfare recipients in long-term unsubsidized employment--and to allow them to contract with private placement firms and charities to do so.

But even the Senate bill, which passed by a margin of 87 to 12, is tough. Like the House bill, it would end the entitlement status of welfare, convert the program into a block grant that allows states to design almost all of their own rules and establish a lifetime limit of five years of benefits for welfare recipients--without the guarantee of a public job that President Clinton tied to time limits in his original reform plan. “If you had taken that bill to the floor last year, it would not have gotten one Democratic vote and probably only 20 Republican votes,” said Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a first-term conservative. “It is amazing how far the debate has come.”

Although the Senate legislation is well to the right of what Clinton initially proposed, the Administration believes it is about the best it can hope for in this environment, and the President has signaled that he would sign a final bill close to its blueprint. Now the question is whether that will be enough for the House.

Most of the differences between the House and Senate boil down to disputes over money that can be resolved by meeting somewhere in the middle. But the most electric issue involves a question of values: How far should government go to discourage poor women from bearing children outside of marriage?

For most House Republicans, and their allies in the social conservative movement, the heart of the House bill is not its provisions on work, but the benefit cutoffs intended to discourage illegitimacy. Most agree that the measure to eliminate benefits for underage mothers--which has never drawn broad public support--is unlikely to survive the final conference.

But conservatives are mobilizing to protect the “family cap” that would deny benefits to women who have additional children while on the rolls. If the conference fails to include some version of the family cap, warns Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, “there is a likelihood the bill could be defeated on final passage in the House.”

The family cap drew only 34 votes of support in the Senate--partly because of heavy lobbying against it by the Roman Catholic bishops and other groups that feared it would encourage abortion. That meager showing already has conservatives quietly looking for alternatives to the House provision. One possible compromise under discussion in conservative circles is to return to the version of the family cap that House Republicans included in the original welfare reform plan they released in November, 1993. Under that plan, known as the opt-out, states would be required to impose the family cap but could pass legislation to exempt themselves. “That’s what I am certainly going to argue for,” says Santorum, who drafted the original House GOP bill while serving there in the last Congress.

Although conservatives considered it inadequate at the time, an opt-out provision could ultimately draw support from the forces that drove the campaign against illegitimacy in the House, including Rep. James M. Talent (R-Mo.), Heritage Foundation analyst Robert Rector and the Christian Coalition. In the end, Clinton might be hard-pressed to reject a bill that allowed states an escape hatch from imposing the family cap.

That likelihood frames another of the key choices facing the GOP. Hoping to create a clear contrast for 1996, many conservative strategists want to draft a final bill that Clinton will not sign--or at least one he “will have to gulp three times before he does,” as one put it. The risk is that any bill so objectionable to Clinton might also be unacceptable to Senate Republican moderates--who could vote it down before it reaches Clinton’s desk.

With public approval for Congress’ job performance already sinking, even the most ardent Republican revolutionaries may think twice about placing such a high-stakes bet.

“It was a devastating blow to the Democratic Congress when the House rejected the conference bill on crime,” says one White House aide. “It would be just as devastating to the Republicans if the Senate rejected the conference bill on welfare.”