Battle Shows Resiliency of Clinton

Powerful cross pressures confront President Clinton as he moves toward a decision on whether to sign or veto the welfare reform legislation that has now cleared both houses of the Republican Congress.

Both publicly and privately, Clinton and other White House officials have sent conflicting signals on whether the president will sign the bill, though most administration officials continue to believe Clinton still “edges more toward yes than no” as one senior official put it Tuesday.

In either case, however, the struggle over the bill, which passed the Senate on Tuesday and the House last Thursday, testifies both to Clinton’s extraordinary political recovery over the past 18 months and to the extent to which his policy options remain shaped by Republican priorities and preferences.

Clinton has had some successes. Republicans agreed earlier this month to decouple welfare reform from changes in the Medicaid program unacceptable to Clinton, and to rewrite other provisions in the legislation he opposed. Tuesday, the Senate passed two amendments that softened some provisions of the bill to which Clinton had objected.

But the basic structure of any bill likely to reach the president’s desk still offers a vision of welfare reform much more conservative than the program Clinton ran on in 1992--or proposed in 1994.

Both houses have ignored Clinton’s complaints in many areas and have spiked the legislation with provisions that are anathema to liberal groups at the core of the Democratic political coalition.

If Clinton does sign the legislation--which must now be completed in a House-Senate conference committee that could finish its work as soon as Friday--he will inevitably declare victory in forcing the GOP to sand down the edges of its original reform plans.

But viewed from a longer perspective, a signature from Clinton on legislation that ends the federal entitlement to welfare and imposes a five-year time limit on benefits--without the guarantee of a public job that Clinton proposed in 1992--would stand as a historic milepost in the rightward drift of Washington’s policy debate.

“He has moved a great deal,” says Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-Del.), the author of a bipartisan welfare alternative that Clinton endorsed but the House rejected last week. “The bottom line is he clearly has moved to more conservative ideas.”

The endgame of the welfare struggle offers a bewildering maze of policy and political considerations not only between the two parties, but within each of them.

The political incentives for Clinton to sign a bill are enormous: Reaching agreement would allow him not only to finally fulfill his celebrated 1992 promise to “end welfare as we know it” but simultaneously deny a potent issue to Bob Dole, who has been slamming the president for his vetoes of the two earlier GOP plans.

But signing a GOP welfare plan could expose Clinton to the wrath of liberal groups, from the Children’s Defense Fund to the AFL-CIO, now rapidly mobilizing against the legislation.

“If the bill looks like it looks now, Clinton should reject it,” says Bob Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.

Republicans face their own tightrope. While many congressional Republicans are eager to take home a welfare bill in November, the Dole campaign worries that an agreement would boost the president’s prospects as well. Though Dole publicly embraced the decision to separate welfare reform from congressional efforts to end the entitlement to Medicaid--the key procedural decision that has created the possibility for agreement--many GOP sources say his campaign privately resisted the idea.

“You might say he encouraged the obvious,” said one senior GOP strategist involved in the discussions. “There is a lot of thought on the Hill about ‘what do I do for myself.’ ”

Beyond these political considerations, on a policy level the welfare proposals represent a huge leap into the unknown. No one in either party can say for certain what will happen to millions of welfare recipients and their children who would no longer be allowed to receive benefits for more than five years, and even less if states choose.

Despite their interest in reaching agreement, congressional Republicans do not appear inclined to make it easy for Clinton.

Clinton has cited as one of his major objections provisions in the bill denying access to most social service programs to legal immigrants who are not yet citizens; on Thursday, the House voted to expand that exclusion. Likewise, Clinton has strongly urged Congress to allow states to use federal money to provide vouchers for children whose parents are denied aid after hitting the five-year time limit; both the House and the Senate have rejected amendments to make that change.

“I think they want to present him a bill just below the minimum that he would sign,” says Sen. John B. Breaux (D-La), who offered the amendment in the Senate. One key House Republican aide said the GOP is “extremely” unlikely to “make major changes for the benefit of the president” when the bill moves into conference.

As Clinton has oscillated over the past year between confrontation and cooperation with the GOP, even the sharpest analysts have despaired of predicting his decisions. Most observers in both parties believe Clinton will reach as far as possible in defining the acceptable minimum on the welfare bill--though no one is confident they know exactly where Clinton’s minimum lies.

“If we get it even a couple of notches better,” says one senior White House official in a view widely echoed on Capitol Hill, “my guess is he will sign it.”

That the White House would seriously consider signing the GOP plan is itself a mark of how much the policy debate in Washington has shifted to conservative terrain since the Republican takeover of Congress.

In some carefully selected areas--such as raising the minimum wage, requiring the installation of a V-chip in new televisions, defending the ban on semiautomatic assault weapons, and imposing new restrictions on tobacco advertising aimed at young people--Clinton continues to support an aggressive deployment of federal power. But on the largest issues, Clinton has assiduously denied the GOP a clear ideological contrast by moving to accommodate the anti-Washington sentiment that powered the 1994 Republican electoral landslide. On most issues, Clinton is proposing to moderate and tame, but not reverse, the GOP thrust toward smaller government.

“One reason Clinton is doing well is he has convinced voters . . . that he accepts the results of 1994,” says GOP strategist Bill Kristol, publisher of the Weekly Standard magazine.

In the 1992 campaign, Clinton argued that welfare reform should be built around what he called “reciprocal responsibility.” All welfare recipients should be required to work after two years on the rolls, he maintained, but government should provide more funds for job training and child care and then guarantee public employment if no jobs were available in the private sector. In the welfare reform package he finally unveiled in 1994, Clinton proposed to increase overall welfare spending by more than $9 billion over five years.

Even before Tuesday’s two conciliatory Senate votes, Clinton had already forced the Republican Congress to move toward his vision of welfare reform in some respects. Compared to the earlier GOP plans, the new legislation offers more money for child care, requires states to maintain a larger amount of their own spending on welfare, and allows states to exempt a larger number of welfare recipients from the five-year limit on benefits.

The GOP blueprint fundamentally veers from Clinton’s 1994 proposal, focusing far more on demanding “personal responsibility” from welfare recipients and less on asking for “reciprocal responsibility” from the government. No matter what else happens in the next days, the final bill that reaches Clinton’s desk will end the federal entitlement to welfare and convert the program into a block grant; impose a five-year time limit on welfare benefits without guaranteeing public jobs; significantly curtail access to social welfare programs for legal immigrants who are not yet citizens; pressure states to deny additional benefits to women who have children while already on the rolls; and cut spending on welfare, food stamps and other social programs by about $60 billion over six years.

If given a blank chalkboard to design a new social welfare system, Clinton would be unlikely to sketch any of those ideas on his own. As keenly as any choice he has made so far, the president’s decision on whether to accept such ideas in a GOP welfare bill will test how much he is willing to stretch his original vision of reformed but revitalized government to reach agreement with a Republican congressional majority bent on dramatically reducing Washington’s role in American life.