A Daunting Task for Poor’s Defenders

The subject before the committee Wednesday night was how to toss a lot of poor people off the welfare rolls in hopes they’ll find jobs, a plan also known as welfare reform. When this happens, possibly later this year, it will cause tremendous trauma in poor communities and spark many powerful human interest news stories from the streets of Los Angeles.

There wasn’t a hint of this potential drama and controversy, however, as a legislative committee plodded through lawmaking verbiage, attempting to write a state law to implement the welfare reform measure approved by Congress and signed by President Clinton last year.

The details were so overwhelming, the jargon so heavy, that I couldn’t follow them. But most everyone else in the packed hearing room seemed to know the meaning of every acronym, and comprehend the significance of phrases such as the “48% disregard.” These were public policy addicts--policy wonks--of the kind found only in capitols, think tanks and university political science departments.

Finally, I gave up listening. Instead, I watched three members of the committee who represent portions of urban Los Angeles County that will be hit hard by the welfare cutbacks. For I knew that the fate of their poorest constituents would depend on the skill of Sen. Diane Watson and Assemblymen Rod Wright and Antonio Villaraigosa, all Los Angeles Democrats. It’s up to representatives like them to master the details and shape the arcane language in a way that spares their constituents the worst of the expected hardships.

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It’s all in the details.

That’s a lesson I learned many years ago, in this very Capitol, when as a young reporter I covered the creation of the big, generous welfare programs that are now being dismantled.

That is, I covered them but didn’t fully understand what was taking place. Neither did anyone else except for a couple of legislative aides and the late Phillip Burton, a domineering, bombastic, angry, brilliant assemblyman who designed the programs and snuck them through the Legislature.

Many years later, journalist John Jacobs dug up the details of what happened that winter and spring of 1963 as part of his biography of Burton, “A Rage for Justice.” Burton, who later became a powerful congressman, immersed himself in every detail of welfare law. “With his enormously retentive mind and overpowering style, he mastered a subject and then dominated any situation by knowing more about the politics--and the policy--than anyone in the room,” Jacobs wrote.

With Burton, overpowering was an understatement. I remember having lunch with him in the small Capitol cafeteria, his eyes flashing, his mouth full of food that, as he spoke, would sometimes fly across the table in my direction. His mind worked twice as fast as mine and he overwhelmed me with facts, argument and, always, details.

Covering the progress of his legislation, I didn’t figure out the many obscure portions, such as Section 1523.7, which permitted the unemployed to refuse jobs and still get welfare. Low-paying jobs could be turned down, as well as those that required the jobless to move or work for a company whose workers were on strike. Such provisions expanded the government safety net far beyond anything previously imagined and helped set the stage for the even more generous federal and state legislation of the Great Society era a couple of years later. They cost plenty, too, much more than Burton let on at the time.

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Thursday morning, I talked about the importance of such details with Assemblymen Wright and Villaraigosa and Sen. Watson.

“It’s the little stuff,” said Wright. “I’ve spent the last four or five months studying the regulations.”

Their job will be difficult. The national mood is far less generous than in Burton’s day. Urban Democrats such as Wright, Villaraigosa and Watson must contend with the fact that it was a Democratic president who signed the national welfare reform bill.

But they have the same sort of stealth task--shape the California version of welfare reform in ways undetected by colleagues, and anyone else, to save at least some of the benefits that Phil Burton won for the poor.