Child Care Held Hostage

Tina Roberts, mother of two, was a waitress who wanted to teach inner-city students and get off partial public aid. With the help of state and federally subsidized child care, the 31-year-old Arcadia woman attended community and four-year colleges at the same time, quickly earning her degrees. Now she’s a pre-kindergarten teacher who is off direct aid and paying part of her child-care costs. Next: earning her teaching credential. She waits tables on weekends and volunteers at her daughters’ school.

Dynamos like Roberts were good reason for the Senate to draw together in rare and short-lived bipartisan harmony and, despite President Bush’s objections, overwhelmingly vote to add $6 billion over the next five years to child-care subsidies.

Short-lived because the money was attached to the welfare reauthorization act, which now is shelved indefinitely because of another amendment, one barely related to welfare. The measure, by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), would raise the minimum wage to $7 an hour. Republicans wouldn’t accept welfare reauthorization with the amendment, Democrats wouldn’t do without it, and now another good idea and a tiny bit of forward momentum in Congress are on the highly endangered list.

Strange amendments that aren’t amendments at all -- because they have little or nothing to do with the bills to which they are parasitically attached -- have a long if unpretty history. But this year these uneasy riders have been particularly odd and plentiful, and occasionally destructive.

A corporate-tax overhaul is held captive by an amendment on worker overtime. The highway bill, suffering a different form of amendment overload, swims through Congress like a whale covered with special-interest barnacles. One would repeal a century-old tax on liquor stores, another would tax foreign arrow makers -- yes, you read that right -- and a third would cap taxes on fishing rods. The bill’s sponsors don’t mind. Every bit of bad-government pork attached by another legislator represents one more vote to override a possible veto by Bush.

Kennedy is right that the minimum wage is due for serious national debate as low-wage workers fall deeply into poverty. But Tina Roberts and her children should not be hostages to that debate.

The child-care funding -- almost $1 billion of which would go to California -- faces other hurdles. Bush remains a foe. And there are concerns that in conference committee, opponents on the House side will slash the amount, reducing child-care availability, yet require more work hours for parents who receive welfare. House Republicans then might suffer political fallout for weakening the popular welfare-to-work movement, but at least it would have been a straightforward political decision.

Extraneous politics should not be knocking down families who deserve a little more support to continue standing on newly strengthened legs.