Mickey Kaus points out a recent action of Obama’s that’s been flying under the radar, and deserves a lot more attention:
Here are some quick initial reactions to the administration’s apparent surprising (and possibly illegal) attempt to grant waivers of the work requirements written, after great effort, into the 1996 welfare reform law…
The Democrat’s 2009 stimulus bill changed the incentives of the 1996 reform by once again rewarding states that expanded their welfare rolls…Rector and Bradley of Heritage (among the first to attack Obama’s action) make the case that the law’s work requirements were specifically designed to not be waivable, and that Obama is using HHS’s authority to waive state reporting requirements as a tricky way of voiding the underlying substantive requirements that are to be reported about. The Heritage argument–that what HHS did was illegal–seems powerful, but I haven’t read the other side’s brief. Perhaps Obama is invoking the long-lost “we can’t wait” clause to enact a change that would never pass a democratically elected Congress–in this case not because Congress is “gridlocked” and and “dysfunctional” and “partisan” but because relaxing work requirements has never been popular with voters…
HHS’s rationale is not the recession, but the alleged need to find “new more effective ways to meet the goals of [the reformed welfare program], particularly helping parents successfully prepare for, find, and retain employment.” In short, job prep, counseling and training…Job training for welfare recipients always sounds good–instead of making a single mom take a dead end $10/hr job, why not let her stay on the dole while she gets a degree that will let her land a higher paying position? The problem is that if you let single moms mix welfare and training that will encourage more single moms to go on welfare in the first place–sign up, and we’ll pay you to go to community college! The rolls might grow, not shrink…
Read the whole thing.
Kaus wonders why Obama is doing this because, after all, it’s not a move designed to be popular with a lot of voters. I offer the following:
(1) The move may not be wildly popular, but it’s certainly popular among Obama’s base, for that all-important election turnout. And I don’t know why Kaus labels the move “surprising,” because Obama has long criticized the original law, and in the late 90s he vowed to “use all the resources at his disposal to undo it.”
(1) So now he’s got a lot more resources at his disposal; he’s doing this because he can. Obama has a history of going around Congress, though czars and agencies and executive decisions that bypass the stated will of the people and have so far been largely unchallenged. Here he’s experimenting with pushing the envelope even more, and if re-elected (and especially if Congress is Republican and refuses to go along with his wishes), expect to see a lot more of this.
(2) Obama’s general goal is always to foster greater government dependence for greater numbers of people.
(3) There may be a Cloward-Piven agenda here, as well. Recall that the original thrust of Cloward-Piven involved overburdening the welfare system, and have no doubt that Obama is very, very familiar with this sort of technique:
The [Cloward-Piven] strategy was formulated in a May 1966 article in left-wing magazine The Nation titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty”.
Cloward and Piven…were critical of the public welfare system, and their strategy called for overloading that system to force a different set of policies to address poverty. They stated that many Americans who were eligible for welfare were not receiving benefits, and that a welfare enrollment drive would strain local budgets, precipitating a crisis at the state and local levels that would be a wake-up call for the federal government, particularly the Democratic Party, thus forcing it to implement a national solution to poverty. Cloward and Piven wrote that “the ultimate objective of this strategy [would be] to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income…” There would also be side consequences of this strategy, according to Cloward and Piven. These would include: easing the plight of the poor in the short-term (through their participation in the welfare system); shoring up support for the national Democratic Party then-splintered by pluralist interests (through its cultivation of poor and minority constituencies by implementing a national solution to poverty); and relieving local governments of the financially and politically onerous burdens of public welfare (through a national solution to poverty)…
Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews wrote that Cloward and Piven “proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system – by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice – that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy.
Whatever Obama’s motives might be, Romney is not ignoring this, even thought the MSM may be. Here’s his response, which I hope will be followed by more:
Friday morning, with Obama’s action still largely unreported, Romney released a statement…
“President Obama now wants to strip the established work requirements from welfare,” Romney said. “The success of bipartisan welfare reform, passed under President Clinton, has rested on the obligation of work. The president’s action is completely misdirected. Work is a dignified endeavor, and the linkage of work and welfare is essential to prevent welfare from becoming a way of life.”
I hope it will be followed by more hard-hitting emphasis on what’s going on here by the Romney campaign.
[NOTE: Meanwhile, this new brouhaha is somewhat related.]