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[Page: H6384] GPO's PDF---
Mrs. JOHNSON of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 527, I call up the resolution (H. Res. 525) expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the 107th Congress should complete action on and present to the President, before September 30, 2002, legislation extending and strengthening the successful 1996 welfare reforms, and ask for its immediate consideration.
The Clerk read the title of the resolution.
The text of House Resolution 525 is as follows:
H. Res. 525
Whereas the 1996 welfare reform law (P.L. 104-193), approved by large bipartisan majorities of the House of Representatives and of the Senate, has delivered dramatic results by promoting record increases in work and earnings among current and former welfare recipients, reducing the number of children in poverty by nearly 3,000,000 and achieving record low rates of child poverty among African-American children and children raised by single mothers, and lifting 3,000,000 families from welfare dependence as part of a decline in national welfare rolls of more than 50 percent;
Whereas despite these unprecedented gains, 2,000,000 low-income families remain dependent on welfare, challenging the Congress to build upon that success by putting even more Americans on the path to self-reliance;
Whereas changes to the law are needed to better promote the creation and maintenance of strong two-parent families, including healthy married families, in order to enhance child and family well-being;
Whereas further changes are needed to improve the quality and availability of child care, since the experiences of young children greatly affect their success in school;
Whereas the House of Representatives, on May 16, 2002, passed H.R. 4737, the Personal Responsibility, Work, and Family Promotion Act of 2002, which includes needed enhancements proposed by the President and extends and strengthens reforms for the coming five years;
Whereas H.R. 4737 would provide a total of $170,000,000,000 in Federal and State funds to support work, child care, education, training , and other family needs;
Whereas the Senate has yet to approve legislation to extend the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF ) program, the Child Care and Development Block Grant, and Title V Abstinence Education State Block Grant programs as required by September 30, 2002; and
Whereas the failure of the 107th Congress to extend the TANF or child care programs by September 30, 2002, would threaten the opportunities currently available for low-income families and create fiscal uncertainty for States: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the 107th Congress should complete action on and present to the President, prior to September 30, 2002, legislation extending and strengthening the successful 1996 welfare reforms.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 527, the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Mrs. Johnson), the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin), the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Boehner), and the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Tierney) each will control 15 minutes.
The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Mrs. Johnson).
Mrs. JOHNSON of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Twelve days, 12 days. In 12 days, the welfare reform legislation expires. Mr. Speaker, this is a very serious matter. This House passed reauthorization of the welfare reform legislation on May 16. The Senate has not acted. We have 12 days, yet welfare reform has been an unprecedented success.
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Never have we passed a reform of a program that has resulted in a decline in child poverty. This bill has resulted in the largest decline in child poverty ever, and in not just 1 year but in consecutive years; and the most dramatic decline in child poverty has been among African American children. Nearly 3 million children have left poverty since welfare reform, and this is not just because we had a good economy.
During the good economy of the Reagan years, when hundreds of millions of jobs were created, welfare roles increased about 12 percent. It is the result of welfare reform that children are leaving poverty, that there has been a substantial reduction in the number of children living in poverty several years consecutively.
Secondly, the most exciting and wonderful news about welfare reform is that of the women on welfare, 33 percent are now working. The percent of those on welfare and working has tripled. It has gone from 11 percent to 33 percent.
[Time: 12:15]
Many of those women are still receiving some welfare benefits as they make the transition to complete independence, but 33 percent are working. That is incredibly good news and it will strengthen those families economically and emotionally. But that also means that 67 percent are not meeting the State definition of working, which does not include complete independence from welfare benefits.
So we do have a lot more work to be done, and I am proud to say that the reauthorization passed by this House recognized that those women who were not meeting the standards of work need more education. They need more training , and it creates tremendous flexibility for the States to not only help women get into that first job, but enable them to have the time they need for the education, the skill development to deal with all those problems that we know from our research which represent barriers to women getting into the workforce and barriers to their rising up the career ladder so that the salary that they earn is a salary that can honestly support a family with children.
The reauthorization bill represented a giant step forward, building on what we learned from the old program, enabling the new program to be far more powerful in the lives of the women and children in America who are on welfare and basically living on extremely low incomes, if not in poverty.
Mr. Speaker, I am proud that the House acted. The Senate has not acted. I call on my colleagues to lay out to the other body the importance of reauthorizing welfare today as it expires in 12 short days. That is not even 2 weeks. In 12 short days, this program expires.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. CARDIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, this is what we call filler because the majority, the Republicans, do not want to bring up legislation that is important to enact before the end of the fiscal year.
If I had been told that on September 19 as one of the last bits of business before we adjourn for the week and come back on Tuesday of next week, not Monday, with not acting on in this body 8 of the 13 appropriation bills, that we would be taking up a meaningless resolution in order to kill time, I would not have believed it; but, that is what we are doing.
The gentlewoman from Connecticut is right. There are 12 days left before the end of this fiscal year. The Republicans have only scheduled 4 more legislative days before the end of this fiscal year. In 4 legislative days funding for education, for veterans affairs, for environmental issues, for law enforcement, and for housing will all expire. This body has not even taken up those appropriation bills; yet we have time for this meaningless resolution.
Yes, I am concerned about the end of this fiscal year and getting work done. It is important that we reauthorize the welfare reform bill, TANF reauthorization. I have been working for 2 years to try to get reauthorization of TANF .
This body missed an opportunity to get that done when it chose a partisan route rather than a bipartisan route which we could have passed when the bill was originally before us, a missed opportunity, making it much more difficult for this Congress to send to the President a meaningful TANF reauthorization bill.
Mr. Speaker, we should have built on the success of the current welfare reform bill. We should have built the success that provides flexibility to the States, but instead the legislation that passed this body took flexibility away from the States and made it more difficult for them to do their programs on welfare. Education and training are important, but the bill that passed this body says it is important for everyone but the mother on welfare with a child; that person does not need education. That is the wrong message.
The bill that passed this body says we do not want welfare recipients to have real jobs. We want makeshift employment, even though every study has shown that will not lead to people leaving poverty.
The bill that passed this body is an unfunded mandate on the States requiring them to spend billions of dollars more and not providing the necessary resources. This resolution states that changes are needed to improve the quality and availability of child care. I agree. We have not done that in this body. We need to do it.
Mr. Speaker, there is still time. I urge my colleagues to join in a bipartisan effort. We introduced a proposal that I authored along with the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind) and the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) that builds on the current welfare system, providing the flexibility and the resources to the States. It took welfare to the next level to get families out of poverty. It had the support. We put in the proposal that the national Governors wanted and that the welfare administrators thought were necessary in order to build on the current welfare system, and it is consistent with the bipartisan effort of the other body.
There is time if we are willing to work in a bipartisan way to get TANF reauthorization passed, but we cannot do it the way that the other side of the aisle did it when this bill first came before this body.
Mr. Speaker, I regret that today is another missed opportunity.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mrs. JOHNSON of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I remind the body, the Senate has not acted. We must go to conference. We can conference this bill and get it to the President's desk in 12 days. The Congress owes that to the American people.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Herger), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the Committee on Ways and Means.
Mr. HERGER. Mr. Speaker, 4 months ago the House passed a 5-year welfare reform extension bill. Yet now, just 11 days remain before the successful Temporary Assistance to Needy Families Program expires. The 1996 law lifted nearly 3 million children from poverty. It resulted in a dramatic increase in the employment and earnings of single mothers, all while reducing welfare dependence by 9 million people.
Still, we know we have more work to do in the next phase of welfare reform. Some in Washington seem to be willing to allow the program to run out at the end of this month. They seem to believe a simple extension would suffice, but a simple extension of this program will not help the nearly 60 percent of the adults on welfare who are doing nothing now to engage in activities that will lead them on the road and the path from poverty to self-reliance. A simple extension will not provide $2 billion in increased child care funds to support more working low-income families, and a simple extension will not invest more in families by promoting healthy marriages and preventing the millions of children born out of wedlock from growing up without the benefit of their father.
We must act now. So join us in supporting H. Res. 525. It is my sincere hope that we will soon get to a conference with the other body so we can work out our differences on this important legislation. More than 2 million low-income families in America are depending on us for help.
Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. HERGER. I yield to the gentleman from California.
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Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
I guess I am just a little bit confused on the basis of initial remarks by the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin) because the arguments that he just made were exactly the ones he made when we had the welfare debate on the floor of this House, and I know that he would have rather had his position prevail than the one that did, and that is the bill that we passed and sent over to the Senate. And what it sounded like was he wanted to revisit the debate that occurred in the House prior to House passage of our legislation, and what I would urge him to do is, if he wants to have another chance at that debate, would be to vote for this resolution which says it is ``the sense of the House of Representatives that the 107th Congress should complete action.''
If the House has passed legislation to complete action, we have to get the Senate to pass legislation, and I would hope that that impassioned speech that he just made to us, those of us who debated and already voted on the welfare bill, could be made to his colleagues in the Senate so that they would move a bill off the floor, we could go to conference, and he would then hope that his position would prevail in conference. But to say that he is opposed to urging the Senate to complete action is to basically say that wonderful and impassioned speech he made is not going to go anywhere because we cannot get the conference to try to get his position to prevail. And so moving this resolution hopefully will nudge the other body along so that his position can be presented in conference and the House and the Senate can resolve their differences.
So I do not understand how folks are arguing that they want to be on both sides. One, this is meaningless, and, two, his impassioned plea ought to be heard again; and the only place it can really be heard again by the House is in conference.
Vote for the resolution, and the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin) I will see in conference.
ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE SPEAKER PRO TEMPORE
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. LaTourette). The Chair would make the following advisory: that as recently as December 19 of 2001 in response to a point of order, Members are reminded to confine their remarks to factual references to the other body and avoid characterizations of Senate action or inaction, remarks urging Senate action or inaction, remarks urging other Members to urge the Senate to take action or inaction, or references to particular Senators.
The Chair would also note that there have been remarks during the course of debate where praise has been heaped upon the other body, and just as criticism is not appropriate, neither is praise as a characterization.
Mr. CARDIN. I thank the Speaker for that clarification.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 15 seconds just to respond to the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas), the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means.
Mr. Speaker, it is just regrettable that we did not follow a bipartisan action in this body like some others have done on the other side of the aisle. I think that is regrettable because that has made it much more difficult for us to reach an agreement with so few days left in this session, and I still say this is a meaningless resolution. It does not do one thing, and I think Members can vote any way they want, and they will be surprised to learn that this is not a Special Order.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin), a distinguished member of the Committee on Ways and Means.
(Mr. LEVIN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)
Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I am glad the chairman of the committee spoke, and I want to respond and also to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Mrs. Johnson), because I think this resolution is an effort to shift the blame. The bottom line is, okay, the Senate should act. But why are they having trouble acting? It takes 60 votes. A major reason is because the House started this debate on the wrong foot including the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Mrs. Johnson). They started on a partisan approach. There was no effort to work with those of us who worked on welfare reform in 1995 and 1996, including the ranking member of the subcommittee. Zero effort. And that included the administration. It came forth with a proposal that in the judgment of the administrators, the vast majority of State administrators, was the wrong way to go. They said it was going to create flexibility. Also, there was the problem of poverty, that such a large percentage of the people who were moving off of welfare to work remained in poverty, and the studies show that the average income for people who have moved from welfare to work is something like 2,000 bucks a quarter. So we said let us build on welfare reform and its successes, let us acknowledge where it has had shortcomings and move on from there.
But you said no, you are going to proceed like you did on
prescription drugs on a partisan basis, and the administration was part and
parcel of that strategy. So now you are reaping not the benefits but the
downsides of that approach, and you say to the Senate act after you got this off
on the wrong foot, and the administration continues to insist on its bill which
cannot receive 60 votes in the Senate.
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