ONE... MORE... TIME...
Here’s what happened:
On July 12, [Obama's] Department of HHS released a policy
document announcing it would grant waivers to states “in lieu of participation
rate requirements” for welfare to work programs contained in the Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families program.
WITH NO... READ ZIP, ZERO, NADA... LEGAL AUTHORITY TO
DO SO! NOTHING IN THE LEGISLATION (aka: THE LAW) GIVES HHS INDIRECTLY OR THE
PRESIDENT DIRECTLY SUCH POWER!
TANF — which replaced the old Aid to Families with
Dependent Children (AFDC) program — requires of states that 30% to 40% of their
welfare recipients engage in “work activities” for 20 to 30 hours a week.
Unlike TANF, which has a narrow definition of “work” to
keep the states from weaseling out of their obligations under the 1996 law, the
language in the Obama administration’s memo is vague, saying among other things
that HHS is “interested in testing approaches that build on existing evidence
on successful strategies for improving employment outcomes.”
AGAIN... A NATION BASED UPON THE RULE OF LAW IS NOT
RULED BY "THE LAW OF MEMOS!"
The same day HHS issued this document, Robert Rector — who
helped draft the welfare to work requirements back in 1996 and has been called
the “intellectual godfather” of welfare reform — co-wrote a blog post at the
Heritage Foundation, “Obama Guts Welfare Reform,” explaining how the “Obama
directive bludgeons the letter and intent of the actual reform legislation.”
Even though welfare rolls have dropped by 50% since the
implementation of welfare reform, Rector pointed out that states in the past
routinely tried to dodge the welfare to work requirements by defining
“activities such as hula dancing, attending Weight Watchers, and bed rest as
‘work.’”
THE KEY WORD UP ABOVE IS "TRIED." THE LAW
WOULD NOT ALLOW THEM TO GET AWAY WITH THEIR "TRIES!" THE LAW WAS
WRITTEN DELIBERATELY TO DISALLOW SUCH "TRIES!"
Rector also raised serious questions about whether HHS
has the legal authority to issue such waivers.
BY "RAISED SERIOUS QUESTIONS" THE AUTHOR
MEANS "POINTED OUT THAT OBAMA WAS ACTING ILLEGALLY."
The work requirements in the 1996 welfare reform were
specifically included in the legislation to make it impossible for them to be
waived.
THUS... (*GNASHING MY TEETH*)... ILLEGALLY!
Following the HHS memo and Rector’s response, the news
that the Obama administration is undermining welfare reform started to
percolate in conservative circles, though the major media all but ignored the
story.
(*SMIRK*)
Members of the Obama administration “were telling the
Associated Press and USA Today that it wasn’t a big deal,” Rector tells the
Weekly Standard.
Despite getting a pass from the mainstream media, HHS
must have worried that the argument they were undermining welfare reform was
legitimate and would gain traction. So on July 18, HHS Secretary Kathleen
Sebelius sent a letter to Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the Ways and
Means committee, "clarifying" that states seeking waivers would have
to “commit that their proposals will move at least 20% more people from welfare
to work.”
(This new requirement was not in the memo announcing the
waivers, and could be reversed at the discretion of HHS.)
In early August, the Romney campaign started running ads
that echoed Rector’s critique, hitting the Obama administration for “gutting”
welfare reform.
Now that the issue was an electoral football, the media
suddenly became interested.
The issue was pounced on by “fact checkers” whose pride
in sorting out such complex policy issues often exceeds their ability to do so.
(*SNORT FOLLOWED BY A CHUCKLE*)
On August 7, PolitiFact gave the Romney ad its worst
rating: “Pants on Fire!”
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
OF COURSE THEY DID!
The only direct source quoted in the piece was an expert
at the Left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
(*SMIRK*)
PolitiFact didn’t mention that HHS had felt the need to
try to tighten up waiver requirements in a separate letter after the fact, let
alone express suspicion about why it might have done so.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
PolitiFact did link to Rector’s blog post — but only to
dismiss him.
“Robert Rector, a welfare expert with the conservative
Heritage Foundation, said it could ultimately allow ‘state bureaucrats’ to
count activities that aren’t really work. We should point out that those
concerns are at odds with the policy’s stated goal of encouraging employment.”
In other words, PolitiFact said his concerns should be
dismissed for no other reason than they are at odds with the Obama
administration’s spin.
YEP! THAT'S ABOUT IT!
PolitiFact didn’t even address the fact that Rector — who’s
quoted in Romney’s ad — was the source of the charge the Obama administration
is gutting welfare reform or that he helped write the welfare reform law. (They
did reference an article Rector wrote for National Review Online and concluded
that he made “a noteworthy point” when he argued that the Obama administration
doesn’t have the legal authority to waive the work requirements.)
AMAZING...
Rather than engage in any critical discussion about the
issue, PolitiFact regurgitated the HHS memo for the sole purpose of making the
waivers sound benign.
“The memo outlined, using the jargon of a federal
bureaucracy, the kinds of waivers that would be considered. It suggested
projects that ‘improve collaboration with the workforce and/or post-secondary
education systems’ and ‘demonstrate strategies for more effectively serving
individuals with disabilities,’ to give two examples.”
Let’s take that last example of accommodating workers
with disabilities — please! It’s a classic bit of bureaucratic misdirection
intended to make exemptions that undercut welfare work requirements sound
reasonable.
“There’s no one on TANF that’s disabled. If you’re
disabled, you’re on another program called Supplemental Security Income,”
Rector tells the Weekly Standard.
“In TANF, you should be able to work — but what the Left
likes to do is to create a nebulous category of TANF recipients who are
disabled with these very cloudy, fuzzy definitions, and then the state can
chunk essentially an unlimited part of its [welfare] population into an exempt
category. That has twofold consequences — now the state doesn’t have to do
anything [to steer the exempted recipients into the workforce], but it can
still maintain it has a high participation rate [in workfare programs]. If you
have a 30% participation rate, and you exempt half the caseload, all of a
sudden you can make it look like your participation rate went up.”
(*SNORT*)
FOLKS... RE-READ IF NECESSARY. RECTOR IS ABSOLUTELY
CORRECT!
Which brings us to the other fantastical claim about
HHS’s waivers — the idea cited by Bill Clinton that they would require more
recipients to get jobs.
Rector calls the idea that states would have to show a
“20% increase in employment exits” the “oldest con game in welfare statistics
[since] the number of employment exits [from welfare] is simply a function of
the size of the caseload.”
In other words, if employment exits from welfare programs
are increasing, that’s usually an indication that the number of people on
welfare is going up. There’s a large body of data confirming this correlation,
and the reverse is also true. It was a sign of welfare reform’s success when
the number of employment exits in the TANF program actually dropped. Over time,
fewer people were exiting welfare because the size of America’s welfare rolls
had dwindled greatly. States that wanted to have work requirements waived would
understand Sebelius’s metric as an incentive to increase their welfare rolls.
EXACTLY...!!!
The 20% increase in employment exits also amounts to
requiring states to document a minuscule change. Writing in the Washington Post
on September 6, Rector observes, “In the typical state, about 1.5% of the TANF
caseload leaves the rolls each month because of employment. To be exempt from the
federal work requirement, a state would have to raise that number to about 1.8%.”
He goes on to note that such a small increase could be created by creative
record keeping or slight upticks in the economy.
Rector also makes another key point that’s been absent
from the debate over Obama’s changes to welfare reform. While welfare reform is
hailed as “bipartisan” because it was signed into law by Bill Clinton, many
Democrats and prominent policy thinkers on the Left only supported the law out
of political expedience, and have remained ideologically hostile to it.
THAT'S TRUE FOLKS! I REMEMBER THE DEBATE AT THE TIME!
This isn’t a closely guarded secret.
Key personnel under Sebelius at HHS have a lengthy track
record of opposing the 1996 welfare reform.
Doug Steiger, for example, the deputy assistant secretary
for legislation for human services at HHS, plays a significant role in shaping
Obama administration welfare policy. Rector notes that Steiger used to work for
Max Baucus, the Senate Finance Committee chairman, “and when TANF was going to
be reauthorized in 2002, they put up a bill that manifestly had no federal work
requirements in it at all. And he was very explicit that was their goal — there
were to be no federal work requirements.”
(*SHRUG*)
In 2001, Mark Greenberg co-authored an article with
former Obama White House economist Jared Bernstein on the impending
reauthorization of welfare reform. “Many progressives, ourselves included,
fought hard against the program that passed in 1996. We judged it too punitive
and too far from the spirit of progressive reform, which would have focused
less on reducing caseloads and more on both promoting employment and improving
the well-being of low-income families with children,” they wrote.
(In the article, Greenberg and Bernstein conceded the
legislation’s success — “many of our fears have not been borne out” — however, they went on to fret that welfare
reform would prove harmful to the poor in the case of an economic downturn,
like the one we’re in now.)
Mark Greenberg is currently deputy assistant secretary
for policy administration for children and families at HHS, and again, in a
position to be shaping welfare policy.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
Then there’s Sharon Parrott, counselor to the secretary
for human services policy at HHS. To mark the tenth anniversary of welfare
reform in 2006, Parrott co-authored a paper for the Journal of Policy Analysis
and Management titled “TANF’s Results Are More Mixed Than Is Often Understood.”
Rather than the commonly held view that welfare reform’s work requirements are
one of the most successful government reforms of our era, Parrott argues that
because of welfare reform the “safety net for the poorest families with
children has weakened dramatically.” Parrott wrote this paper when she was
director of the welfare reform and income support division at the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities, a job she held until joining the Obama
administration.
READ ON...
WAIT FOR IT... WAIT FOR IT...
(*DRUM ROLL*)
(Contain your surprise, but that’s the same liberal think
tank PolitiFact went running to when they concluded Mitt Romney was lying about
welfare reform.)
Lastly, the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein recently
reported on a new Congressional Research Service (CRS) report showing that Obama
had already undermined the work requirements in welfare reform before this
summer.
One of the provisions in the law says an able-bodied
adult without dependents will only be allowed to receive food stamps for three
months out of a 36-month period unless that person “works at least 20 hours a
week; participates in an employment and training program for at least 20 hours
per week; or participates in a '[Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] workfare’
program for at least 20 hours per week.”
This requirement was suspended by the stimulus bill.
(*SMIRK*)
It was supposed to be reinstated at the end of the 2010
fiscal year; Congress twice rejected the administration’s attempt to extend the
exemption. However, Obama has extended the waivers. “The law grants the executive
the authority to do this in states where the unemployment rate is above 10
percent or there’s a ‘lack of sufficient jobs,’” notes Klein. The end result is
that the number of able-bodied adults without dependents on food stamps more
than doubled from 1.9 million in 2008 to 3.9 million in 2010, according to the
CRS report.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
To date, three PolitiFact columns have been written on
the main welfare reform controversy — two concluding Republicans are lying, and
a third concluding that Bill Clinton was telling the truth about Sebelius’s
misleading, garbage-in, garbage-out 20% metric.
(*SNORT*)
OH... WHAT A SURPRISE...
(*SMIRK*)
Factcheck.org and the Washington Post fact checker have
also concluded that Republicans are not telling the truth about what the Obama
administration did to welfare reform.
UH-HUH...
(*SNORT*)
In order for “fact checkers” to swiftly, unanimously, and
erroneously reach the wrong conclusion, they created a feedback loop,
credulously taking at face value the statements of the Obama administration and
liberal policy experts, while systematically ignoring critical sources — including
the primary source for the allegation the Obama administration is gutting
welfare reform.
Though they’ve selectively and dismissively quoted him,
Rector says PolitiFact has spoken to him only once, and that was about a tangential
matter involving Republican governors who have requested welfare waivers.
He’s never been asked by any fact checking organizations
“about the core argument, which is Obama gutting workfare,” he says.
One wonders whether the concerted effort to ignore Rector
was because of or despite his unparalleled expertise and credibility on the
topic.
A LITTLE OF BOTH, I'M GUESSING...
In PolitiFact’s second and largely redundant ruling, they
again go out of their way to sweep Rector under the rug: “Robert Rector, a
welfare expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation, wrote that the new
standards set a ‘very weak or counterproductive measure of success.’ But
there’s no evidence the Obama administration has changed its philosophy.
Indeed, the goal of the policy is to boost employment. The HHS letter, in
several places, says only proposals from states that ‘improve employment
outcomes’ will be considered.”
(*LAUGHING ALOUD*)
Once again, they don’t mention a single specific argument
Rector makes... [but yet] counter his criticism by taking the Obama
administration flatly at its word.
The Weekly Standard also spoke to the leading Republican
welfare policy expert in the House of Representatives, Matt Weidinger, staff
director of the Ways and Means subcommittee on welfare.
He said he had never been contacted by a fact checking
organization.
Becky Shipp, an adviser for the Senate Finance Committee,
known as the premiere GOP welfare geek in the upper chamber, also reports she
hasn’t been contacted by a media fact checker. Further, she tells The Weekly
Standard she went so far as to reach out to a fact checking organization to
correct the record and never heard back.
FOLKS... LIKE I'VE SAID ALL ALONG... THE GLOVES ARE
OFF. THE MSM ISN'T EVEN GOING TO PROVIDE COVER FOR ITSELF. THEY'RE FLAT OUT IN
OPEN COOPERATION WITH THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN AND THE DNC. (AND IT'S ONLY GONNA GET
WORSE AS NOVEMBER NEARS.)
Aside from their refusal to engage opposing arguments, "fact
checkers" expressed no curiosity about why HHS felt the need to at least "appear"
to toughen the requirements for welfare reform waivers after Rector’s initial
criticisms, or whether a 20% increase in people exiting welfare programs is a
meaningful measure of success. And they didn’t offer any historical context
about the welfare reform debate or take so much as a cursory look at the people
involved in welfare policy in the Obama administration, which would have cast
serious doubt on the Obama administration’s motives.
The result of all this is a textbook example of how “fact
checkers” corrupt political discourse.
Once they all came down on the same side of the issue,
the mainstream media quickly calcified the conclusion that Romney was wrong to
accuse Obama of gutting welfare reform.
Rather than report on the policy details, the media
simply made it a campaign story and acted as a megaphone for Democratic
partisans eager to charge that Republicans were inflaming racial tensions
merely for arguing that the goal of welfare policy should be self-sufficiency.
PolitiFact’s second ruling on the issue concludes that
the Romney campaign “inflames old resentments about able-bodied adults sitting
around collecting public assistance. Pants on Fire!”
SCUMBAGS...
This is vintage PolitiFact —nothing quite says you’re committed to an
unbiased evaluation of the facts like wild speculation about scurrilous
motivations premised on your own misunderstanding.
(*RUEFUL CHUCKLE*)
Still, the false narrative that Romney is fomenting
racial resentment to advance his campaign has had surprising durability. Thomas
Edsall at the New York Times cited PolitiFact and Washington Post fact checker
Glenn Kessler’s criticisms before flatly declaring the “racial overtones of
Romney’s welfare ads are relatively explicit.”
On September 12, the Boston Globe’s Washington bureau
chief Christopher Rowland ran a nearly 1,200-word article that barely addressed
the specific nature of the policy disagreement and declared “the charge is
false,” citing “independent experts and media fact-checking organizations.”
(The bulk of the article is then devoted to quoting
Democrats such as Jesse Jackson Jr. on the Romney ad’s “unspoken, racial
subtext.”)
And those are just a few examples from news reporters; columnists
and editorialists have been positively frothing. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews got
into an on-air shouting match with Republican National Committee chairman
Reince Priebus at the Republican convention. “When you start talking about work
requirements,” he bellowed, “you know what game you’re playing, and everybody
knows what game you’re playing: It’s a race card.”
Newsweek/Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky marked the
solemn occasion of September 11 with a column saying Romney’s “dishonest
welfare ads” were proof that he “hasn’t been shy about using race,” because
this line of attack was more politically effective than previous Republican
attempts to “demonize slatternly women or Latinos or gay people.”
Daily Caller blogger Mickey Kaus — perhaps the sole media
voice to take seriously Rector’s argument that the Obama administration is
gutting welfare reform — notes that Bill Clinton told Buzzfeed, “Obama had
asked him to make two modifications to [Clinton’s convention] speech — one on
Medicare and one on welfare — but wouldn’t specify what they were.” Based on
the fact that both Clinton and Obama quoted Newhouse, that’s a pretty good
indication that Obama asked Clinton to go after Romney’s welfare reform charge
because he felt he was vulnerable to the criticism.
(Given that Obama was publicly opposed to the 1996 welfare
reform, it might help to have the guy who signed it into law defend him.)
Clinton was a good soldier and covered for the president
in his Democratic convention speech. Sure, it was pretty bold to have a
convicted perjurer and the man who famously told America, “I did not have
sexual relations with that woman,” make an extended argument for the Romney
campaign’s dishonesty — but Clinton had the fact checkers, if not the facts, on
his side.
(*SIGH*)
There are some signs that Rector’s arguments are starting
to be heard.
A few days after the Washington Post’s publication of
Rector’s September 6th op-ed titled “How Obama has gutted welfare reform,”
Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler revisited the welfare reform issue.
He’d already given the Romney welfare ad a rating of “four Pinocchios.” To his
credit, Kessler ended up giving Bill Clinton a rating of “two Pinocchios” for
his welfare reform remarks at the Democratic convention citing Sebelius’s 20%
requirement — and for exactly the same reasons that Rector pointed out.
FOLKS... YA CAN'T MAKE THIS SHIT UP...
“Officials would tout that 15% of recipients had left the
rolls, without acknowledging that the overall welfare population had grown by
20%,” Kessler wrote. “One former top welfare official said he could easily meet
the administration’s requirements by more assiduously tracking people who found
jobs but did not inform the welfare agency.”
ROB... DON'T YOU EVER GET TIRED OF BEING LIED TO...???
Bizarrely, though, Kessler still stands by his original
judgment of giving Romney four Pinocchios for saying Obama has gutted welfare
reform. How one concludes that substituting Sebelius’s 20% metric for current work
requirements is bogus, but still argues that this doesn’t seriously undermine
welfare reform requires being comfortable with a level of cognitive dissonance
that only professional “fact checkers” seem willing to tolerate.
Rector for his part is not at all surprised by the low
level of diligence the media have shown in covering welfare policy. He notes
that Left-wing critics have always considered the 1996 welfare reform racist. A
near-parodic 2002 essay by prominent Left-wing journalist Barbara Ehrenreich
began, “It was hard to miss the racism and misogyny that helped motivate
welfare reform, which is about to come up for reauthorization by Congress. The
stereotype of the welfare recipient — lazy, overweight, and endlessly fecund — had
been a coded way of talking about African Americans at least since George
Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign.”
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
Rector also points out that only one side of the debate
is trying to hide its views — and it’s not Republicans. Opposition to welfare
reform is “so unpopular that everything [opponents] do has to be coded so that
they, too, can appear to be in favor of tough work requirements,” he says.
A July Rasmussen poll taken the week after HHS announced
the waiver program found that 83% of Americans favor the idea that “those who
do receive welfare benefits should be required to work,” and only 7% are
opposed.
As for the media malpractice, Rector notes that the press
didn’t report on how Democrats tried to gut welfare reform when it was up for
renewal in 2002 either. (And that was before “fact checkers” had arrived on the
scene!)
“I’ve been doing politics for over 30 years, and the
mainstream media always completely ignores or distorts any issue I’ve ever
written about. The ‘fact checking’ is a bizarre add-on to that distortion. It’s
even a little bit worse,” Rector says.
Rector is deservedly dismissive of the knowledge “fact
checkers” bring to the table in discussing complex policy details. “I don’t
think the fact checkers have that much data on AFDC employment exits between
1980 and 1996. They’re probably a little short on that,” he says dryly.
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