Aug 3, 2018
"to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life." --Abraham Lincoln
Chairman's Note: Welfare Reform Worked. Let’s Stop Undermining It
True bipartisan public policy reform is rare these days. Successful public policy reform is even rarer. But that is exactly what happened in 1996 when a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and a Democratic President fought through a toxic partisan political environment to pass a historic realignment of the American welfare state.
At the time, President Clinton called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, “the end of welfare as we know it.” And the legislation was a sea change in American welfare policy. No longer would the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program guarantee a check each month with no strings attached. Instead, most welfare recipients would be expected to work, or participate in job training programs, after two years of receiving benefits.
At the time, many on the left predicted these new work requirements would be Armageddon for struggling families. Sen. Patrick Moynihan (R-NY) predicted we would “find children sleeping on grates, picked up in the morning frozen.” Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) said we would see “children begging for money, children begging for food, eight- and nine-year old prostitutes.” And Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) called the bill “legislative child abuse.”
But guess what? The left was wrong.
Between 1996 and 2000 single-mother welfare caseloads fell by 53 percent, their employment rate increased by 10 percentage points, and their poverty rate fell by 10 percent. And the consumption-based poverty rate among single parent families has continued to fall since then: from 23 percent in 1995, to 15 percent in 2000, to 9 percent in 2010.
Unfortunately, some on the left have never accepted the reality of welfare reform. To this day they continue to deny the ability of work requirements to move struggling families out of dependence and into the workforce. Fortunately these activists have failed to undo the changes made to federal cash-assistance programs made in 1996.
But they have managed to undermine the success of welfare reform in other ways.
Medicaid used to be a narrowly targeted program designed to provide health care for only our most vulnerable populations including individuals with disabilities, low-income children, pregnant women, and seniors. But thanks to a number of expansions, Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion being the biggest, Medicaid is now a broad-based welfare program. In 1969 just 6 percent of Americans were on Medicaid. Today 22 percent of Americans use the program.
Food stamps have also seen a similar transformation from a cyclical program providing temporary relief during rough economic times, to a way of life for far too many Americans. Technically referred to as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, SNAP’s participation rate used to rise during recessions and then quickly fall after. But thanks to expanded eligibility rules passed during the Great Recession, that didn’t happen this time. A full nine years after the recession ended in 2009, the proportion of the U.S. population receiving SNAP is 48 percent higher now than when the recession began in 2007.
By expanding non-cash welfare programs like Medicaid and SNAP far beyond their original intended scope, the left has accomplished an end run around the ground breaking successful work requirement reforms made to cash welfare programs in 1996.
It is not surprising that this increase in non-cash welfare dependence coincided with a drop in labor force participation among working-age adults. Between 2000 and 2017 the overall labor force participation rate among working age adults fell from 77.6 to 74.2 percent.
America works better when Americans are working. We need to reverse the recent trend in falling labor force participation by applying the same work requirements that worked for cash-welfare programs to non-cash welfare programs.
Families do better when they move from dependence to self-sufficiency. And we as law makers should do everything we can to make sure our safety net programs are designed to make that happen.
Issue in Focus: The Truth About 3D Guns
This Tuesday President Trump tweeted, “I am looking into 3-D Plastic Guns being sold to the public. Already spoke to NRA, doesn’t seem to make much sense!”
The White House has not offered any clarification on what exactly President Trump’s tweet meant, but if he is worried about plastic guns being sold to the public, he shouldn’t be. The Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988 already makes the sale, and even the mere possession, of plastic guns illegal.
Following President Trump’s tweet, however, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) went to the Senate floor and tried to pass a bill by unanimous consent (meaning there would be no roll call vote, the bill would just pass the Senate immediately without any debate) that would have banned the mere publication of any designs for a plastic gun that could be produced by a 3D printer.
I objected. Anytime legislation begins with words “It shall be unlawful for any person to intentionally publish…” I will force the Senate to take a long look at that legislation.
The federal government already believes it has the power to ban the publication of 3D plastic gun designs under the Arms Export Control Act and it has been selectively enforcing this ban on a company called Defense Distributed since 2013. Other entities have published 3D plastic gun designs on the internet for years, but the federal government has been locked in a legal dispute with Defense Distributed since 2015.
But the federal government has been losing this legal battle. That is why the State Department entered into a settlement with Defense Distributed this July that allowed them to publish their 3D plastic gun designs.
Nelson’s ban would be just as unconstitutional as the State Department ban.
“There are many limits on our First Amendment rights of speech,” Nelson claimed Tuesday. “You cannot say ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” he explained.
Nelson may want to read up on his First Amendment case law. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s quote, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a crowded theatre,” comes from the case U.S. v Schenck where the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of man distributing pamphlets opposed to the draft during World War I.
Schenk was a shameful decision. And it has since been overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio where The Supreme Court held a member of the KKK could not be convicted for his hateful speech. Unless speech “is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action” the government cannot ban it the court ruled.
This is the right standard. There are literally hundreds of gunsmithing books for sale on Amazon right now. Does Nelson want to ban all those books too?
Undetectable plastic guns are a danger. That is why the production and possession of them has been illegal for 30 years. But just publishing a design for such a gun is not the same as having such a gun. We cannot censor speech. That is why I objected to Nelson’s bill Tuesday and it is why I will continue to fight for the First Amendment.
