Preserving the Welfare Work Requirement and TANF Extension Act of 2013

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. NEAL. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Levin.

Well, we're at it again. There is no greater misuse of time than re-fighting the last election. The last election is just that: the last election. It's over.

Governor Romney's pollster said at the time, ``We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers,'' after it was pointed out that there were so many mistakes and miscalculations in their proposal.

They might not have cared about the facts, but today I do. I chaired the Democratic position with Lynn Woolsey and Vic Fazio at the behest of Dick Gephardt at the time. One of the goals of welfare reform was to move unemployed Americans from welfare to work, and it did work. The legislation has been very successful in meeting that goal.

Welfare reform put people back on the work rolls. Welfare rolls have dropped by half, and poverty amongst children has dropped as well. The administration's TANF waiver initiative continues on this success of promoting welfare to work. It is ludicrous for our Republican friends to try to get in the way of people working by their stopping this waiver initiative--an initiative, by the way, that the Republican Governors asked for. Bill Weld was a very successful Governor of Massachusetts on the issue of welfare reform. He wanted the waiver. He asked for the waiver, as did George Pataki of New York. They asked for the waivers, Republican Governors.

The President is not dropping welfare's work requirements. He is allowing the States to experiment. You would think our Republican friends would be entirely in favor of letting Governors experiment on getting people back to work fairly quickly. Secretary Sebelius has stated that the Department's goal is to accelerate job placement, requiring States to commit to a plan that will move at least 20 percent more people from welfare to work compared to the last marker of the State's performance. Let me repeat: a 20 percent increase in getting people on welfare to work from the last marker.

I must be missing something here. I sat through months and months and months of deliberation. We reached a compromise. Some of us were disappointed in parts of it, but the Clinton administration signed on. It worked. Those are the facts, not opinions.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source