A divided House opened debate Wednesday night on a Republican vision for the future of welfare, moving toward approval of legislation that would require poor parents to work more, encourage states to promote marriage and sexual abstinence, and maintain a ban on cash assistance to recent immigrants.
The legislation, which provoked bitter partisan exchanges, would incorporate a weakened version of one of President Bush’s central goals for welfare–allowing states to combine federal subsidies and ground rules for welfare, food aid, housing and other anti-poverty programs. The House planned for further debate and a final vote Thursday.
In a particularly contentious provision, the measure would allow a few states to drop out of the food stamp program and receive, instead, a fixed amount of money to spend on food aid in any way they choose.
The House had planned Wednesday to become the first chamber of Congress to lay out a path to revise the nation’s welfare system. But the debate stalled as an internal dispute broke out among House Republicans over conflicting ideas about how much ability the states deserve to combine different kinds of poverty programs, as the White House wants.
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The legislation, which House leaders predicted would pass Thursday, would set up an ideological collision later this year with the Senate, controlled by Democrats who oppose many of the core changes adopted by the GOP-led House.
Democrats portrayed the GOP’s overall approach as unfair to welfare families and to states. Requiring states to send more people to work, without furnishing enough money to train them or care for their children, “is a big unfunded mandate for the states,” said Rep. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.), a congressional leader on welfare.
Congress must decide this year how to revise a 1996 law, due to expire in the fall, that transformed the nation’s approach to financial help for the poor.
Before that law, welfare was designed as a federal system of unlimited cash assistance for many of the poorest families. In the mid-1990s, it was converted to a system of grants for states to offer temporary cash assistance while attempting to wean people of government dependence by getting a job.
Since the early 1990s, Americans on welfare has plunged by about half, and neither party this year is advocating wholesale changes in the basic direction the program has taken in recent years. Instead, Republicans and Democrats are engaged in a debate over narrower but significant questions about refinements.