On 06 Oct 2022, Jeff Thiele said the following...
Were you asleep during the welfare reform bill(s) passed during the Clinton administration? That's exactly what they said -- able-bodied people need to be seeking or holding jobs in order to qualify for public assistance.
Yes of course I do remember that and I remember thinking "good for him"
when it was passed.
oh my, what do we have here? Gasp!
Found on the Web at
https://thedailyhatch.org/2012/08/06/why-did-obama-but-the-welfare-reform-that- clinton-put-in/
The Obama Administration issued a new directive stating that the traditional TANF work requirements can be waived or overridden by a legal device called the section 1115 waiver authority under the Social Security law (42 U.S.C. 1315).
Section 1115 states that the Secretary may waive compliance with any of the requirements of specified parts of various laws. But this is not an open-ended authority: Any provision of law that can be waived under section
1115 must be listed in section 1115 itself. The work provisions of the TANF program are contained in section 407 (entitled, appropriately, mandatory work requirements). Critically, this section, as well as most other TANF requirements, are deliberately not listed in section 1115; they are not waiveable.
In establishing TANF, Congress deliberately exempted or shielded nearly all
of the TANF program from the section 1115 waiver authority. They did not want the law to be rewritten at the whim of Health and Human Services (HHS) bureaucrats. Of the roughly 35 sections of the TANF law, only one is listed
as waiveable under section 1115. This is section 402.
Section 402 describes state plans reports that state governments must file to HHS describing the actions they will undertake to comply with the many requirements established in the other sections of the TANF law. The authority to waive section 402 provides the option to waive state reporting requirements only, not to overturn the core requirements of the TANF program contained in the other sections of the TANF law.
The new Obama dictate asserts that because the work requirements, established in section 407, are mentioned as an item that state governments must report about in section 402, all the work requirements can be waived. This removes
the core of the TANF program; TANF becomes a blank slate that HHS bureaucrats and liberal state bureaucrats can rewrite at will.
Congressional Research Service: There Are No TANF Waivers
In a December 2001 document, Welfare Reform Waivers and TANF, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service clarified that the limited authority to waive state reporting requirement in section 402 does not grant authority to override work and other major requirements in the other sections of the TANF law (sections that were deliberately not listed under the section
1115 waiver authority):
Technically, there is waiver authority for TANF state plan requirement; however, [the] major TANF requirements are not in state plans. Effectively, there are no TANF waivers.
Obviously, if the Congress had wanted HHS to be able to waive the TANF work requirements laid out in section 407, it would have listed that section as waiveable under section 1115. It did not do that.
Define Work
In the past, state bureaucrats have attempted to define activities such as
hula dancing, attending Weight Watchers, and bed rest as work. These dodges were blocked by the federal work standards. Now that the Obama Administration has abolished those standards, we can expect work in the TANF program to mean anything but work.
The new welfare dictate issued by the Obama Administration clearly guts the law. The Administration tramples on the actual legislation passed by Congress and seeks to impose its own policy choices pattern that has become all too common in this Administration.
The result is the end of welfare reform.
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