Daniel Moynihan

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I yield 5 minutes to my friend from Utah. He makes great sense.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I yield myself 5 minutes, briefly to respond to my distinguished friend from Utah to say that I believe every word he says is true for him. I do not think this will lead to a race to the bottom in Utah. It will in New York, I am sorry to say. The proportions are so much vaster. In New York City, we have 1.1 million people on welfare at this moment. These are overwhelmed systems, and you do what is easiest: You send out checks. That is the cheapest, easiest, and most destructive thing to do. We are learning the kinds of things you describe in Utah. The Manpower Development Research Corp., which is the principal evaluator of studies like this, said of some study results in Atlanta, Riverside, CA, Grand Rapids, MI, that they had an effect on bringing down AFDC rolls to the point where they said this exceeds the savings achieved by experimentally evaluated programs in the last 15 years. We are beginning to get a hold, maybe. I begin with the thought that things are so much worse than we know. In the fine State of Utah in 1970, the illegitimacy ratio was 3.6 percent. It is now 15.5. That is half the national average, but the trend line is the same. This is something so deep in our society, we have not found an answer. I simply want to maintain a national commitment, but I am sure that Secretary Shalala said just what she did, and I am sure she tried to move the Department of Health and Human Services. That is our dilemma. The easiest thing to do is what we now do and it is the most destructive, but it need not be that way. President Reagan thought it would change, and it is changing, because the Utah program proceeds under the Family Support Act. I can say no more but thanks for the candor and the quality of the Senator's statement. Mr. President, the Senator from New Jersey was to be next. I am sorry if I seem to be stammering here, but it is because I am stammering. The Senator from New Jersey is here now, and I would like to yield him such time as he may desire for the purpose of speaking. The Senator was one of 11 Members on this side who voted against this bill when it first came forward.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I yield myself such time as I may require to thank my colleague and neighbor and friend from New Jersey for his statement, and particularly for raising a point, absolutely central to the legislation before us, which has not been raised until this moment in the debate, which is that this measure would repeal the eligibility of families who are now on Aid to Families with Dependent Children for Medicaid. This was not in the bill that passed the House. It was not in H.R. 4. It was not in the Senate bill. It is in the conference bill, which we have never seen. We never saw it. The conference never met. I am sorry, we met once, October 24, for opening statements. And it never met again and the bill has come out. It was handed to us, the conference report was handed to us this afternoon. We found out what the Senator from New Jersey has said. That is the degree of the destructiveness of this measure. I find it hard to comprehend, but I am not in the least surprised that every major religious group in the country, save one alone, pleads with us ``Don't do this.'' Catholic bishops, the Lutheran Conference, on and on, UJA: ``Don't do this to children.'' I am increasingly confident, Mr. President, that we will not. I yield the floor.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. The Senator can have as much time as remains to us, if he wishes.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, may I yield myself 30 seconds to thank my friend from Massachusetts, who is, as ever, at the fore in these matters. The President in his statement that he will veto this bill says that he looks forward to bipartisan efforts to pursue the directions we took in 1988 and on which we should continue. But it is not cheaper. Mr. President, the cheapest thing to do is what we do now, what we are going to do in this bill. And it is ruinous to children. We would look back at this as a day without precedent in the history of this body, an idea that a year ago would have been, I think, unthinkable. I think now we will at long last, when we have come to our senses, as I said earlier, in a bipartisan effort accomplish what we need to as soon as this particular one is behind us. I thank the Chair.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, we are truly at the end of our debate this evening, toward the end. I ask unanimous consent that statement by the presidents of the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties, and the United States Conference of Mayors urging the defeat of this measure be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, they make a number of points, but the first one being: The bill ends the entitlement of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, thereby dismantling the critical safety net for children and their families. This is the central point. We do not have welfare reform before us, we have welfare repeal, a repeal of a commitment made in the 1930's in the middle of the Depression. To be abandoned now would be unthinkable, and I am increasingly confident it will not occur. Also, I ask unanimous consent to print in the Record a joint statement by Catholic Charities USA, the Lutheran Social Ministry Organizations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Salvation Army, and the Young Women's Christian Association on these and other matters.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I reserve the remainder of my time as I believe we are going to try to go to a concluding measure here.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I yield myself 3 minutes.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. As much time as the Senator likes.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. To the Senator from Massachusetts.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I am coming to a close. The three demonstration projects of intense efforts for young, unmarried mothers, training them, stimulating them, encouraging them, reassuring them--it is so hard. If we knew how hard it was, we would know what we are putting at risk here. We are abandoning the national commitment to solve a national problem. We are doing it with very little understanding, very little understanding. I have here, Mr. President, and I will close with these remarks--we are getting used to everyone who comes to the Senate floor having a poster--I have an artifact. Give this a little thought, just a little thought. What I am holding is a pen with which John F. Kennedy, in his last public bill signing ceremony at the White House, October 31, 1963, signed the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Health Centers Construction Act of 1963. I was there. I had worked on the legislation. He gave me a pen. In that act we undertook what was known as the deinstitutionalization of our great mental institutions. We developed tranquilizers, first in New York State, at Rockland State Hospital. We again used them systemwide. We thought we had a medication for schizophrenia. We thought it could be treated in the community, perhaps more effectively in the community than in a large mental institution. So we were going to build 2,000 community mental health centers by the year 1980. And then, thereafter 1 per 100,000. President Kennedy was very deeply interested in this. I have always thought, if some person with wonderful fast-forward vision was in the Oval Office at that moment and said, ``Mr. President, before you sign that bill could I tell you we are going to empty out our mental institutions. In 30 years time they will have about 7 percent of the population in this time. We are only going to build about 600 of these community mental health centers. Then we are going to forget we started that and go on to other things and leave it be.'' I think the President would have put that pen down. I think he would have put that pen down and said, ``What, do you want people sleeping on grates on Constitution Avenue? Sleeping in doorways? In cities around the country, schizophrenic persons with no medication, no location, simply cast onto the streets?'' He would have said, ``They will be called homeless or something?'' I think he would not have signed the bill. I wish he had not. And that is why I am so pleased to say that President Clinton will veto this bill. And then we can get back together, work together for the next stage in what has to be a national effort for an extraordinarily severe national problem. Mr. President, I see my friend from North Carolina is on the floor but I yield the floor. I thank the Chair for his courtesy.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today to note with solemnity the anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. It is now 7 years since that infamous act which claimed the lives of 270 people. All the more vile because its perpetrators still have not been brought to trial. Despite a regime of international sanctions, the Libyan government refuses to extradite the indicted terrorists. A state which harbors outlaws must, of necessity, remain an outlaw state. The United States and our allies ought never to waver in our commitment to the rule of law and the measures necessary to enforce it. On November 3, I joined the families of the victims and President Clinton at Arlington National Cemetery for the dedication of a memorial cairn. On that occasion the President reminded us that ``we must never, never relax our efforts until the criminals are brought to justice.'' I emphatically concur. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, and I shall not object, it would be the right of any Senator to ask at this time that the conference report to accompany H.R. 4, the Personal Responsibility Act, be read in its entirety by the clerk. Such a reading would provide the first indication to most Senators of what is in this conference report. It has been 3 full months since the bill passed the Senate, but the conference committee met only once, 2 months ago, October 24, and conducted no business at the meeting other than opening statements. The entire conference process was conducted behind closed doors and without participation by the minority, which is one reason why there is not a single Democratic signature on this conference report. I was able to obtain a copy of the conference report only a few hours ago, as the House completed its consideration. We are woefully uninformed as to the details, but may I say that all any Senator needs to know about this legislation is that it would repeal title IV-A of the Social Security Act, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and that it will be vetoed by President Clinton. Mr. President, I do not object. I simply want to make the point that this partisan mode is not the way great social-political issues are addressed successfully in our country, and I hope this will pass with the coming of Christmas.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, will the Senator allow me 30 seconds on the subject of Bob Dole?

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, since the publication of Michael Young's ``The Rise of Meritocracy'' in 1957, a book written from the perspective of Great Britian in the year 2034, there has not been so brilliant an exercise in this format than Jason DeParle's ``Welfare, End of'' in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, looking back from the year 2015. It foresees a social disaster that will follow the repeal of title IV-A of the Social Security Act, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, in this the 104th Congress. Mr. DeParle speculates that President Clinton will look back upon this as one of the greatest regrets of his Presidency. Mr. President, I ask that the article be printed in the Record. The article follows: [From the New York Times Magazine, Dec. 17, 1995] Welfare, End of--The Events That Led to its Demise in 1995, and the Striking Consequences in the Years Since. (By Jason DeParle) The following interactive encyclopedia entry looks back from the year 2015. References to events before December 1995 are real; subsequent developments may become so all too quickly.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, first may I congratulate the Senator from Delaware on a wonderfully cogent and compelling statement, with that marvelous phrase of Kierkegaard's that ``life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.'' I would like to use that as the theme for my remarks. We are responding today to what we have learned from the past. What we have learned about the importance of law and of collective security. It is for that reason, Mr. President, that I rise in support of the resolution developed by the majority leader, Senator Bob Dole, and Senator McCain. At the appropriate time I would ask, as I am sure many others will, to be a cosponsor. This morning's debate has been, as the Senator from Connecticut suggested, a defining day in the history of the Senate. I think not least because of the quality of remarks not just of the Senator from Delaware, but the Senator from Idaho, although he is, perhaps, on the opposite side of the issue. He spoke of the arms embargo imposed on Bosnia and Herzegovina as being illegal, and indeed it was illegal, and it is illegal under article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which provides for the inherent right of collective and individual self-defense. This is a provision Senator Vandenberg, at the San Francisco conference, insisted be in the U.N. Charter, so that there would not be a conflict with the Rio Treaty for the defense of the Western Hemisphere. But that is singularly an American provision. Then the Senator from Connecticut spoke of the way sanctions bit in Serbia. This has been the first ever successful use of sanctions in the course of enforcing international law after a century of advocacy of such measures by groups looking to a world of law, a world of international law, and consequently of a measure of order. The failure of sanctions after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, discredited the idea so severely it has rarely been attempted. It has worked somewhat in Iraq, let us grant, but it has not brought a regime to the peace table. Sanctions bit in Yugoslavia. We have before us a resolution which begins: Whereas beginning on February 24, 1993, President Clinton committed the United States to participate in implementing a peace agreement in Bosnia and Herzegovina without prior consultation with Congress; Whereas the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been unjustly denied the means to defend itself through the imposition of a United Nations arms embargo; And now the third clause. I do not know that there has been such a statement on this floor in half a century. Since, that is, 1945, when the U.N. Charter came to the Senate under bipartisan sponsorship. The clause reads: Whereas the United Nations Charter restates ``the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense,'' a right denied the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina whose population has further suffered egregious violations of the international law of war including ethnic cleansing by Serbian aggressors, and the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to which the United States Senate gave its advice and consent in 1986. This is a rousing statement of the centrality of law to the actions that the United States, the NATO alliance, and the extraordinary assembly of other countries, some 29 in all, are now undertaking. We sometimes forget how central international law has been to our understanding of what would follow World War II. The Genocide Convention, as it is called in shorthand, and which is specifically referred to in the Dole-McCain resolution, was in effect proposed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948, when it declared that ``genocide is a crime under international law.'' To make it a crime required a treaty. In time a treaty was drafted, and in time ratified by the United States. As a treaty it is the supreme law of the land. This land, Mr. President. The resolution also refers to the ``egregious violations of the international law of war.'' By that, sir, we refer to the Geneva Conventions, which were agreed to in the city of Geneva in 1949. A little history here. The Nuremberg tribunals, and the equivalent in Asia that followed World War II, were arguably extralegal, in that individuals arguably were not subjects of international law at that time for most of the issues that were involved in those trials. To resolve any question the Allied Powers determined to remove any shadow of doubt by adopting treaties to establish that the laws of war apply to individuals. Four treaties were drawn up concerning the treatment of particular classes of vulnerable persons during war. These nearly universally accepted treaties are known as the Geneva Conventions of 1949. The conventions make it illegal to target civilians as the objects of military operations. Each of the four conventions has a common Article 3, which states: In the case of armed conflict, not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions: (1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms . . . shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. Note ``sex,'' Mr. President. To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions: (1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms. . . shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: (a) violence to life and person, in particular merder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) taking of hostages; (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment; (d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment procounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples. It is under that common article 3 of the Geneva Conventions that the war crimes tribunal has been convened in the Hague and indictments have been handed down. The Dole-McCain resolution specifically provides that the President will regularly report to the Congress on the progress of the tribunal. Mr. President, the United States is in the process of assembling the most formidable and broadly-based collective effort to maintain international peace and security the world has ever known. This represents a triumph of an American position concerning the law of nations which goes back to the beginning of the Republic, a position that has defined American policy for much of this century, at least until mid-century. But which until this moment, with this resolution, a tradition that has been singularly absent from statements about the Dayton agreement by the President, the Secretary of State or the administration generally. They have spoken about moral imperatives, which no doubt exist, but there is nothing in the Constitution that speaks of moral imperatives. The Constitution says, ``The Congress shall have Power * * * To define and punish * * * Offenses against the Law of Nations.'' It says ``Treaties * * * shall be the supreme Law of the Land. And in a lifetime of searching through article II, I have never found any real duty assigned to the President of the United States other than that ``he shall take Care that the Laws are faithfully executed.'' We are now saying that he is doing this. This goes back a very long way. S. 1, the first bill introduced in the first session of the first Congress of the United States in 1789, written if I may say, by Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, who in 1796 would be appointed Chief Justice of the United States, was titled ``An Act to establish the Judicial Courts of the United States.'' It was the 20th public law enacted. Among other things, the legislation provided that-- . . . the district courts shall have . . . cognizance . . . of all causes where an alien sues for a tort only in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States. An alien can sue in U.S. court for a tort violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States which occurred outside our territory. That was 206 years ago. Eight weeks ago the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Second Circuit unanimously held that under that statute the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic could indeed be sued in the Southern District of New York for offenses against the law of nations committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The suit was brought before Karadzic was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. It is not likely that Mr. Karadzic will appear soon in Foley Square. Yet in the unanimous ruling, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, said, yes, indeed, our laws do provide for such actions. That spirit infused our early Republic. We thought of it as the basis of our legitimacy. When Chancellor Kent published his ``Commentaries on American Law,'' lectures given at Columbia University, his first lecture in his first volume was entitled ``Of the Law of Nations.'' That tradition goes back to the Constitution itself which gives Congress the power ``To define and punish Offenses against the Law of Nations.'' At the beginning of this century, there was a strong movement, the peace movement so-called, consisting of those who hoped that law could be used as a device for preventing war altogether. George Kennan has described this as follows: At the outset of the present century, there emerged in the United States, England and other parts of northern Europe, a vigorous movement for the strengthening and consolidation of world peace, primarily by the development of new legal codes of international behavior. This is from an introduction by Ambassador Kennan to a reprinted volume of a report on the Balkan wars of 1912-1913 which was sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Elihu Root, then a U.S. Senator from New York, was, as I recall, chairman. I might say, when the Carnegie endowment was established in 1910, such was the degree of optimism in the world that the bequest provided the moneys be used for further objectives once ``the establishment of universal peace is attained.'' Ambassador Kennan is, as always, generous. In retrospect, the peace movement, he writes, might seem ``unrealistic, naive, and pathetic. But they were * * * profoundly prophetic and well justified in the concerns they reflected.'' You had no more to see the First World War than to realize that. Then came Woodrow Wilson's effort to create an international organization, the League of Nations, and the failed effort on the Senate floor to enact it. A failure that was far more the President's fault than the Senate's fault. He could have had the Treaty of Versailles if he made a few concessions, which were not of any consequence. But it failed. We withdrew from the world. The world brought us back in with the Second World War. Then the U.N. Charter was signed and then the great effort began to see that law became the arbiter of relations between States. That was reflected not least in the Genocide Convention, and in the Geneva Conventions, reflecting such deep convictions and beliefs on our part. But there followed a time when, among many liberals, international law began to be seen as a set of doctrines that always got you into trouble, that said you had to do this, you had to do that in distant places of which, as the phrase goes, ``we know little.'' Next, in a conservative period that followed, for quite different reasons, the same rejection of law occurred. International law in the eighties came to be seen as a system of negative restraint saying what cannot be done. So damn the treaty: Mine the harbors. Those are inadequate understandings both of what our laws are and what our interests are. We have a profound interest in a world with a measure of order, a measure of predictability, and a capacity to enforce it in some measure at least. As do others. Twenty-nine nations are going to join us in this effort, at last count. Forty-two nations met in London to discuss reestablishment of a civil society in the region. So, Mr. President, I know my colleague from Nebraska would like to say a word, and that a vote is scheduled at 12:30. May I simply welcome this resolution for its ringing reaffirmation of a central tradition in American statecraft, American diplomacy, American military operations: The centrality of law, the legality of what we are doing and the importance of the fact that we are doing it in a collective mode, anticipated by the U.N. Charter. I was once our Representative to the United Nations. I once represented the United States as the President of the Security Council. I did not know I would live to see such a hopeful hour as this. None of us knows how much resistance the implementation force will face. There will surely be losses. I made my way into Sarajevo 3 years ago this Thanksgiving and I saw the dangers the French, Egyptian, and Ukrainian forces faced, along with the air crews of a dozen nations. And that, in theory, was a peace-keeping exercise. This is much more. We have settled for the partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina, however little we may like the term. With half the population of that state either dead or displaced in 4 years of war imposed on it from the outside, this is surely something. Peace may come, in the sense of the absence of war. But stability is surely a long way off. Even so we have at length recognized the necessity to address the legal obligations of the parties involved, which include all members of the United Nations by treaty definition. We will do what can be done, and do it according to law. That has the potential for rescuing us from the shame of having done so little until now. I yield the floor. Several Senators addressed the Chair.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, does the majority leader accept cosponsors at this point of the Dole-McCain amendment?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I would like to be added.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Note that concluding paragraph: If we don't get as good at asking questions as conservatives have become, ``the current revival of liberalism will be brief and inconsequential.'' In the course of the recent debate on ``Welfare reform,'' specifically on September 14, I took occasion to note that almost the only serious critique of the Republican proposal, and its Democratic variant, was coming from conservative social analysts and social scientists. Let me cite three such criticisms which in sum, or so I would argue, make a devastating case against what Congress and the administration seem bent on doing. First George Will, who in the high tradition of conservative thought, asks us to consider the unanticipated consequences of what we are about to do to children in the course of disciplining their parents. He wrote in September: As the welfare reform debate begins to boil, the place to begin is with an elemental fact: No child in America asked to be here. * * * No child is going to be spiritually improved by being collateral damage in a bombardment of severities targeted at adults who may or may not deserve more severe treatment from the welfare system. Let me attach numbers to this statement. In 1968, as part of the social science undertakings associated with the Economic Opportunity Act of 1965, the Federal government helped establish the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. The thought was to follow cohorts of real, named individuals over the years to see how income rose and fell over time. Earlier this year, using this data, Greg J. Duncan and Wei-Jun J. Yeung calculated that of children born between 1973 and 1975, some 24 percent received AFDC at some point before turning 18. Among African-Americans this proportion was 66 percent, while for whites it was 19 percent. All told some 39 percent of this cohort received AFDC, Food Stamps, or Supplementary Security Income. (Duncan, Greg J. and Yeung, Wei-Jun J. ``Extent and Consequences of Welfare Dependence Among America's Children.'' Children and Youth Services Review. Vol. 17, Nos. 1-2, pp. 157-182, 1995.) And so we know what we are talking about. A quarter of our children. A year ago November, James Q. Wilson gave the Walter Wriston lecture at the Manhattan Institute, entitled ``Welfare Reform and Character Development.'' He began by insisting on how little we know: Let me confess at the outset that I do not know what ought to be done and assert that I do not think anyone else knows either. But I think that we can find out, at least to the degree that feeble human reason is capable of understanding some of the most profound features of the human condition. What we may find out, of course, is that we have created a society that can no longer sustain a strong family life no matter what steps we take. I am not convinced of that, for the very people who express the deepest pessimism are themselves leading, in most cases, decent lives amid strong human attachments and competent and caring families. What we worry about is the underclass. There has always been an underclass and always will be one. But of late its ranks have grown, and its members have acquired greater power to destroy their own children and inflict harm beyond their own ranks. The means for doing so--guns, drugs, and automobiles--were supplied to them by our inventive and prosperous economy. We must either control more rigorously those means or alter more powerfully the lives of those who possess them. I wish to discuss the latter, because the public is rightly dubious about how great a gain in public safety can be achieved by the legal methods at our disposal and is properly indignant about the harm to innocent children that will result from neglecting the processes by which the underclass reproduces itself. The great debate is whether, how, and at what cost we can change lives--if not the lives of this generation then those of the next. He then set forth three precepts. Note that the first is precisely where Will began: First precept: Our overriding goal ought to be to save the children. Other goals--reducing the cost of welfare, discouraging illegitimacy, and preventing long-term welfare dependency--are all worthy. But they should be secondary to the goal of improving the life prospects of the next generation. Second precept: Nobody knows how to achieve this goal on a large scale. The debate that has begun about welfare reform is largely based on untested assumptions, ideological posturing, and perverse priorities. We are told that worker training and job placement will reduce the welfare rolls, but we know that worker training and job placement have so far had at best very modest effects on welfare rolls. And few advocates of worker training tell us what happens to children whose mothers are induced or compelled to work, other than to assure us that somebody will supply day care. We are told by others that a mandatory work requirement, whether or not it leads to more mothers working, will end the cycle of dependency. We don't know that it will. Moreover, it is fathers whose behavior we most want to change, and nobody has explained how cutting off welfare to mothers will make biological fathers act like real fathers. We are told that ending AFDC will reduce illegitimacy, but that is, at best, an informed guess. Some people produced many illegitimate children long before welfare existed, and others in similar circumstances now produce none, even though welfare has become quite generous. I have pointed out that group homes and boarding schools once provided decent lives for the children of stable, working-class parents who faced unexpected adversity, but I do not know whether such institutions will work for the children of underclass parents enmeshed in a cycle of dependency and despair. Third precept: The federal government cannot have a meaningful family policy for the nation, and it ought not to try. Not only does it not know and cannot learn from ``experts'' what to do; whatever it thinks it ought to do, it will try to do in the worst possible way: uniformly, systematically, politically, and ignorantly. Today official Washington rarely bothers even to give lip service to the tattered principle of states' rights. Even when it allows the states some freedom, it does so only at its own pleasure, reserving the right to set terms, issue waivers, and attach conditions. Welfare politics in Washington is driven by national advocacy groups that often derive their energy from the ideological message on which they rely to attract money and supporters. And Washington will find ways either to deny public money to churches (even though they are more deeply engaged in human redemption than any state department of social welfare) or to enshroud those churches that do get public money with constraints that vitiate the essential mission of a church. Finally, to Wilson's point that any welfare program significantly funded from Washington will be run ``uniformly, systematically, politically, and ignorantly.'' I don't disagree. The Family Support Act of 1988 had two basic premises. The first was that welfare could not be a way of life; that it had to be an interlude in which mothers learn self-sufficiency and fathers learn child support, and also that this goal was to be pursued in as many different ways as State and local governments could contrive. I would like to think that I am not the only person still in Washington who recalls that in debate we would continually refer to the experiments being carried out by a liberal Democratic Governor in Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, and a conservative Republican Governor of California, George Deukmejian. Our expectations, very much under control I should say, were based on the careful research of such programs by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation based in New York. On December 3rd, Douglas J. Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute, the third of the conservative analysts I will cite, wrote in support of the welfare measure now in conference, stating that the experience of the JOBS program under the Family Support Act showed just how innovative and responsible States can be. He said: Since 1992, the federal government has allowed states almost total freedom to reshape their welfare systems through the waiver process. According to the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), as of last week, 42 states had requested waivers and well over half had already been granted. As some will know, earlier this year I introduced the Family Support Act of 1995, seeking to update the earlier legislation, given seven years experience. In the current issue of The National Journal, in which I am referred to as the ``champion'' of ``left-of-center advocacy groups,'' this measure, which got 41 votes on the Senate floor, is simply dismissed: ``. . . Moynihan's bill is principally a vehicle for defending the status quo . . .'' Dreadful charge, but not unwarranted. The status quo is meant to be one of experiment and change. And it is. I so state: the idea of changing welfare has even taken hold in New York City. Now to what I think of as a constitutional question, the source of my greatest concern. I have several times now, here on the floor, related an event which took place in the course of a ``retreat'' which the Finance Committee held last March 18 at the Wye Plantation in Maryland's Eastern shore. Our chairman, Senator Packwood, asked me to lead a discussion of welfare legislation, the House bill, H.R. 4, having by then come over to the Senate where it was referred to our committee. I went through the House bill, and called particular attention to the provision denying AFDC benefits to families headed by an unwed female under 18 years of age. I said that these were precisely the families we had been most concerned about in the Family Support Act. The welfare population is roughly bi-modal. About half the families are headed by mature women who for one reason or another find themselves alone with children and without income. AFDC is income insurance, just as unemployment compensation is income insurance. Or, if you like, social insurance, which is why we call it Social Security. These persons are typically in and out of the system within 2 years. The other AFDC families, rather more than half, begin as AFDC families. Young women with children typically born out of wedlock. These are the families the Family Support Act was concerned with. There are millions of families in just this circumstance. A few days later, a colleague on the Finance Committee came up to say that he had checked on this matter at home. In his state there were four such families; two had just moved in from out of state. I can imagine the state welfare commissioner asking if the Senator wanted to know their names. Here is the point as I see it. Welfare dependency is huge, but it is also concentrated. That portion of the caseload that is on welfare for two years or less is more or less evenly distributed across the land. But three-quarters of children who are on AFDC at a point in time will be on for more than five years. They are concentrated in cities. In Atlanta, 59 percent of all children received AFDC benefits in the course of the year 1993; in Cleveland, 66 percent; in Miami, 55 percent; in Oakland, 51 percent; in Newark, 66 percent; in Philadelphia, 57 percent. By contrast there are many States that do not have large cities and do not have such concentrations. The Department of Health and Human Services has estimated the number of children who would be denied benefits under the 5-year time limit contained in both the House and Senate welfare bills, now in conference. For California, 849,300. For neighboring Nevada, 8,134. For New York, 300,527. For neighboring Vermont, 6,563. If welfare were a smallish problem--if this were 1955, or even 1965-- an argument could be made for turning the matter back to State Government. But it is now so large a problem that governments of the states in which it is most concentrated simply will not be able to handle it. On December 3rd, Lawrence Mead had an excellent article in the Washington Post in which he described the recent innovations in welfare policy, all provided under the Family Support Act, in Wisconsin. His article is entitled: ``Growing a Smaller Welfare State: Wisconsin's Reforms Show That To Cut the Rolls, You Need More Bureaucrats'' It begins: The Politicians debating welfare reform would have us believe that their efforts will greatly streamline the current system, help balance the nation's books and reverse the growing tide of unwed pregnancy among the poor. What they aren't telling us is that, at the state and local level, the federal cuts in the offing are apt to increase--not shrink-- the size of the welfare bureaucracy. Mead's point is one we understood perfectly at the time we enacted the Family Support Act. The cheapest thing to do with chronic welfare dependent families is simply to leave them as they are. Changing them in ways that Wilson speaks of is labor intensive, costly and problematic. A nice quality of the Wisconsin experiments is that job search begins the day an adult applies for welfare. But this takes supervision. Mead notes that high performing areas of the state ``feature relentless followup of clients to see that they stay on track.'' The term client is important; it is a term of professional social work. This sort of thing is not for amateurs. Most importantly, he concludes: Even with Wisconsin's successes so far, important questions remain unanswered: What happens to the people who were formerly on the welfare rolls? Are they better or worse off than before? Can they sustain themselves long term? Anecdotes don't suggest great hardship, but nobody knows for sure. And what evidence is there that this approach can flourish in inner cities where the social problems are far more serious? In Milwaukee, which has half the state's welfare caseload, the success has been far more modest than in the rest of the state. These questions need answers before a case can be made that Wisconsin is the model on which other states should base their reforms. But this much is clear: Wisconsin's fusion of generosity and stringency does represent what the voters say they're looking for. In Milwaukee, 53 percent of children are on AFDC in the course of a year. I have been taken to task for suggesting that the time limits in the House and Senate bills will produce a surge in the number of homeless children such that the current problem of the homeless will seem inconsequential. So be it; that is my view. I believe our present social welfare system is all but overwhelmed. Witness the death of Elisa Izquierdo in Brooklyn. If 39 percent of all children in New York City were on AFDC at some point in 1993, I would estimate that the proportion for Brooklyn would have been at least 50 percent, probably higher. Hundreds of thousands--I said hundreds of thousands--of these children live in households that are held together primarily by the fact of welfare assistance. Take that away and the children are blown to the winds. A December 6 administration analysis concludes that the welfare conference agreement will force 1.5 million children into poverty. To say what I have said before here in the Senate: The young males can be horrid to themselves, horrid to one another, horrid to the rest of us. By way of example, or analogue, or what you will, I have frequently referred to the Federal legislation that commenced the deinstitutionalization of mental patients. I was present at the creation of this movement. Early in 1955, our former esteemed House colleague, Jonathan B. Bingham, at that time secretary to Governor Averell Harriman of New York brought Dr. Paul Hoch, the new commissioner of mental health, in to meet the Governor. I was present, along with Paul H. Appleby, the new budget director. Dr. Hoch, a wonderful, humane man of science, told of a new chemical treatment for mental illness which had been developed by Dr. Nathan Kline at Rockland State Hospital in the lower Hudson Valley. It had been tested clinically. Hoch proposed that it be given to all patients, throughout the New York mental hospital system, which then held some 94,000 patients. Today there are 8,000. Harriman asked what the program would cost. Hoch mentioned a sum in the neighborhood, as I recall, of $4 million. Harriman asked Appleby if he could find the money. Appleby, I cannot doubt having been cued by Bingham, replied that he could find it. Done. said Harriman, I am an investment banker and believe in investment. And so reserpine medication commenced. Eight years later, on October 22, 1963, in his last public bill- signing ceremony at the White House, President John F. Kennedy signed the Community Health Center Construction Act of 1963. I was present, since I had worked on the legislation, and the President gave me a pen which I have in my hand here. We were going to empty out our great mental hospitals and treat patients in local community centers. We would build 2,000 by the year 1980, and thereafter one for each additional 100,000 persons in the population. Alas, we built some 400 centers, and then just forgot about our earlier plans. But we emptied out the hospitals. A decade or so later, the problem of the homeless appeared, to our general bafflement. I have commented that in New York, with our singular ability for getting problems wrong, homelessness has been defined as a problem of lack of affordable housing. We will very likely think up some equally misleading explanation for the growing numbers of homeless children when they appear, and so I would like to put this on the record now. On December 3, a newspaper of considerable circulation did just this, however inadvertently. A long article on ``welfare reform'' was accompanied by a photograph of an overstuffed chair on which a broken, or battered doll had been placed. The caption read: ``Republicans blame failed welfare policies for today's problems. Above, an easy chair at a Philadelphia homeless encampment.'' A photograph, I dread to say, of things to come. Republicans must look to their own consciences. I would appeal to that of my own party. Last week, our distinguished majority leader, Senator Bob Dole, stated that he hoped to bring welfare reform to the floor this week. It is very likely next week there will also be a conference report on welfare reform. I think we have about concluded the conference. [T]he original bill passed in the Senate by a vote of 87 to 12. We believe we have retained most of the Senate provisions in the conference, and I ask my colleagues on both sides--this bill had strong bipartisan support--to take a close look. Eighty-eight percent of the American people want welfare reform. We will have it on the floor, we hope, next week. We hope the President of the United States will sign it. In my view, it is a good resolution of differences between the House and the Senate. We still have one or two minor--well not minor--issues in disagreement we hope to resolve tomorrow, and then we hope to bring it up by midweek next week. What is one to say? The Senate bill did indeed have ``strong bipartisan support.'' If we do get a conference committee report, it will pass and will, I am confident, be vetoed. What I fear is that the repeal of the Social Security Act provision will return as part of a general budget reconciliation, and that bill will be signed into law. Should it do so, the Democratic Party will be to blame, and blamed it will be. It will never again be able to speak with any credibility to the central social issue of our age. We will have fashioned our own coffin. There will be no flowers.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, we are now in the final days of the 1st session of the 104th Congress. In a short while we will have worked out some accommodations on the budget. We must do this, for we will now be engaged in the establishment of some measure of peace and lawful conduct in the Balkans. It would be unforgivable if we put our military in harm's way abroad without first getting our affairs in some minimal order here at home. I am fearful, however, that as we close out this session we will also close down the provision for aid to dependent children that dates back 60 years to the Social Security Act of 1935. If this should happen, and it very likely will, the first and foremost reason will be the monstrous political deception embodied in the term Welfare reform. In my lifetime there has been no such Orwellian inversion of truth in the course of a domestic debate. ``Welfare reform'' in fact means welfare repeal. The repeal, that is, of title IV-A of the Social Security Act. Everyone is to blame for this duplicity, everyone is an accomplice. For practical purposes, we can begin with the celebrated Contract With America, which pledged that within 100 days, a Republican House would vote on 10 bills, including: 3. Welfare reform. The government should encourage people to work, not to have children out of wedlock. This in itself was unexceptional, especially the second clause. By 1994, the nation had become alarmed by an unprecedented rise in illegitimacy, to ratios altogether ahistorical--from practically nil to almost one-third in the course of a half-century. Since illegitimate children commonly end up supported by Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a causal connection was inferred. Not proven. We know desperately little about this great transformation, save that it is happening in all the industrial nations of the North Atlantic. Undeterred, the new House majority promptly passed a bill which repealed AFDC. Such an act would have been unthinkable a year earlier, just as repealing Old Age pensions or Unemployment Compensation, other titles of the Social Security Act, would be today. At minimum, it would have seemed cruel to children. But the new Republicans succeeded in entirely reversing the terms of the debate. Instead of aiding children, AFDC was said to harm them. Last month, a Republican Member of the House remarked on the importance of child care: . . . because our welfare reform package is going to remove people from welfare and get them to work. We understand that child care is a critical step to ending the cruelty of welfare dependency. What once was seen as charity, or even social insurance is redefined as cruelty. This happens. Social problems are continuously redefined. Malcolm Gladwell of The Washington Post has noted that, ``In the 19th century, the assumption had almost always been that a man without a job was either lazy or immoral. But following the depression of the 1890's, the Progressives `discovered' unemployment.'' Which is to say, a personal failing became a societal failing instead. This redefinition has wrought what would once have seemed miracles in the stabilization of our economy. Mass unemployment is now history. On the other hand, such cannot be said for the attempt to dissociate welfare dependency from personal attributes, including moral conduct. As we would say in the old Navy, I am something of a plank owner in this regard. It is just 30 years since I and associates on the policy planning staff of the Department of Labor picked up the onset of family instability in the nation, in this case among African Americans. Interestingly, this followed our having failed to establish that macroeconomic problems were the source of the trouble. In the event, I was promptly accused of Blaming the Victim. For the 30 years that followed there was an awful tyranny of guilt mongering and accusation that all but strangled liberal debate. One consequence was that when a political force appeared that wished to change the terms of debate altogether, established opinion was effortlessly silenced and displaced. Again, Gladwell: But if anything is obvious from the current budget fight and Capitol Hill's commitment to scaling back welfare and Medicaid while lavishing extra billions on the Pentagon, it is that this once formidable confidence has now almost entirely slipped away. This is what has given Washington's current re-examination of the size and shape of government its strange ambivalence. In most revolutions the defenders of the status quo have to be dragged from power, kicking and screaming. In this revolution, the defenders of the old activism toward the poor surrendered willingly, with the shrugs and indifference of those who no longer believed in what they stood for either. This was painfully evident in the Senate. On August 3, 1995, the Republican majority introduced a Welfare reform bill which abolished AFDC. That same day, the Democratic minority introduced a competing Welfare reform bill--which also abolished AFDC. On the minority side an enormous fuss is now being made over adding a little extra child care, some odd bits of child nutrition aid, perhaps a little foster care. Literally arranging flowers on the coffin of the provision for children in the Social Security Act. Coming from devious persons this would have been a conscious strategy--distracting attention from what was really going on. But these were not, are not, devious persons. Sixty years of program liberalism--a bill for you, a bill for me--had made this legislative behavior seem normal. The enormity of the event was altogether missed. I hope this is not mere innocence on my part. The Washington Post editorial page has been unblinking on this subject. An editorial of September 14 described the bill on the Senate floor as ``reckless,'' adding with a measure of disdain: ``Some new money for child care may . . . be sprinkled onto this confection.'' Those seeking to define welfare repeal as welfare reform by improving the Republican measure should have known better, but I truly think they did not. In recent years, child care has been something of a mantra among liberal advocates for the poor. For all its merits, it has awesome defects, which are the defects of American social policy. The most important is that it creates two classes of working mothers: one that gets free government provided child care; another that does not. The Clinton administration arrived in Washington sparking with such enthusiasms. At this time, I was chairman of the Committee on Finance, charged with producing $500 billion in deficit reduction, half through tax increases, half through program cuts. I thought deficit reduction a matter of the first priority, as did my fabled counterpart in the House, Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of Ways and Means. In the end, we got the votes. Barely. Fifty, plus the Vice President in the Senate. But all the while we were taking on this large--and as we can now say hugely successful--effort, we were constantly besieged by administration officials wanting us to add money for this social program or that social program. Immunization was a favorite. Rosty and I were baffled. Our cities had had free immunization for the better part of a century. All children are vaccinated by the time they enter school. If they aren't vaccinated at earlier ages, it is surely the negligence or ignorance of the parents that has most explanatory value. But nothing would do: had to add whatever billion dollars for yet a new Government service. My favorite in this miscellany was something called family preservation, yet another categorical aid program-- there were a dozen in place already--which amounted to a dollop of social services and a press release for some subcommittee chairman. The program was to cost $930 million over 5 years, starting at $60 million in fiscal year 1994. For three decades I had been watching families come apart in our society; now I was being told by seemingly everyone on the new team that one more program would do the trick. The New Family Preservation Program was included in the President's first budget, but welfare reform was not. In fact, the administration presented no welfare plan until June of 1994, a year and a half after the President took office. At the risk of indiscretion, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at this point a letter I wrote to Dr. Laura D'Andrea Tyson, then the distinguished Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today to wish great congratulations to Lauren F. Otis, who retired Thursday, November 30, 1995, after 28 years of dedicated service to the city of New York's department of city planning. Mr. Otis has been with the department of city planning since 1967, the last 11 as chief urban designer. In this capacity, he has acted as a consultant to the chairman and the city planning commission on a variety of urban matters while developing comprehensive studies of the five boroughs of New York City as an overall framework for individual projects. Prior to becoming the chief urban designer, Mr. Otis was a key member of a team of architectural professionals who developed new zoning and regulatory approaches for the development of Midtown Manhattan and the Wall Street area. Some of his individual urban design highlights include Times Square, the Citicorp Center and the Sliver Building zoning amendment. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard University School of Design, Mr. Otis served in the U.S. Navy Civil Engineer Corps from 1955-58 before moving to architectural design, working as a staff architect for I.M. Pei & Partners before joining the city of New York. In addition to Mr. Otis' work in the department of city planning, his patronage of New York City's cultural spirit as mayor's representative to the New York City Art Commission between 1982 and 1992, the last 7 years as vice president, and as a representative to the New York City Historic Properties Fund deserves recognition. Mr. President, I hope my colleagues will join me in wishing him the best of luck in his much deserved retirement. (At the request of Mr. Daschle, the following statement was ordered to be printed in the Record.)

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. No. The testing called for in the amendment is a screening study to identify active and inert pesticide ingredients that mimic estrogens. It is a hazard identification process designed to identify the magnitude of the potential problem and to help set priorities for the future. As we learned from the experience with the Ames test for carcinogens in the 1970's and 1980's, hazard identification tests do not provide enough information to be the sole basis for regulatory action. Having said that, let me quickly note that the Administrator may have additional information about the exposure levels, or about the relationship between exposure and effect for certain of the substances to be tested such that she makes a risk management decision that regulatory action is needed. If, as a result of such evaluations, the Administrator finds a substance likely has a potential adverse effect in humans she must take appropriate regulatory action. The amendment gives her authority to do so through appropriate regulatory action under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act or the Toxic Substances Control Act or under other authority available to the Administrator.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, would the Senator from New York yield for some questions regarding this amendment?