Rick Santorum

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. I am happy to yield to the Senator.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I yield such time as I may consume. I want to go over this amendment again and discuss it specifically for Members who may be torn, as I think many are, in wanting to support work and see the potential need for day care. Focusing on what the amendment does, we have heard a lot of discussion from the Senator from Connecticut and the Senator from Massachusetts of the concern for mothers with preschool children, that we cannot allow mothers who have children 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years of age-- and I have three children all under the age of 5 and I am keenly aware of the need for care for young children. However, this amendment does not just pertain to young children. This provides funding so that every welfare parent with children under 12 years of age--12 and under, under 13--you can have an 11-year-old or 12-year-old and you still get a funded day care slot. That is what the amendment says. This is not just focused on children under 5. We talk about being concerned for them. This is a much more expansive program. It is not just part-time child care, it is a full-time child care program. It is 12 and under, full time, not just for single moms, not just for single moms or dads who have children, but for married mothers and fathers who may be on welfare and have children. This is for two-parent households as well as single-parent households. That is what the amendment says. You could have a situation where you have a 12-year-old child at home with two parents, and under this bill, you would get a full-time day care slot paid for by the Federal Government. Would that not be nice if every American who was working, the Government would pay your full-time child care, and you could not even have to work under this bill. So you do not have to work. You can be married, have a 12-year-old at home, do not work, and the Government will pay your child care full time. That is what this amendment does. Now, you hear a lot of compassion on the other side about the single mom with the 2-year-old, but you do not hear that this is another well- intended bill that focuses on the hard problem. And then when you realize this is a brandnew big-time expansive program, day care for everybody on welfare, whether you are married or not, whether you are working or not. I do not think that is what is being sold here on the Senate floor. I think we have to look very carefully at what is in this amendment and how much money it costs--$6 billion, fully funded day care slots for all children of married and unmarried parents, single and married parents, up to 12 years of age. Not the preschool kids, but up to 12 years of age. I think this is a real Pandora's box we have opened. This is not the amendment that is being talked about. This is a very broad, expansive program.

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

Mr. SANTORUM. The AFDC program is block granted at a flat level, the Senator is right. But, obviously, there are a lot of other support services and means-tested programs that will continue to grow. The point I tried to make is that with respect to AFDC, you have the flexibility within that program the Governors desire, saying, in fact, they can save money and have money, because of the savings, available to support the work program. In addition, you have a 50-percent work participation requirement which would give the States the flexibility to exclude a lot of the people that you mentioned who have young children or maybe multiple young children, from having to go to work and the work requirement. We do provide a lot of flexibility there. We think that flexibility goes a long way in solving the problem. I am hopeful we can look at the past to see what the future holds. Looking at the past and seeing all the entitlements we put in place and seeing all the money that we spent trying to make sure nobody is harmed, what we have done is make sure that nobody has been helped. What we have not done is challenge people to do more, to move forward. I believe this program, with the work requirement and the participation standards we have and the flexibility given to States, will do just that: challenge people to go out and work and find ways to provide for themselves and their families. I think, in the long run, that will be the best for everyone concerned. At this time, I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Vermont.

Mr. SANTORUM. The Senator is right, the AFDC dollars remain flat. When I talk about the 70-percent increase, I talk about all the means- tested entitlement programs included in this bill.

Mr. SANTORUM. Yes, I will yield.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I wanted to congratulate the Senator from Connecticut for his very persuasive case on behalf of the need for child care and making workfare or welfare to work. I do not think anyone on this side of the aisle disagrees with the basic premise of his amendment, which is if we are going to have people go to work, then we are going to be in some need of child care for working women, single mothers. The question is, How much money are you willing to put up? What will be the impact? Again, we go back to the start of a lot of these programs, the welfare programs back in the 1960's when they really mushroomed, and a lot of these programs were very well intentioned, but what happened? What were the consequences of these--I am careful not to use the word entitlement because I know the Senator from Connecticut says this is not an entitlement. I agree. It is not an entitlement. But there is enough money in his bill to fill all the day-care slots that are anticipated to be needed. Well, it is not an entitlement, but it takes care of everyone who needs the service. So while you know it is sort of taking away with one hand, saying it is not an entitlement, it is giving with the other by giving all the money necessary anticipated to have the need. You can say it is not an entitlement, but it is, in fact, almost a guarantee of child care. So, what are the consequences of this guarantee? And we talked about this in some dialog on Friday. And you know, I have some concerns about people on welfare getting a guarantee of sorts of child care where if someone who is a working mother gets no guarantee at all of having any kind of child-care support. In fact, as the Senator from Connecticut pointed out on numerous occasions, accurately, there is a shortage of day-care slots available for working mothers in this country. So to suggest we should provide some sort of quasi-guarantee for those on welfare and not for those who are working mothers, I think, sets up a bad precedent, No. 1; and with the law of unintended consequence you may encourage welfare dependency, at least initially, in some cases. There are several other points I want to make. One is the money. I know we sort of gloss over that around here. Mr. President, $6 billion is not a whole lot of money, at least if you sit on the Senate floor most days you would think $6 billion is not a lot of money. But it is a lot of money, and it is given the fact that if you look at what is being proposed in the Republican bill that we are now amending. The Republican bill over the next 7 years will allow welfare to grow at 70 percent over the next 7 years--70 percent. Welfare programs will grow from [[Page S 13188]] the year 1995 to the year 2002, 70 percent. There will be an increase of 70 percent in these programs. And what we are saying now is that is not enough. We need another $6 billion more. Just so you understand, you say, well, how much was it going to grow if we did not cut it back, because this bill does have some reduction? Well, it would have grown at 77 percent. So we are taking a program that was supposed to grow over the next 7 years and grow by 77 percent; cut it back to 70 percent. There are those on the other side saying, that is too tough. We need to add another $6 billion more back to this fund of money. If you are serious about day care, if you really think child care is that important, well then, I would suggest that you confine it to the 70-percent growth that is going to be experienced over the next 7 years, $6 billion to offset the money you want to spend, not another quasi-guarantee or almost entitlement for child care. I just think you have to pass the straight-face test around here. If you really are serious about solving problems--I think we all are. We want to solve the problem of child care in this bill. And I think we have done some things with the Snowe amendment that goes a long way in doing so. So it is now in the Dole modified bill. I think we made a major step forward. If you are serious about providing and funding more dollars, do not say we need to spend more. That is how we got to where we are today. This bill has to fit into a reconciliation package which, by the way, it does not right now. It does not right now. It is over what, I think, the Budget Committee wants to see in reductions in welfare. We are going to have to get more. When we go to conference this bill is going to come back with less money, I suspect. The House bill was substantially under this bill. So it will be under this. The House bill had a 5-year year timeframe when they passed the bill. And on their 5-year timeframe they had welfare expenditures growing at 42 percent. Now, that is at a slower rate than our 70 percent over 7 years. So you are going to see we are already going to have to pull back funds. And to suggest that we should come to the floor and we can get a compromise spending more money, that is how we got there and how we got to what the welfare system is. We have always done that, come to the floor and said, ``OK. We will compromise and spend more.'' And everybody will be happy and pass a bill 96 to 1, passing a bill 96 to 1 that perpetuates the same thing--maybe makes everybody feel good, but it does not solve the problem. It does not solve the problem. So what we are suggesting here is that you know, we are, and I think, continuing in a dialog. I know Senator Hatch has an amendment on day care that I think is a serious amendment. And we are trying to find some ground to make all of our Members, not just on the Democratic side, but I know myself and others, I know Senator Jeffords is going to speak here. We are concerned about the child care aspects of this. I know Senator Jeffords supported the Snowe amendment which is now in the leader's bill. I know he would like to go further. And I know there are other Members who would like to go further. But we have to understand we have budget constraints. This is not a stingy bill that we are dealing with. Welfare spending will grow by 70 percent over the next 7 years. That is not stingy. That is not uncaring. And to suggest that we can solve the problem and get everybody happy by spending another $6 billion--I suggest if we got that in there there would be another $6 billion to spend in another program. I would also add that Republican Governors, almost every one of them--I know the majority leader has come here and said I think 29 of the 30 Republican Governors in the country have come out and supported the Dole substitute. They comprise roughly 80 percent of the welfare recipients. The Governors of those States have within those States 80 percent of the Nation's welfare recipients. And what they have almost unanimously said to us is ``You give us the money you allocated under this bill and we can do the job. We can, in fact, put people to work.'' You would think from the comments of some on the other side that we are going to require every mother who has a child under 5 to go to work. I would remind the Senators who are debating this amendment that when this bill goes into effect, the initial participation rates are only 30 percent. That means only 30 percent of all the welfare caseload has to be in a work program. It only goes up to a maximum of 50 percent. So the State always has discretion to take mothers with young children and not require them to work. In fact, many Governors have already told me that is exactly what they would do in most cases because of the cost, and because of the difficulty with day care. But we provide that flexibility in the law. We already provide that. We already say they can adjust. And the Governors say they can do it. And if you look at some of the plans that have been tried under the 1988 act--I mentioned on several occasions the Riverside, CA, example, where what we have seen is a 14-percent reduction in food stamps, a 20- some reduction--I do not have numbers in front of me--20-some percent reduction that goes out on AFDC, aid to families with dependent children, and a 25-percent reduction in caseload. Now, that saves money. Why? Why do they save money? They require people to go to work. So you can save money to provide some of that work. And it was a successful program at a time when Riverside, CA, was experiencing a 9 percent-unemployment rate. So it is not that there are no jobs. There are no jobs. Well, there are jobs, if we do some things like the Dole bill does which allow you to fill some vacancies in cities and counties and local governments, State governments which you cannot under current law. If there is a vacancy in the State government or local government, you want to fill it with a welfare recipient, you can do it. You are not allowed to hire somebody who is a welfare recipient for an open position. Why? That is to protect the union membership at the State and local level. They do not want people on welfare to get some of those jobs. I think that is a crime. That would change under the Dole bill. So I mean we are doing a lot of things that will encourage--will create more job opportunities which will cause savings as we have seen in examples in the past, where if you have a work requirement, the welfare rolls will go down. Ask Governor Thompson, Governor Engler, and ask others who have tried it. The caseload will go down. People will get to work because of the requirement that is there. And they will save money. And that money can be used to provide for support services for those who have to remain in the program and go to the work program. That is the whole basis behind what we are suggesting here. I would suggest that what we have provided for again with the Governors, Republican Governors lining up behind this bill, is adequate to fund this program, to fund the child-care programs that are necessary. We have the flexibility of the States with the 50-percent work participation requirement to exempt certain difficult-to-place mothers with young children. I mean there is a lot of flexibility in this program to be able to deal with the problems. I think what we now have to do is make the fiscally responsible vote. Welfare has gotten itself in the problem it has because we have been reluctant in the face of harming children or these horrible things that are going to occur, if we do not provide all the money for everything, all these entitlements. If we do not provide all these entitlements children are going to suffer. All I would suggest is we provided entitlements for 25 and 30 years. Children are suffering at historic levels. So if it was just money and entitlements there would be no suffering today. There are plenty of entitlements and plenty of suffering to go with it. So let me suggest that maybe what we need is instead of guaranteeing everybody child care, why do we not require work and say that we have to look to families and to other kinds of networks of support to look for child care, just like we have done in this country historically? One of my real concerns--and this gets to be more of a philosophical concern, if we--as I know the Senator from Connecticut will say we are not guaranteeing, but we darn near are guaranteeing it--if you provide all the money for all the slots, if you do that, you run [[Page S 13189]] into the problem where the Government day-care option is the first resort; that getting Government support for that day care slot is now the first choice, not the last resort. The system as it works today works well. I know there are shortages of day care, but it works well in targeting the mothers who need day care the most. It works well in that you have to go through a very rigorous qualification procedure to be able to qualify for Government-assisted day care. That would probably not be the case if we fully funded all these day care slots.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, may I inquire of the Chair of the time remaining on this side?

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. The Senator has 30 seconds remaining.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Texas for yielding. As I discussed the other night, I want to congratulate the Senator from Texas for working diligently in coming up with this formula. It is a fair formula. On the surface, it sounds like the Feinstein formula is fair because it is based on growth in poverty population. What the Feinstein formula ignores is how we got to the allocation in the first place. In other words, how did we get to today? It is based on not how many poor children there are in California, Pennsylvania, or New Mexico; it gets to the State today based on how much the State of California ponied up, as did the States of Texas and Pennsylvania. As a result, you have States like California--and Pennsylvania being another one and New York--who had large welfare contributions. They put up a substantial State match. As a result, they got more Federal dollars. If you put up more State money, you got more Federal money. So you had certain States who were more generous with their welfare--or more progressive, some would say--and put up more dollars. Well, now the match is gone. There is no longer a match required under the Dole substitute, the bill we are going to pass. So to suggest that we should now take a formula based on what a State match was and apply that in the future, based on what the growth in the poverty population is, already gives those States that had high State matches an artificial advantage in the first place. So what the Hutchison formula tries to do is say--starting at this inequity, because the Hutchison formula holds every State harmless and says that, from there on, we are going to have the States who get less per child under current law get more money over time to equal out what the Pennsylvanias and Californias and New Yorks get. So her growth formula targets the low-benefit States that are growing and allows them to catch up with these Federal dollars. It is fair in the sense that these are block granted funds and there is no match required anymore. California does not want to spend a penny on this. They will not anymore because we have a 75 percent maintenance of effort. But California can reduce their contribution, which would be a lot more to their State budget than Mississippi's reduction in their welfare contribution. So they have a lot more flexibility under the current law. There is no match requirement except to the extent of the 75 percent maintenance of effort. [[Page S 13201]] This is a fair way to make up the difference over a period of time. As Senator Hutchison will very articulately tell you, they are still at the short end of the stick because the per child expenditure for a child from California, New York, or Pennsylvania will still be less after 7 years than they will be in taxes, even though it is a block- granted formula. We try to make up this inequity. I congratulate her for her tenacity in dealing with this issue. This was the toughest issue to deal with. Any time you try to figure out how the money is allocated, you get all sorts of parochial interests that jump to the floor. She was able to stick in there and handle it and bring people together. It is one of the principal reasons this bill is on the floor and in shape to pass the Senate.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. I will be happy to yield.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I send to the desk three amendments on behalf of the Senator from New York, Senator D'Amato and ask for their consideration.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that those amendments be set aside for later consideration.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendments be dispensed with.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand in recess until the hour of 10 a.m. on Monday, September 11, 1995, that following the prayer, the Journal of proceedings be deemed approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and that the Senate then immediately resume consideration of H.R. 4, the welfare reform bill.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I now ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand in recess under the previous order.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. I ask unanimous consent the amendment be set aside.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I send to the desk an amendment on behalf of the Senator from New York [Mr. D'Amato]. I ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent we resume consideration of the welfare reform bill, H.R. 4.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. For the information of all Senators, the Senate will resume consideration of the welfare reform bill on Monday. Under a previous consent agreement, a number of amendments will be debated throughout the day with a series of consecutive rollcall votes beginning at 5 p.m., therefore Senators should be aware that the first rollcall vote will begin at 5 p.m. Monday. Also, for the information of my colleagues, a large number of amendments have been offered to the bill, as stated by the Senator from New York, and will need to be disposed of before passage. Therefore, the majority leader has indicated that Senators should anticipate late night sessions next week in order to complete action on the welfare reform bill.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent following the third rollcall vote on Monday, the Senate resume consideration of the Feinstein amendment, No. 2469, there be 30 minutes to be equally divided between Senators Hutchison and Feinstein, and that the vote occur on or in relation to that amendment following the conclusion or yielding back of time. [[Page S 13139]]

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the resolution be considered and agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements related to the resolution appear at the appropriate place in the Record.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Senate Resolution 169, submitted earlier today by Senator Thomas.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. I thank the Chair. I will not take the 5 minutes. I wanted to inform Members who were not here last night when we debated this amendment, I believe this is an amendment that should get overwhelming support of this body. The amendment addresses a problem that I think has come to light through newspaper articles and other studies that have been done by criminal experts where we found that because of the privacy provisions in the current welfare statutes, police are not able to get addresses of people who are fleeing the criminal justice system, fugitive felons who have warrants out for their arrest or are, in fact, convicted felons who have escaped. You have warrants out for their arrest, convicted felons that police are trying to track down. They go to the welfare agency and say, ``Are they receiving welfare? Is there a current address you might have?'' And the welfare agency, under law, is not allowed to tell them whether this person is receiving food stamps or AFDC or whatever the case may be. You might say, how big of a problem is this? Well, in Cleveland they had a sting operation a year or so ago and 33 percent of the people who they caught in this sting operation had welfare cards, either receiving food stamps, AFDC, or SSI. In Philadelphia--I went there earlier this year and talked to the fugitive task force there--they have 50,000 outstanding fugitive warrants, felony warrants in the city of Philadelphia. And of the people that they have brought in under this task force, the police there claim that 75 percent of the people who they have brought in collect welfare. And there is no way for them to go to the welfare agency with this warrant and be able to find out where these people live because one thing the police of Philadelphia told me is that when these folks sign up for welfare, they give the right address because they want those checks to be mailed to the right place. So we have good information and in many cases we have photographs, and as you know, in pursuing felons you do not necessarily have a recent photograph. They may have changed appearance. So there are all sorts of good reasons this amendment is supported by the chief of police, the FOP--all law enforcement agencies have come out in favor of this amendment. I am hopeful that the Senate today will adopt this and move forward to help police be able to better find fugitives. Remember, these are dangerous felons who are hiding out, not taking jobs, by collecting Government benefits and therefore not signing up for employment where they might otherwise be caught. So we think this is sort of a logical exemption to the privacy provisions of the Welfare Act. And I hope that the Senate will support the amendment this morning. I yield the floor. Mr. BINGAMAN addressed the Chair.