Rick Santorum

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I send the following five amendments to the desk on behalf of the Senator from New Mexico [Mr. Domenici] and ask for their consideration.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside.

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

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I send to the desk an amendment on behalf of the Senator from Pennsylvania, Senator Specter, and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. SANTORUM. I ask unanimous consent that that amendment be set aside for later consideration.

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

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I send the following amendment to the desk, and ask for its immediate consideration on behalf of the Senator from Maine, Senator Cohen.

Mr. SANTORUM. I think it is important to look. If, in fact, we see the penalties are not particularly stiff, I would look at dealing with that down the road. I thank the Senator.

Mr. SANTORUM. I would say to the Senator again in the Dole bill as recently modified there is a provision that States have to do 75 percent maintenance of effort over 3 years. There really is no attempt to race to the bottom. I do not know how many States are going to be willing to sort of give back dollars as opposed to reallocating existing dollars. We are not really asking to spend more money. We are telling them to reallocate dollars to child care, to implement the work program. And that is not costing them any Federal funds to do that. If they violate and suffer penalties, they will lose Federal dollars. And that is a pretty powerful incentive, I think. I will get those numbers as to what the penalties will be.

Mr. SANTORUM. Do not put me on the spot.

Mr. SANTORUM. OK. Then if we are going to provide sufficient money for everyone to get child care as a first resort and a last resort, while it may not be an entitlement, it has in effect the same consequence which is everyone will have a day care slot, and that is a Federal day care slot which I think is a dangerous precedent and a counterproductive one. Again, I want to emphasize that I think through the Snowe amendment we are going to without a doubt encourage States--and I think a lot of States would do this without our encouragement--encourage States to move forward and to provide day care support for working single parents. And I will go through that rationale again. I think it is important. Under the Dole provision, we are going to require eventually 50 percent of all people who participate in this program, the welfare program, 50 percent will have to be in the work program. There will be a substantial number, roughly a third is usually the number, a third considered to be incapacitated, disabled, whatever the term you want to use, who will never be in a work program because of either their own incapacity or disability of a child that would make that parent really ineligible to have to leave that child and go to work. So you are setting aside a third that you pretty well know are not ever going to be in that program. So you have 50 percent of the whole thing and [[Page S 12931]] again a third of that is gone, so you have a pretty good chunk of the remaining caseload that are going to be required to work. If you say that single parents are going to be required to work irrespective of the age of the child, so they are going to be in the denominator of the equation, but they are not required to work if they can demonstrate that child care is not available to them--and again the State will set the criteria--that means they are not going to be in the enumerator, and if you have a pool here of roughly 67 percent of the whole group, and you have to get 50 percent to work, you have a pretty slim margin to work with to exclude people because they cannot get day care. So what you are going to do is to meet your 50 percent number the State really is going to be forced to go out and provide day care opportunities for younger mothers, and I think that is what we want to do. We want to make sure that as efficiently as possible we can direct the States to in effect go out and provide those dollars. So we think we have gotten around the problem without getting into the--I will not use the term entitlement because it is not entitlement--without getting used to, I would say, the guaranteed slot that is being provided for in the Dodd amendment, however well- intentioned I think--I know the Senator from Connecticut has been a champion in trying to expand the number of day care guarantees for parents. However well-intentioned that is, I do not think that is the right direction we should be taking at this time.

Mr. SANTORUM. I think that is a distinction without a difference.

Mr. SANTORUM. If you provide the amount of money that will be necessary to fully fund the program, in a sense you have not created an entitlement but you have created a slot for everyone.

Mr. SANTORUM. The Senator has.

Mr. SANTORUM. Sure.

Mr. SANTORUM. I am not making the point that we should not provide child care for women who are on welfare who want to work. I am not saying we should not do that. The point I was making is I do not think we should create a guaranteed entitlement for it. There is a difference. The Senator mentioned in fact for working mothers today there is no entitlement to day care. There simply is not. We do, as the Senator mentioned, have some 600,000 people who are in need of day care assistance, that assistance, but it is a very tough program. You have to walk through the hoops to be able to qualify. You have to prove that there is no family or other kind of support necessary. It is not easy to qualify. And even at that, even if you qualify, you are not guaranteed a slot.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, seeing no other Senators present, I would like to respond to the comments of the Senator from Connecticut. As I said, yesterday when I made comments on the issue of child care, I have sympathy for what he is talking about. I was a member of the Ways and Means Committee which last year worked on the Republican Task Force on Welfare and came up with a bill, H.R. 3,500, with the Senator from Massachusetts spoke to and came over and said we should adopt the Santorum bill over here from last session because indeed in the last session we introduced a bill that, as chairman of the task force, will provide more money for child care recognizing the need that if we are going to put people into work that we would in fact be required to come up with some more money for child care. I say that under H.R. 3,500 we did not block grant the program. We did not give States the kind of flexibility that we do in this bill, and that Governors from across the country--as I said, yesterday, 80 percent of the people who are on welfare today are represented by Republican Governors. Those Governors have almost unanimously--I think there is one Governor so far that has not come out and endorsed this proposal--said that they are willing to take the allocation of resources provided in this bill and can in fact run programs that will put people to work and provide day care and the other support services that are necessary to get people into work. So while we did provide money in that bill in the House, we did not provide the flexibility that the Governors wanted. They believe, as sort of the age-old tradeoff, as most Governors will tell you, if you are going to give us all these requirements give us the money to live with them. If you are going to give us responsibility, give us the flexibility and we will not need as much money. That is pretty much the bottom line here. We believe we are actually able to provide more money overall if we give more flexibility to run the programs and not have the bureaucratic hoops to jump through here in Washington which cost a lot of money for the States to comply with. So that is one comment. The other comment I would make is that in the programs that have in fact required work and in fact did put people into work. I cite the example of Riverside, CA, Grand Rapids, MI and Atlanta. In those programs where you had these work requirements you had substantial cost savings from the existing programs as a result of implementing this program. You had I believe about a 15 percent reduction in food stamps, over 20 percent reduction in AFDC payments and over 25 percent reduction in AFDC caseload. So you got a lot of people off welfare who maybe should not have been on welfare in the first place and you had a reduction in the expenditures which that pool of resources [[Page S 12930]] could be used to provide the supplemental benefits that are necessary to put people to work. In fact, that is what was done in these experimental cities that I referenced. So it is a matter of better targeting resources. It is not a matter that we have to keep putting up more and more money. The final point I wanted to make on child care, and it is a sensitive one, is that I share the concern, and in fact I support the Snowe amendment which now is the modified Dole package which would provide for mothers who have children under 5 to be able to be exempted from the work requirement if they can demonstrate that they simply do not have child care available or the child care available is simply unaffordable under the circumstances that they are in. I support that because I think we first have to make sure that before we create an entitlement for someone to get child care we have to make sure there are not any other sources of day care available. There are people on welfare who have parents and grandparents who can help provide day care for children, who have neighbors, who have other situations in which they can in fact find child care for their children without resorting to government entitlement. The government entitlement and the big concern I have with the Government entitlement is it becomes the first resort for day care, not the last, and that it becomes another program that just simply grows and grows and grows and we continue to break down the family, the need for parents and grandparents as we have done historically not just in this country, in every civilization known, to have parents and grandparents of the mother be able to be there and help provide for the extended family. We can continue to say that is not as important, or the Government is going to take their place now, that the Government is going to be in there first to provide this day care. I think that is harmful. I do not think that should be the first resort. I think we should say that families should continue to work together and not look to the Government to provide day care for children. If you are going to have children, there should be a responsibility of not only the parents but the grandparents involved to be a participant in helping. And in fact that is what happens today in most cases in America. If we create this entitlement, which is what has been talked about, I think we really potentially damage. Unintended as it may be, I think we damage the nucleus of the relationships of families in America, and the dependency which I think is so necessary between generations to hold families together. The other point I would want to make on that is that if we provided an entitlement for mothers--and it is predominantly mothers--for mothers on welfare, we say if you go on welfare and then go to work under a work program, we will provide you day care, but if you do not go on welfare and you just are trying to make ends meet as a single mom, you are on your own, wow. What are we saying here? What are we saying to single mothers who are out there, as they are, in the millions today just trying to get kids to day care and get to work and not be late and get home on time and the rest, and we say if you get on welfare, we will make it easy for you; the Government will pay for it? What are we saying?

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

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

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk in behalf of Senator Grams of Minnesota and ask for its consideration.

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

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. I just wanted to respond to the comments of the Senator from Massachusetts about the Snowe amendment. I think there is a mischaracterization. Maybe it is not a mischaracterization. I know the amendment has not been presented. You received a summary. But what the Snowe amendment does is say that the parents with children under 5 who can demonstrate to the State--the States will determine what the demonstration requirements would be--that their child care is either unaffordable to them or unavailable to them, whatever, would not be sanctioned for not working. That does not mean that anyone who has a child under 5 would be exempt from the work requirement. That is not the case. In fact, they would be required to work unless they can prove that there is no child care available. So what happens, since the Snowe amendment does not change the participation standard, which is that 50 percent have to be in the work program, what the Snowe amendment really attempts to do by keeping the denominator the same is to encourage States to provide more child care so they can increase work participation by families with children under 5. So it is, in a sense, a roundabout way of getting States to come up with more child care dollars so we can, in fact, give opportunities for women, in most cases women, who have children under 5.

Mr. SANTORUM. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that there now be a period for the transaction of morning business with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.