Rick Santorum

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. I would be happy to----

Mr. SANTORUM. Senator Frist has offered to the Democratic leader a vote on all three of the amendments that the Senator from California asked for; that is, minimum wage, the issue of overtime, as well as the issue of unemployment insurance. We have agreed to votes on all three of those amendments, in exchange for votes on two things we would like to do; that is, pass a welfare reform bill that is actually going to help reduce poverty in America, help stabilize and build families, reconnect fathers with their children, and to pass a JOBS Act otherwise known as the FSC bill, which will help manufacturers compete in the international marketplace, save jobs, and create new jobs, and avoid harmful tariffs which are now in the process of being assessed against American workers by the European Union. We have agreed to pay a ransom, to get two victims returned. The victims of the filibuster are the victim of welfare and the JOBS Act to help create manufacturing jobs. But we are not going to pay a ransom and not get a victim back. We are not going to pay a ransom to have votes on theme or message amendments and not get back for the American public two things that are absolutely necessary to help alleviate poverty and create jobs. This is not just going to be a political exercise. The leader and the Republicans want to get things done. We are not here to message for Presidential politics. We are here because we want to do a job for the American people. We have a welfare bill that has worked--the 1996 welfare bill. I will quote--by the way, not a Republican--June O'Neill, who was at the Congressional Budget Office, who said: Politicians and experts from the left and the right acknowledge that welfare reform has succeeded beyond the most optimistic expectations. The 1996 Welfare Act, which Members on the other side of the aisle say: ``We are not trying to block. Oh, yes, we'll eventually get to it''--they say they are not trying to block it, so what do they do? Right out of the box, they offer an amendment and say: You either give us a vote on this amendment or we can't move forward on the bill. They did not wait until we worked our will, until we had several amendments we were trying to work through. There are supposedly 30 germane amendments on the other side of the aisle. They did not wait to offer their 30 germane amendments. They did not work through the process. Right out of the box comes an amendment that has nothing to do with welfare, that we said, from the very beginning, if you offer this amendment, then we will be happy to vote on it in exchange for a commitment to finish this bill. But no. No. We have to get our message amendments out. Why? Because I believe there are many on the other side of the aisle who do not want a welfare bill, who want message amendments instead of improving a bill that we know works for the American public. Now, why would I say that? Well, let's listen to the Senator from Massachusetts, 8 years ago, on the floor of the Senate, dealing with this first welfare bill that we are trying to reauthorize and modestly improve. I underscore modest. This is not a major revamp of welfare in this bill. There are some modest improvements, tinkering, because we know what is out there is working. We want to make sure what has been put in place stays in place and make some minor tinkering to try to improve it. That is why this bill came out of the committee in a bipartisan basis, because these are not major changes. These are minor changes which amplify what we know has already been working out among the States. But what did the Senator from Massachusetts say about this bill in 1996, which he voted against? These provisions are a direct assault on children and have nothing at all to do with meaningful reform. Let's see if they had anything to do with a direct assault on children. Children in America who were at the highest poverty rates, when this bill passed, were African-American children. Let's see if Senator Kennedy's assault, as he termed it, came to be. No. Wrong. The assault was on poverty, not on children. The assault that Senator Kennedy foretold never happened. Over 40 percent of poverty was among African-American children in 1996. Now the rate of poverty among African-American children is the lowest ever recorded--the lowest ever recorded. Why? Because this bill works. Why? Because requiring work works. That is what this bill did. And that is what Senator Kennedy was vehemently against--vehemently against. He goes on to say: Here we are talking about American children living in poverty, the innocent victims of fate. ``[T]he innocent victims of fate.'' If this bill passes, they will be the innocent victims of their own Government. Let me change that around. For 30 years, African-American children in poverty were the innocent victims of their Government, in programs created by the Senator from Massachusetts, which locked them in poverty. And we have the courage on this floor to say: Stop this ``compassion'' that is killing America's children. We stood up and said, just because you are poor, you are not disabled, that we do not have a prejudice against you because you are poor, but we believe you can achieve just like the rest of Americans, if given the chance. So we passed a bill that fundamentally changed the structure that the Senator from California and the Senator from Massachusetts, and far too many others, believed was the best for children--well-meaning but very wrong. Instead of admitting this is the proper course, they now offer an extraneous amendment, having nothing to do with welfare, to block this hugely successful program in helping millions of families--millions of families--get off of welfare. How many millions? Two point eight million families. So 2.8 million families who used to get a welfare check now bring home a paycheck. You ask, How big a difference is that in our world? I will give you a story of a young lady who told her story. She works for CVS. She had been on welfare for many years. She said after she had her first week of work and got her first paycheck, all of the children piled into her car and wanted to go to the store. Why? They wanted to go to the store because they wanted to go through the checkout line and have their mom pay with cash instead of food stamps. They wanted not to feel looked at as someone who was using the person behind them and their money to help pay for their food, but they had earned it themselves. You don't think that has an impact on a little child's life? You don't think that being dependent upon the Government has an impact on the psychology of little children who grow up in that environment? Do you think we are doing people a favor by saying, We will take care of you? If we don't pass this welfare reform bill today, the majority of Americans on welfare will no longer have a work requirement. If we don't pass a welfare reform bill, a majority of Americans on welfare will be in the old welfare system prior to the reform in 1996. You say, well, this bill doesn't really make any difference? It makes a huge difference because the incentives will not be there anymore. I can't tell you the number of welfare mothers I have talked to. As I mentioned before, we have employed nine in my State office. I have worked personally, hand in hand, in trying to deal with the difficulties of taking people from welfare to work. It makes an enormous difference in their lives. They have said to me, one after another: I probably would not be where I am today had welfare reform not passed and the Government changed their expectation of me. I had to look at myself differently. It forced me to do something I never had the courage to do because to get that first job is scary. It is a frightening thing, if you have very little skills, to go out and hold yourself up to failure. Let's be honest. Remember your first job. You knew nothing about what it meant to work. You knew nothing. How did you sign up? Where did you get your paycheck? What timecard did you fill out? There are so many things in the world of work that you have no concept of if you have no experience in it. That first job can be frightening, particularly if you are unskilled. Taking that first step or staying at home and letting the Government send you a check, that is an option that far too many people took. Well, we didn't allow that in this bill. And it was not cruel. It was a step in the right direction for 2.8 million families, 2.3 million children out of poverty, 700,000 African-American children out of poverty. And we are blocking a bill that would make this a reality for future generations of people who may have to go through the welfare system? I yield the floor to the Senator from Iowa. I thank the chairman for his tremendous effort in bringing this bill to the floor and fighting to get it through cloture and on to passage and to reality. He has been a warrior for children on this issue. I thank him for his work.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I object to that modification because what the Senator from South Dakota has just said is, no, I will not let the bill go to conference. That is what sending the bill back to the House means, which means, no; no conference. As we all understand, without conference we do not get closure. Without closure, we do not get a bill and we do not help millions of Americans get out of poverty. What we are playing is politics. I commend to my colleagues a Brookings Institution Policy Brief of September 2003 ``Welfare Reform & Beyond #28.'' Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have several articles printed in the Record.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I reiterate that we are perfectly willing to give up-or-down votes for a chance to pass this bill. I have asked unanimous consent and the other side has said no. I have heard so much about everyone having a right to get up-or-down votes. We have had a debate on the floor of the Senate for a year and a half about up-or-down votes on Federal judges. So maybe we can exchange up-or-down votes. I ask unanimous consent that we have an up-or-down vote on the Boxer- Kennedy amendment, followed by a vote on a McConnell relevant amendment dealing with minimum wage, in exchange for a vote on Calendar No. 169, Carolyn Kuhl, of California, to be a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Calendar No. 455, Janice Rogers Brown to be United States Circuit Judge for the District of Columbia.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, what the Democratic leader has just suggested is allowing us to vote on welfare reform, but what the Democratic leader has insistently refused to do is to allow that bill to go to conference. Of course, a bill passage means nothing unless there can be a final resolution on that legislation. So what we are being told is they will give us an apparent victory of passing legislation with no end in sight. The idea that somehow or another we are going to have a final resolution--I think the words of the Senator from South Dakota were ``final resolution''--is simply not accurate. Passing a bill that has already been passed by the House gets basically put in limbo until we go to conference. The Democratic leader has been very clear about not moving this bill to conference. So let's be perfectly clear, we are absolutely ready--in fact, I will offer a unanimous consent. We are absolutely ready to give votes on issues of importance to the Democrats and, as I said before, we are willing to pay a ransom. But we want to make sure we get our victims back, and the victims in this case are the welfare reform bill and FSC/ETI. We want to make sure they have a chance of becoming law, not put in the bin of bills that have yet to go to conference because of some concern about fairness in conferences. I ask unanimous consent that at a time determined by the majority leader, after consultation with the Democratic leader, the Senate proceed to back-to-back votes, first, in relation to a public minimum wage amendment, to be followed by a vote on or in relation to the Boxer amendment with no second-degrees in order to either amendment; provided further that the bill be limited to germane amendments, and at 9:30 on Friday, April 2, the substitute amendment be agreed to, the bill be read a third time, and the Senate proceed to a vote on passage of the bill with no intervening action. Finally, I ask unanimous consent that following the passage of the bill, the Senate insist on its amendments, request a conference with the House, and the Chair be authorized to appoint conferees on the part of the Senate. I will explain what I have requested, and that is that we give a vote up or down, which has not been allowed on a whole host of judges on this side, on the issue the Democrats say is the important issue of the day, in exchange for all the germane amendments the Democrats would like to offer between now and tomorrow morning. And if they would like a little bit more time tomorrow, we would be happy to do that, but passage and conference, that is what this request asks. Historically in the Senate, when we passed a bill we automatically went to conference. That has changed. So now we have to specifically include to do so in the unanimous consent or we do not get to conference. I ask unanimous consent according to what I just read.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I am happy to let the Senator from South Dakota talk on his time since my time is limited. If he would not mind taking his time, he could reserve the right to object.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I would ask the Senator from California--she suggested we are not going to allow a vote. I would be very happy to allow a vote. We suggested we would be happy to give a vote on the issue of minimum wage. But I think it is important, if we are going to give a vote on a ``message amendment''--that is the term that has been used by Members on your side of the aisle, a message amendment--we would be happy to give you a vote on your message amendment in exchange for you giving us a vote on something that is actually going to help people in poverty; that is, passage of this bill and going to conference. In fact, we have offered to the Democratic leader that in exchange for a vote on your message amendment, you allow us to pass and go to conference on a bill that is actually going to help low-income people get out of poverty. So I would be happy to offer, as I did yesterday, a unanimous consent request to give you a vote on your amendment, in exchange for you allowing us to have a vote on passage, at a time certain, and a commitment to go to conference on this legislation. I ask the Senator: Would you agree to such a proposal?

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I am introducing today the Medicare DSH payments for Puerto Rico Hospitals Fairness Act of 2004. This legislation seeks to provide fairness for Puerto Rico hospitals in their qualification for disproportionate share payments under the Medicare Program. The primary purpose of the DSH program is to reimburse hospitals for the higher Medicare costs associated with treating low-income Medicare patients. Under current law, hospitals providing essential health care to low-income Medicare patients in Puerto Rico are effectively denied equitable reimbursement, because the law is being applied in such a way that a significant portion of the low-income population served by Puerto Rico hospitals is not allowed to count toward DSH calculations. The legislation that I am introducing today would amend section 1886(d)(9)(D)(iii) of the Social Security Act to help ensure that Puerto Rico's low-income Medicare beneficiaries and hospitals that treat them have access to the same health care as the mainland. I ask unanimous consent that the next of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Madam President, I appreciate the Senator from Iowa giving me the opportunity to sit in this august chair he so ably occupies on more than just a few occasions on the Senate floor where we seem to have Finance Committee bills on a pretty frequent basis. He works diligently. He has been called away to do some other things so I am going to take this opportunity to speak, as we are stuck on an amendment that is nongermane to this bill, and which was offered with the full knowledge that this would severely jeopardize this bill being moved to passage. Earlier today we had a good debate on daycare funding. We passed an amendment that added $6 billion more in daycare funding to this bill. Current funding for the Child Care and Development Fund is $4.8 billion. The committee added $1 billion more. Why did we add this increase in funding? Because in the bill we increased the work requirement by 20 percent. Now I would make the argument we did not actually increase it by 20 percent because we give partial credit to the States, so it is probably not a 20- percent increase. At most, we increase the work requirement in this bill by 20 percent. So we also increased the daycare funding. Candidly, there is probably not even that much of a direct correlation. It is probably not even going to be required to have 20 percent more to meet this work requirement, but we did it, anyway. The HELP Committee comes forward with a proposal that is $2.3 billion more in childcare that will be in this bill, and then today we add $6 billion more. That is a 100-percent increase in daycare funding for a 20-percent increase in work requirements. I am starting to rethink the work requirements at the rate this is costing us. In addition, there is almost $1.5 billion in money the States now hold that can only be used for cash assistance. When we passed the 1996 welfare bill, one of the concerns on the left was this money for cash assistance be used for cash assistance and it is not to be taken out and used for other purposes. So we have a pipeline which only funds cash assistance. What we do in this bill is allow this $1.5 billion to be used for daycare. So it is not a $1 billion increase on top of a $2.3 billion increase on top of a $6 billion increase, but on top of a $1.5 billion increase on top of that. This is how much money we now have in this bill for childcare. I oppose that. I think that is an extraordinary expansion of a program that, while it has benefits and I certainly support it, and in the 1996 bill I supported the final compromise which added $1 billion to the daycare funding to get this bill originally enacted, but this is excessive and unwarranted, and I would argue not good policy for a variety of different reasons. There is some good policy in this bill, and it is being blocked. I think when the Senator from California offered this amendment, she understood what was going to happen if she offered this amendment, and that was this bill would be shut down, as the last bill was because of a blocking amendment on the JOBS bill to create more manufacturing jobs. What we would like to see done is a limitation of amendments. I would frankly be happy to deal with all relevant amendments to this bill, no limitation on any relevant amendments, but a limitation on political amendments. Clearly, minimum wage is a political amendment that has been offered numerous times in the past, always seeming to wait until right before election. We never see minimum wage increases offered in odd-numbered years. I do not know if my colleagues noticed that, but it seems to be offered in even-numbered years. So we have even-numbered election issues that are brought up by Senators Boxer and Kennedy, who said they would like to see this bill pass. They say they would like to see this extended. I tell my colleagues that the Senator from California in 1996 said: I cannot support legislation--she was referring to the 1996 welfare reform act--which will throw countless children into poverty. No one expects us to solve the welfare problem by punishing children for being poor. That is what she said in 1996. So did this bill punish children for being poor? Let us look at the black child poverty rate. The highest rates of poverty in America are among black children, at least they have been. At the time Senator Boxer made that statement, the poverty rate among African-American children was 45 percent. She said this bill will punish children by throwing them into poverty, will punish them because we are going to require their mothers to go to work, we are going to require and put time limits on the amount of time people can spend on welfare because we have an expectation that if one is able-bodied they can work, they should work, and it is beneficial to them and their children if they do work. So we did a whole bunch of things to create not only a stick to get people to work, but a lot of incentives or carrots to make work pay. We invested a lot of money: Daycare, yes; transportation; EIC. We can go on down the list. We put in a lot of incentives over the last several years to make work pay. What happened? We have the lowest rate of black child poverty ever in America. Now, one might ask, well, did the other side learn a lesson? Did they understand that actually they were wrong? I know the Senator from California had a picture, and I know the Senator from Illinois at the time, Ms. Moseley-Braun, had pictures of people in breadlines and people sleeping on grates. Have we now admitted this concept of work and the concept of time limitations was, in fact, not a punishment but the real punishment was locking people into dependency and poverty? That is punishing. That is hopelessness. What we provided in this bill was hope. Have they learned? Well, the proof is in the pudding. The Senator from California comes forward and offers an amendment, shuts down the bill. She will have ample opportunities over the next several weeks to offer an amendment on this issue. By the way, there have been ample opportunities in the past 15 months to offer a minimum wage increase, and yet on a bill everybody is for, that we want to reauthorize--they say they are not trying to block this bill--15 months go by in the session and we are going to offer an amendment to try to sink this bill. I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to offer germane amendments, to withdraw this amendment, let's get to the substance of this issue. This is an important battle to provide hope and opportunity for the poor in our society, to bring dignity into the lives of communities that have been struggling to make ends meet. Let's stick to this issue and get it done. Let's show the Senate can work on important issues of the day. One of the things I wanted to talk about--I had talked at length about the general welfare bill and I had mentioned the issue briefly, but I wanted to focus a little more attention on it, the issue the President proposed on marriage. There has been a lot of debate about marriage in America over the past several months. What I am talking about here is the role of the Government to encourage and promote healthy marriages. The President has a healthy and stable marriage initiative he has put forward. Why do we want to do this? Do we want to force people into bad marriages? Or bring out the shotgun again and get people to marry even though they may not want to? No. That is not what this is about. No one is suggesting or has suggested we force anybody into marriage. But here is what we have done. The President, and many of us who have been working on this issue for a long time, actually decided to look into the benefits of marriage to children and to women and to men in poverty, and determine what and if there are any benefits. Should the Government be neutral on this issue? Should we stay out of it? Or are there things we can look to that would encourage us to encourage marriage? Here are some of the benefits we have identified in looking at the data. Children in married homes do better in school. They drop out less. They have fewer emotional and behavioral problems, less substance abuse, less abuse or neglect, including physical abuse, less criminal activity, less early sexual activity, and fewer out-of-wedlock births. If I said I had a drug that could accomplish all these things for children, we would prescribe it for every child in America. Yet when we say we want to have a program in the welfare system where we are dealing with the poorest children in America who, in most cases, are in some of the worst neighborhoods of America, in the roughest communities in America, who are living in many cases in very difficult family situations--if we say we want to provide these benefits to them, you get the responses: Why do you want to force some rightwing religious agenda on us? There are actually people who are opposed to the President's proposals, who are opposed to the President's proposals in the face of the benefit to those who we hear a lot about here on the floor of the Senate, how we need more for children. We get a lot of proposals from the Senator from Massachusetts that we can help children by increasing the minimum wage while in fact he provides absolutely no evidence that is the case. In fact, when we had the discussion today, the Senator from Massachusetts said things were better in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, when the minimum wage was high. If you go back to the previous chart on black poverty, I will tell you what else is high: Poverty among African-American children. So if there were a connection between the rate of poverty and the minimum wage, you would think during this time, when the value of the minimum wage was actually going down, black poverty would be going up. Just the opposite is the case. Why? Because most people who earn the minimum wage aren't the heads of households so there is very little connection between increasing the minimum wage and poverty. Why? Because poverty isn't about a little bit more money. You think: That makes no sense, Senator. Of course it is about more money. No, it is not. It is about a lot of factors. People who are poor have lives that are just as complicated as those of people who are not. It is about the status of their mothers and fathers. It is about the family unit around them. It is about a whole host of issues that determines whether they will be raised in or out of poverty. To look at one little factor that has no correlation with poverty is the kind of wrongheaded thinking we have suffered under for far too long in this institution. But in 1996 we changed it. We went to a different model in welfare. Now we are trying to change it again. We know that work works. We also know from the data families work. If you look at child poverty, it dramatically increases outside of intact marriages. If you have an intact marriage, the percent of time in poverty for the average child is 7 percent, if that child's parents are married. As we all know, upon divorce many women end up with the children. That is the case certainly the vast majority of time. Many times they also end up on welfare, they end up in poverty, as a result of separation and divorce. That is the case for children born out of wedlock. This represents children born within wedlock. Some stay, others get divorced. Here is the situation where children are born out of wedlock and the mother subsequently gets married. The child poverty rate is high, but not as high as in the case where mom never gets married. In that case, the percentage of time children spend in poverty is 51 percent of their childhood, on average. So we have a situation where we know marriage has a positive impact on poverty. Again, we want to focus on poverty and the health of children. The Senator from Massachusetts spoke about the minimum wage and how important it was, and provided no evidence as to how minimum wage increases would help reduce poverty among children. Let's look at what happens, when marriage is involved, to poverty among children. Married families are five times less likely to be in poverty than are single-parent families. Again, the poverty rate among those who are married: Among all, 13 percent; among single families, 35 percent of single-parent families in America are living in poverty. Shouldn't we have a program that at least suggests when a mother has a child and she is not married and the father is there in the hospital, that we simply ask the question: Are you interested in being married? If both say yes, refer them for counseling to a nonprofit in the community, maybe a faith-based organization in the community, somebody who is there to nurture that relationship at a very stressful time in their lives where, without the proper support and help--and in many cases in this situation you don't have a whole lot of family support, you certainly don't have popular culture support for fathers nurturing and caring for their children--can't the Government at least suggest when someone expresses an intent to get married they be given a little help in working through that process, given the demonstrable benefits that would accrue to them and to their children from an economic point of view? But there is more than economics. Children living with two parents are 44 percent less likely to be physically abused; 47 percent less likely to suffer physical neglect; 43 percent less likely to suffer emotional neglect; 55 percent less likely to suffer from some form of child abuse than children living with a single parent. There are people who will come here to the floor and say the Government should be neutral with respect to this. In spite of this rather strong statement in support of marriage being the optimal place, a married household being the optimal place in which to raise a child, they will say the Government has no business in this. Yet they will come here and have the Government spend billions of dollars to get results that are one-twentieth of what these results would be in the life of a child. We will spend billions here to reduce neglect by 2 percent, or 5 percent. That is OK if we spend billions. That is all right. But if we do something as simple as to say, If you are interested in marriage, we will refer you to counseling because we want to actually help you, if you want to be married, to get married and to stay married, that is wrong. Spending billions of dollars on violence prevention programs, that is OK. But the best violence prevention program for a child is a healthy marriage. Spending any money on that, Well, wait, this is a right-wing religious attempt to influence people with a religious agenda. I think we all know from the debate that is going on that marriage is not just a religious event. It is a civil event. It is a public event. It is a State-sponsored event. It is one that is vitally important to the future of our society. There is another piece of legislation Senator Bayh, Senator Domenici, and I have been working on for quite some time. I am hopeful this will not be as controversial as marriage--that is, fathers should participate in their children's lives. We actually are going to have some money in this bill that will encourage responsible fathers. It is called the Responsible Fatherhood Initiative which Senator Bayh of Indiana, Senator Domenici of New Mexico, and I have been working on for several years. We are able to get some money in this bill to promote that. Why? I guess it is obvious. Obviously, we would like to have children have some presence of a father in their lives. We understand there is a potential benefit. We also understand there are a lot of fathers unfortunately who are not necessarily good fathers, who may not necessarily be a good influence on children's lives. But there is money to help those fathers become a positive influence in their lives; to take responsibility for not only providing for them economically, which all the previous welfare bills had never focused on--which is getting child support--but actually try to support them in ways beyond the paycheck they happen to bring home that day. Why? If you look again at the information we have been able to gather about the difference between children being raised with fathers' involvement as opposed to fathers being absent, if you have a father involved in your life versus if you do not have a father involved in your life--if you do not have a father involved, you are two times more likely to abuse drugs and two times more likely to be abused. Why? Unfortunately, in far too many relationships, the boyfriend tends to be the greatest abuser of the child who is not his own. You are two times more likely to become involved in a crime, three times more likely to fail in school, three times more likely to take your own life, and five times more likely to live in poverty. Again, if we had a program we were funding here in the Federal Government out of the Great Society program that could accomplish all these things, we would be pouring billions in this baby. I mean, there would be cries over here to say, if you have this program that can do all of this, then we are going to spend--you can't outbid us on this because we are going to go home and talk about how we are saving lives, reducing drug dependency, reducing abuse, reducing crime, improving education, and solving the poverty problem. But then you mention, Oh, by the way, this program has to do with fathers taking responsibility. No, wait a minute, we are not going to do that. You are messing around with families here. No. If you have a Government program that we can hire somebody to fill that role, fine, but we can't encourage fathers. Why would we want to do that? Who are we to be judgmental about getting fathers involved with children's lives? That is not the role of the Government. What is the role of Government to mess around with the family? Because we know what works. Americans know what works. We have known it for 200-plus years. We know that stable families is the place which has the greatest opportunity to produce stable young children and adults. Yet somehow we can't be on the side to save the family, we can't be on the side of marriage and responsible fathers. At least we haven't been in the past. I am hopeful that we have an opportunity in this bill to come down on the side of the family, to come down on the side of mothers and fathers taking responsibility for their children from the very beginning. And the Government should be there to simply ask and encourage and provide support if they want to, not to force anybody into anything. We have an obligation if we know what works to do it. If we know what works and we can have some positive impact on the lives of children, then we have an obligation to do it. We are doing it here with a very small amount of money. The marriage proposal I think is $100 million Federal, $100 million matched by the States, and then a separate $100 million. It is $300 million. Excuse me. It is $100 million from Federal and $100 million from the States over 5 years, which is $1.5 billion. I argue that is a fairly modest sum of money for the tremendous benefit that will accrue not just to the children, but which is going to accrue to fathers who will take responsibility for their children. Imagine the change in neighborhoods. Imagine the change in neighborhoods where 70 percent of kids, 80 percent of kids are born out of wedlock, and within a year 90 to 95 percent of those kids have no father involvement in their lives. Imagine the change in the neighborhood, which is permeated by single mothers and fathers who are attached to nothing except other irresponsible fathers--we call those gangs--or they are not attached to that neighborhood at all because they are in jail. Imagine the neighborhoods with fathers in the homes. Imagine the neighborhoods with role models of responsible manhood and fatherhood. I have talked to so many people who grew up in neighborhoods with high concentrations of fatherlessness and how they were inspired by the one or two fathers they knew who weren't their own, but the one or two men in the community who were responsible fathers who gave them hope and who taught them responsibility. Imagine how we could change neighborhoods if we simply brought mothers and fathers back together in those neighborhoods, and how that dynamic would change. Dare we come down on that side? Dare we invest in trying to change their pathology that has attacked so many neighborhoods in our society? I say yes. I say we have an obligation to do that. Let me get to the economics of this. Fatherhood involvement increases child support. The States that, unfortunately as a result of the 1996 Wofford law, are concerned about establishing paternity and getting the money, I say to the States, which will be the instrument by which these programs will be implemented, they will have to play a part. They will have to put up some money to do this. I make the argument it is to their financial benefit to do it. Even though it will cost some money for the programs, I make the argument to the States that if you can get fathers involved in the lives of their children, you will not have to spend as much time chasing down fathers to provide child support, and in many cases not getting that child support, but you will have a better connection with your children which means a better life, and we will actually save the States some money. I hate to make the economic arguments to the States, but those are the facts. I am hopeful the States will understand this is not just good for their neighborhood, this is not just good for men, it is not just good for women and for children, and for society at large, it is also good for their bottom line and their ability to provide services to the poor. This is a good piece of legislation. It is not perfect. There are things in this bill I do not like. But we move the ball forward. We increase work a modest amount, a responsible amount. As someone who was in this chair leading the fight in 1996 for this bill and wanting the tough requirements on work, I am not someone who believes we need to dramatically increase that requirement. I know there will be an amendment potentially if we ever get to this bill to increase the work requirement to 40 hours. I will vote against that. The reason is because we do in this bill increase the actual work requirement from 20 hours to 24. What does that mean? That means the amount of hours someone must be in work in order to be eligible for this program, assuming they did not get off the program to work themselves, they are actually on welfare but working, is increased from 20 to 24 hours. Then we have an additional 10 hours that was in the 1996 act that stays the same, an additional 10 hours to bring the total up to 34 hours. That 10 hours being sort of wraparound issues, whether it is job search or other types of improvement that individuals may be working on to get a better job, to increase their educational skills, get their GED, whatever the case may be. It is important to have a tougher work requirement to take single mothers out of the home for 40 hours a week, of which 16 of those hours will not be actually working--I don't see the benefit. What we have seen from all the studies is the thing that works the most is work. While these women--it is predominantly, overwhelmingly women--are not in a job outside of welfare, not on a payroll outside of welfare, they still are working and getting work experience. The additional time is well spent to actually find a job outside of welfare, but I don't think at least at that point in time, because of the transition of a 40-hour requirement, that is going to be beneficial in the long term for these women. I will not support that. I would have supported a modest increase in daycare funding. What we have done is fundamentally change the expectation of what daycare is. This is more money than people on welfare could ever hope to need when it comes to daycare. This is a whole other agenda trying to be advanced on the bill in the name of welfare to work. But it is simply universal daycare under a different guise. I will not support that. But we have a lot of steps taken in the right direction in this bill. I am hopeful, again, we can get bipartisan cooperation from people who understand the importance of this legislation in getting it passed and putting those work requirements back on 28 States that right now do not have them so we can begin the process again in turning lives around and improving the quality of lives of children in the poorest neighborhoods in our society. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I think it goes to state the case that the Senator from Massachusetts, in offering these other ideas, is in fact not interested in the Senate working its will on welfare reform, which is the bill before us, but bringing the political motives and debates that are surrounding the Presidential campaigns here on the floor of the Senate, and to have sort of ``message theme'' amendments on a very serious piece of legislation that needs to be passed to create opportunities so this line on this chart can continue to go down. Because what we have with the welfare reform reauthorization bill is something that is going to continue to move people out of poverty, to create better opportunities for work. What the Senator from Massachusetts is suggesting is, instead of that, we are going to extend unemployment benefits. What we need to do is create better incentives and better education, training, and an enormous amount of childcare to help people go to work, not extend unemployment benefits. Again, we are in this situation where the Senator from Massachusetts said: Well, if we just do this. Now it is: Well, you need to do this, and this, and then this. The bottom line is, we have a lot of substantive debate that can and should occur on this legislation. If there are relevant amendments, we would be happy to debate them. But the amendments the Senator from Massachusetts now wants to bring in are not relevant, and, therefore, I have to object.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I would like to spend a few minutes talking about this bill and the importance of why we need to move to the passage of it. The Senator put up his chart of minimum wage increases. I voted for those minimum wage increases. I would vote for a minimum wage increase in the next 10 minutes if we could have gotten that agreement. I would have been happy to vote on a side by side, and I would have supported Senator McConnell's amendment, which would have raised the minimum wage, and would have raised it by over a dollar over the next couple of years. I think it is important that we talk about this issue. But I think the most important thing we can do for the poor in America--and I found it remarkable the Senator from Massachusetts can look at his chart, that shows the minimum wage at very high levels in real dollars, during a time when child poverty, and particularly African-American poverty, has been at its highest and he says it only makes sense if you have high minimum wage, you are going to have low poverty rates. Tell the people living during this time who were experiencing high poverty rates how much sense it made. Because in reality it made no sense because it was not happening. A high minimum wage does not guarantee low poverty. What, in many cases, a high minimum wage guarantees is unemployment and very high rates of poverty. What we have is a situation where we had higher rates of the minimum wage. We also had a welfare system that was debilitating on the poor, designed by the very same people who think the minimum wage is the answer to poverty. It is the same economic team, folks, which believes Government micromanaging of every person's life and business in America is the way to make sure everybody achieves. Guess what. It did not work. It did not work. What worked? Work. Yes, what every American knows. But there is a commonsense deficit in this city. What every American knows, as common sense, that work works to improve people's economic status in life, has been lost here in the Senate, was lost for many years when it came to the issue of poverty in America. And, oh, I remember, sitting in the chair where Senator Grassley sits today, and sitting in this chair at times in 1995 and 1996, when scores of Members who designed the welfare system in the 1960s and 1970s, who designed the minimum wage increases in the 1960s and 1970s, who said that was the answer to solving poverty in America, that was the answer to solving poverty in America, came to the floor and said: How dare you. How dare you suggest we require people to work. How dare you suggest we put a time limit--a time limit--on people on welfare. Don't you understand? These people are poor. That is a disability greater than any other disability people encounter in life--at least if you listen to the other side, that is what you would think they were saying. President Bush uses the term ``the soft bigotry of low expectations.'' There was no soft bigotry. This was hard bigotry of low expectations. If you were poor, you needed our help, you needed Government to give you dollars, you needed Government to raise your wages. And that was going to solve the poverty problems in America. It did not work. What worked? Work. Here we are in the Senate Chamber. I find it absolutely ironic. We have Senator Grassley standing up for the new war on poverty, his bill out of committee, increasing the work requirement, yes, increasing support for women who are trying to get work, including daycare and other services. On the other side we have, no, we need the Government to fix the economy and raise the minimum wage. It is a classic difference in the perspective of what the role of Government should be. We stand here today and say, you can debate all you want about the minimum wage. I am not suggesting it is a bad thing, but it is not a panacea. It bears no relationship historically to reductions in poverty. Why? Because most of the people who get the minimum wage jobs, as the Senator from Iowa said, in the past are not heads of households; they are teenagers, many of whom are in very wealthy homes. That is who we are helping with minimum wage increases primarily. We are helping some others, but if you really want to help those who have not had the chances economically, if you really want to lift people out of poverty, then work and developing and nurturing a system that encourages people to get their lives together and to get into the workplace to achieve is the answer. That is what this bill does, and more. That is why I am so excited about this bill because we have found out that, yes, work works. This is the lowest rate of African-American child poverty ever recorded in America. By the way, in the last year, 2002 and 2003, yes, because of the recession, black poverty among children went up, but very slightly, 1 or 2 percent, during a time of a lot of job loss. If you look at the other statistics, for example, one that probably mirrors this, as far as high rates of poverty, had to do with single mothers never married. What we saw was single mothers never married, historically the rate of employment among single never-married mothers was around 40 to 42 percent historically. It was an intractable problem that people said could never be fixed. Then we passed the welfare reform bill in 1996. Now 63 percent of single, never-married mothers are employed. That is remarkable to see those kinds of dynamic shifts. By the way, that number has not changed in the last 2 years. The employment levels have remained the same as they have basically within the welfare system. The Senator from Massachusetts has said things have been terrible the last few years in the job market and people in poverty have been hurt. The bottom line is, the welfare rolls continue to be low. They have not shot back up. In fact, I was reading an editorial from a paper I generally don't read editorials from, my hometown paper--not necessarily fond of me. They happened to write a lucid editorial, sort of the blind squirrel phenomenon. They wrote an editorial in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, ``Shrinking Welfare, the Statistical Mystery of a Smaller Dole.'' They comment on the fact that here we are, during 3 years where there has not been dramatic job growth, and yet the welfare rolls are not going back. They were sort of at a quandary as to why. They say: Although welfare reform still has problems, single mothers often have considerable difficulty obtaining childcare--after we passed now $7 billion; we have over doubled the amount of daycare that is going to be available under this bill--these numbers suggest it is working. The numbers suggest welfare is working. For whatever reason--gosh, I can't imagine; it is again another commonsense deficit--more people are trying to do for themselves instead of asking government to do for them. Go figure. Let me repeat this. For whatever reason, more people are trying to do for themselves instead of asking government to do for them. Even if the experts can't explain it, they conclude that is a good thing. Do you know what. That is a good thing, what we did in 1996, despite the protestations, despite the charts with pictures of people standing in bread lines, sleeping on grates, of just absolutely cataclysmic predictions of what would happen to rates of poverty, which were around this level at the time, we had projections that black poverty among children would skyrocket, that women would be thrown off welfare and not be able to raise their children, that we would have dramatic changes and riots in our poorest neighborhoods because of this welfare reform proposal that was being put forward. I will read some of my colleagues' predictions of what would happen to poverty. Guess what. They were wrong. Those of us who stood here and said, have faith in the poor in America that they, too, want a better life for themselves and their children, and they are willing to work for it, if given the incentives and the opportunity to do so, if given the tools to make work work, they, too, will pursue the American dream, we had faith in them. Too many others have faith only in the government to take care of them. Having talked to numerous people who have been on welfare--in fact, in my office in my State, I have hired nine people from the welfare rolls. They have worked through all the problems, and there are problems in someone transitioning off of welfare. I can tell you that every single one thanked me for having faith in them, thanked me for passing a bill that didn't say that we needed the government to be there to protect them and keep them in poverty and dependent upon it, but trusted them that, if given the tools, that they, too, could take care of their family and feel better about it every day, knowing full well it would be a struggle and continues to be a struggle. But there is honor in the struggle to provide for your family. There is honor. There is dignity. There is character in struggling to provide for you and your family. Millions of women--predominantly women; welfare is predominantly a woman's program, a single-mother program--have courageously gone out and fought for their families because we gave them the tools and incentive to do so. They have changed their lives for the better, and they have given their children a hope, a model that they can build a life on, that they can build on the success of their mother who overcame addiction. A young woman spoke to our Republican conference this morning from here in DC, incarcerated many times, addicted, so bad that she lost her three children to foster care. Then welfare reform came around, made her go to work. And today she has her three children back. She not only got a job, she now has a small business where she employs four people in town. She didn't do it with an SBA loan or any Government help at all; she saved a little money and started her own business. In the last 6 months, she got married. You have to believe in people. You have to believe that poverty is not the ultimate disabler. That is why this bill is so important. That is why this bill has to be passed, because we have 28 States right now, where all of the requirements that we have put on the States to have work programs, to get people transitioned off of the rolls, to provide the support services to transition people into the economic mainstream in 28 States--that incentive is now gone. So in 28 States in America, we are back to the old AFDC days. That will have an impact. Let me tell you what one of the reasons is I am so excited about this bill. It is the next step in welfare. We knew--those of us who helped design the 1996 act--this was the first step, that work was the most important thing. There were other important things, but we understood work was the central focus. But there were other causes and concerns we wanted to deal with. Senator Grassley had this chart up. It is a chart by Haskins and Sawhill. They are from the Brookings Institute. I think even the Senator from Massachusetts would admit that the Brookings Institute is not a conservative think tank. It is seen as the left-leaning think tank in town--or one of them. Elizabeth Sawhill is a former Clinton poverty expert. Ron Haskins happens to be--I don't know how he got in there--he is a fairly conservative guy. We have our differences. Anyway, Ron and Elizabeth worked together on this. This is a peer- reviewed study that isolates factors of poverty. This is the official poverty rate, 13 percent. Remember what we said back in 1996: Work works. You have to get people into work. That is the best cure for poverty, the best way to turn your life around. That is the best medicine for children--to see mom get up every day and go to work, instead of receiving a welfare check. Guess what. It works. With full- time work, poverty rates go down to 7.5 percent. The other thing this bill does is understand we have to keep this and, in fact, improve upon it. We are going to increase the work requirement by 20 percent. Interestingly enough, we increased the amount of daycare by 100 percent. So this is, again, Washington logic. We are going to require people to work 20 percent more, so we need 100 percent in daycare to pay for that. Nevertheless, there are other factors involved that reduce poverty. Marriage. The President's initiative is, again, common sense. It is an understanding that the poverty rates are lower among married couples than they are among single heads of households. So one of the things the President wanted to do with his marriage initiative is to create at least a positive or nurturing atmosphere for couples who enter the welfare system with the intention of getting married to actually get married and raise a family. There was a study done by a professor at Princeton that asked the question upon paternity establishment: Are you in a relationship? What I mean by paternity establishment is that most States figured out the best time to establish who the father of the child is is in a hospital; so most States have adopted that as a way of establishing who the father is, and then using that to get the father to pay child support. That was something that was a very big contentious point in the welfare bill of 1996. We required paternity establishment in the States, that they have an active program to find out who these fathers were. This was the whole deadbeat dad issue and the fact that there were enormous amounts of uncollected child support. So we did a whole lot of things on child support enforcement and paternity establishment because there was a huge number of women on welfare who either refused to, or don't, for whatever reason, identify the father of the child. From my perspective, to try to get the father involved in the child's life, I thought paternity establishment was going to be very important. The States have a different view. They saw it as a way to get cash-- establish paternity so we could get child support and we could get money. They were not particularly interested in whether dad did anything to raise the child other than to send the check so the State could get some of the money. They would then reduce the benefits to the mother in proportion to the child support being paid by the father. There is an incentive for the States to find out who the father was and attach wages, if necessary, and get the child support flowing into the State coffers. That is not exactly the most nurturing conclusion that I thought would occur by finding out who father was. I had this funny idea that maybe if they found out who the father was and the father became involved in a legal way with his child, he might take some responsibility for that child. That is not, unfortunately, what has happened. There are a lot of factors involved, including a culture in many communities that is not nurturing of fathers taking responsibility for their children--at least in the popular culture. In a segment of the popular culture, it is not reinforced that fathers should take responsibility for their children. It is a misogynist popular culture that abuses women in song, in video, and in many other ways, and teaches you not to take responsibility for your actions. So the popular culture, matched up with the State that was just interested in money, has resulted in incredibly high rates of absent fathers. What are we going to do about that? What should we do? People say, Senator, what is the Government's role in marriage--to encourage people to marry? Why doesn't the Government stay out of it? I argue that the Government is already in it because, prior to welfare's inception--and you can say this is a good or bad thing, but it is a fact--prior to welfare's inception, one of the reasons mothers and fathers stayed together was because there wasn't any money to support the child at all. The Government didn't help raise children at all. There was no money. That is when sort of a popular joke regarding the shotgun wedding came about, because mom had no means to support herself and her children. So families required fathers to stick it out. Many will say that was not the optimal situation. I agree. But ask the question now, are we better off now? Are the children better off now? As the Senator from Massachusetts said, it is about the children, isn't it? Are the children better off now in this culture? I would make the argument that the Federal Government has already done its part in taking sides on the marriage debate, and that is, it has been an enabler of the dissolution of marriage because it is no longer required to support and raise your child. Again, you can argue positives and negatives about it, but that is a fact. Economically, it simply was not possible 50 years ago. Economically, it is a viable option--I am not saying the best option. I am not saying better or worse. All I am saying is it is an option that was not available before. So the Government has taken sides on the issue of marriage. What I am suggesting, and what this bill suggests, is the Government try to shift gears to be somewhat neutral on the issue. What do I mean by that? A researcher from Princeton I started talking about did a survey asking whether mothers and fathers at the time of paternity establishment were in a relationship. Actually, a very high percentage said yes at the time. I think it was roughly 80 percent said they were currently in a relationship. They were asked the question: Do you have any intention of getting married? Again, a very high percentage of these young parents or new parents said, yes, they actually were contemplating marriage--over 50 percent. What happened? By the way, what did the Government do during this time? The Government basically said: OK, dad, sign here, make sure you establish paternity. Thank you very much. Fold up that paper, put it in the briefcase, and back down to the welfare office. File the paper. Make sure we get dad a child support order so we can get our money. That is the Government's role financially. The Government says marriage is not such a bad--no, no, we are not going to prejudice these folks; let them do whatever they want as long as we get our money--as long as we get our money. What happened a year later? The researcher from Princeton--again, not a conservative researcher--asked the question a year later of these same couples. Guess what. Very few got married. I think 10 percent were still together in one form or another. What happened? I think it is fairly obvious what happened. It is a tough situation for an unmarried couple, particularly, again, given the popular culture. It is a very tough situation to work through the difficulties of raising a newborn and trying to keep a relationship together. Even people who are married have a tough time. A newborn is a big change in your life. Having had seven children, I can tell you, having a newborn in the house is a big change. When you are struggling economically, when you may be living at home or may be living in poor accommodations or maybe not living in the same place, this is a very stressful and difficult situation. People, in many cases, do not have a heck of a lot of role models around to help them get through this difficult time in their life. I do not think anybody here is surprised to hear these numbers--I would not think they would be--that a very small percentage of people in this situation end up getting married. Why aren't you surprised? I think we need to think about that. Why were you not surprised when I said that? That is the expectation, is it not? That is what we expect. If we expect it, what do you think the people involved in the situation expect over time? We are trying to change that dynamic. We are not trying to force anything down anybody's throat. All we are suggesting is that at the time of paternity establishment, instead of folding up that little paper that now has the signature that is going to create financial liability for that man for at least some period of time, we ask one additional question: Are you interested in getting married? If both answer yes, for example, what a caseworker could do is pull out a card and say: Here is a card and here is a list of 10 people, 10 organizations who do marriage counseling. If you call one of these organizations and you show up for an appointment, we will pay for your counseling to help you get through this difficult time and stressful time in your life. Believe it or not, there are people who are saying this is a right- wing agenda to try to get people to get married, as if that is a horrible thing to actually have mothers and fathers of children actually get married; that is some sort of secret plan to destroy the world. I do not understand it. What we are trying to do is help two people who at the time have a commitment and have a product of that commitment called a child who needs love and support from as many people as that child can get-- optimally, a mother and a father. All we are saying is give this child a chance; hopefully, a better chance. At least try. At least try to help people who want to be helped. Not force it on them, just try to help people who have, at least at the moment of the time they are looking at the face of this new creation, who actually still dream and hope of a better life with that child and together to pour some water on that seed to nurture it instead of folding up that piece of paper and saying: I got your money. That is all I came for. I am here from the Government, and I got your money. I got your signature, and that is all I am here to do. And look down at that child and say: I know what is going to happen, but what do I care? I have no requirement to care about whether mothers and fathers stay together and raise and nurture that child. It is not my job. I will be offering an amendment, if we get a chance to offer amendments, to actually increase to the President's budget figure the amount of money in this program because I do believe that Government should be on the side of children in creating at least a chance for them to be raised in a stable two-parent family. What happens to the poverty rate? If you increase the marriage rate, the poverty rate drops not some but very dramatically. So the keys in this legislation of work and marriage are the two strongest indicators of a reduction in poverty. The other factors many others suggest are keys to reducing poverty is increased education. It helps, but it is not anywhere as powerful as the focus of this bill. Reduced family size? Again, the more children you have the higher the chance you are going to be in poverty. So if you have fewer children, it helps--again, not as much as the focus of this bill. The interesting thing is, if you factor all these four things together, look what happens to the poverty level: Work; marriage, which allows in many cases the opportunity for education; and reduced family size--dramatic reduction in poverty. Can you imagine, for the longest time we didn't want to do this? And we still don't do this. The results are powerful. What do some on the other side still hold to? I underscore ``some'' because thankfully we have had bipartisan support in much of what we have done here. What do some on the other side see as the answer? Spend more money. If we want to get people out of poverty, just increase the amount of money you give people in poverty and, guess what, you get them out of poverty. Here is doubling the welfare benefit. If we doubled the welfare benefit, what would happen? Hardly any decrease in poverty. The Senator from Massachusetts might say it is obvious on its face, if we give people more money--in fact, it isn't that he might say it; yes, he did say it. He said it is obvious, if you give people more money, if you raise the minimum wage, of course poverty is going to go down. We are not talking about raising the minimum wage here; we are talking about doubling the welfare benefit. It makes barely a scratch. So I guess it isn't all that obvious, is it? I guess, just like the rest of us, people who are experiencing poverty in their lives are as complex as the rest of us and have a lot of factors that go into whether they are poor, not just how much money comes in the door. There are a lot of factors that go into whether people rise in society. What we know works is work and marriage and families. We know that works. You know what. America knows it works. That is obvious. It is obvious to me and hopefully it will be obvious to my colleagues as we proceed here today. Instead of focusing on minimum wage--again, it has its time and place, but there is no evidence at all that has been put forward that it does anything to reduce poverty. In fact, straight cash assistance--not identical with the minimum wage, but the same idea behind it--doesn't significantly affect poverty. What we are doing in this bill works. It works from an analytical point of view; it works from a moral point of view; it works from a commonsense point of view. It is all about what we Americans value and understand and revere--at least we have throughout the history of this country. So I am hopeful we can move forward, that we can get an agreement to somehow or another dispose of the Kennedy amendment, either in this bill or at some future time, and move to passage of this very important piece of legislation which is going to have a dramatic impact in taking this number and numbers like it, the poverty rate among Black children, of all children--it has not just been among African-American children; it has been among all children as well as mothers--down, and down further. We have an obligation if we know something is working to make it permanent and extend it and make it better, to do more of what we know works. That is what this bill does. I am hopeful the Senate will give its support to the bill.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I believe the Senator from Massachusetts is insincere about moving forward on both this minimum wage increase as well as moving forward on this bill. I will offer a unanimous consent request to do just that. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that tomorrow morning, at a time to be determined by the majority leader, after consultation with the Democratic leader, the Senate proceed to back-to-back votes, first in relation to a Republican minimum wage amendment, to be followed by a vote in relation to the Boxer amendment, with no second degrees in order to either amendment; provided further that the bill then be limited to germane amendments, and at 9:30 a.m., on Thursday, April 1, the substitute amendment be agreed to, the bill be read a third time, and the Senate proceed to a vote on passage of the bill, with no intervening action or debate. Finally, I ask consent that following passage of the bill, the Senate insist on its amendment, request a conference with the House, and the Chair be authorized to appoint conferees on the part of the Senate. Before the Senator from Massachusetts comments on this request, I would suggest what this unanimous consent request says is the Senator from Massachusetts will have a vote on his amendment, the Republicans will have a vote on a side-by-side amendment, we will go to final passage on this bill, with germane amendments being offered and voted on in between that time; and after passage of the bill, this bill will go to conference, and we will have an opportunity for the House and the Senate to work their will and to actually get this welfare reauthorization passed for another 6-year period. So if the Senator from Massachusetts is sincere about getting the minimum wage increase voted on here in the Senate, and not holding up this piece of legislation, I would hope he would be willing to accept this unanimous consent request.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I think the Senator from Massachusetts makes an important point about what we should be doing to reduce poverty. The Senator from Massachusetts made statements that increasing the minimum wage has an impact on child poverty. I have not seen a chart that indicates that. If the Senator could put up the chart when the minimum wage increases went into effect, my question is--we are on the welfare reform bill. This welfare reform bill has had a dramatic impact on child poverty. In fact, if you look at the chart, it shows the increases in the minimum wage--I will have a chart that compares with that; we have dueling charts that work in concert. The Senator shows where the minimum wage was at very high levels that happened to be in about this area. I am using Black child poverty, but obviously that is the worst case scenario. During the highest level of poverty among African Americans, we had a high minimum wage. All throughout this time--in fact, as you suggested, the minimum wage actually came down in real value--what else came down? The rate of Black child poverty. Now, I would not suggest that the minimum wage was necessarily tied to that. What I would suggest is what happened was a fundamental change in welfare policy that started in the mid-1990s and accelerated in 1996 by the Federal Government and has resulted in a huge decline in poverty, irrespective of what the minimum wage is. I make the argument that if the Senator wants to do something about helping child poverty, we should pass this welfare bill. Maybe there is a time and place to have the argument with respect to minimum wage, but I do not believe the evidence supports that increasing the minimum wage has any discernible impact on the poverty level, certainly among African American children and, I argue, across the board among children in general. Finally, the point I want to make, since----

Mr. SANTORUM. I thank the Senator. I want to make the point in the last 10 years, the child poverty rate has declined almost 30 percent. During that time there was one increase in the minimum wage, but there was a dramatic change in welfare. I ask the Senator, does he have any information that shows that the minimum wage actually does result in a decrease in child poverty? I think I have very conclusive evidence that changes in welfare policy have a dramatic impact on the reductions in child poverty.

Mr. SANTORUM. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I am introducing today the Medicare DSH payments for Puerto Rico Hospitals Fairness Act of 2004. This legislation seeks to provide fairness for Puerto Rico hospitals in their qualification for disproportionate share payments under the Medicare Program. The primary purpose of the DSH program is to reimburse hospitals for the higher Medicare costs associated with treating low-income Medicare patients. Under current law, hospitals providing essential health care to low-income Medicare patients in Puerto Rico are effectively denied equitable reimbursement, because the law is being applied in such a way that a significant portion of the low-income population served by Puerto Rico hospitals is not allowed to count toward DSH calculations. The legislation that I am introducing today would amend section 1886(d)(9)(D)(iii) of the Social Security Act to help ensure that Puerto Rico's low-income Medicare beneficiaries and hospitals that treat them have access to the same health care as the mainland. I ask unanimous consent that the next of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I can't imagine what I am going to do with all that time. I thought there might be a few more minutes. I look forward to this welfare reform debate. I hope we can have a good and enlightened debate on an issue that is vitally important for millions of Americans and that we keep to the subject of welfare, try to pass this bill, get it to conference and get a bill done this year to help millions more leave poverty and get gainful employment.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. SANTORUM. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Ohio. If Senator Feinstein's speaker arrives, I will be happy to abbreviate my remarks to accommodate the other side of the aisle. I wanted to congratulate Senator DeWine and Senator Graham, who have really worked hard not just on this legislation, but getting this legislation to a point where we can have an up-or-down vote, have a vote on the amendments, and let the Senate work its will. That is one of the things we have not seen done in recent weeks. We have had an opportunity here on a very important issue to have the Senate's will be done. I also congratulate Senator Frist and Senator McConnell and the Democratic leaders for allowing us to debate this issue. This is an important debate. I think Senator Graham, who I had the privilege of listening to for a few moments, summarized it very well. The issue is, how many victims are there? Do we recognize the loss of a child in the womb, a child who is anticipated, is wanted, and whose life is very real to the mother and father and the family? When that life is taken away by a third party, do we recognize that child's existence in the law? I don't think anyone would doubt that when a woman who has a child in the womb is attacked and injury comes to that child, another person is affected. If the child dies, that child is affected. There is something that goes on to another human being. The issue here is whether we are going to recognize that in the law. I agree with the Senator from South Carolina that it has nothing to do with abortion. It is specifically excluded from this legislation. So why do all of the abortion rights activists have a problem with this legislation? It comes down to the very issue, do we recognize the humanity of a child in womb? How far would we go to protect this right to an abortion? Do we go so far as to even deny the existence of a child who is not subject to abortion? How far do we go to protect this right, the supreme right above all, the right to an abortion, a right that can have no restriction on it? In fact, it cannot even have a restriction that is not at all applicable to it. So, in other words, we cannot even talk about this, or some way, through some logic, attack the issue. We have to deny under every circumstance that the child in the womb is a human life. That is what this is about. This is all about denying the humanity of the child. We just cannot contemplate that in our laws. We cannot have any admission anywhere in law that says what is inside the woman's womb is a child--when, of course, we all know that is exactly what it is. But we cannot express that legally. If we do, somehow or another, this right to abortion may be threatened down the road. Who cares about what harm we may bring? Who cares about what harm we may bring to a mother whose child is injured or what harm we may bring to the family who may lose or have an injury to a child in womb? Who cares that we cannot bring somebody who has done violence to a child in the womb to justice? All of those things are worth ignoring to protect this right that is not even at stake today. This issue, as I have said many times, is a cancer. I thought at first it was a cancer that ate away at us in how we view the relationship between the mother and the child, but it is worse. It is a cancer that reaches in and infects even areas that have nothing to do with abortion. We need to let common sense reign in the Senate today. The common sense is, this is a child who is loved and wanted by the mother. This is a child who, in many cases, has been given a name, such as Conner Peterson, and this is a child who deserves the dignity of recognition by our society.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, this is a bill that has been a bipartisan bill. The Senator from South Dakota has mentioned on numerous occasions, and again in this letter, that the concern is--and in the newspaper article--that things have been put in conference that were not either the scope of the conference or slipped in without the minority's knowledge of what was going to happen. I just ask the Senator from South Dakota and all those who are objecting to this bill going to conference to look at the history of this legislation. The history of this legislation has been bipartisan. Senator Joe Lieberman and I have worked to put this bill together. It has priorities on the Democratic side. It has priorities on the Republican side. We have worked to take out everything that could be controversial. At a press conference we had the other day, Senator Lieberman said this bill is simply all good. There is not anything bad or controversial. There is not any kind of strong opposition to this bill on either side of the aisle. If there was strong opposition on either side of the aisle, it would not be in this bill. We have a bill that provides money to those who are serving those in need in our society. We have a bill on which the track record through the Finance Committee and through the Senate floor has shown we have worked together. Senator Grassley and Senator Baucus have worked together in committee to pass a bill unanimously out of that committee, on a bipartisan basis. When it came to the floor, there were concerns. We were able to take care of those concerns and pass a bill. I believe it was 95 to 5. As we were going through the passage, we had some concerns as to some things the House might be interested in putting in this bill, some faith-based provisions some Members on the Democratic side had concerns about. We received a letter from the House saying they had no intention of doing that. In a sense, we were able to preconference some of the concerns to make sure we were trying to pass something good and helpful to those agencies and individuals wanting to help people in need in our society. At a time when many in this Chamber are clamoring about those who are falling through the cracks, this is an opportunity for us to get literally billions of dollars, some of it Government money but most of it contributed by individuals, to groups which get favorable tax treatment for doing so. We set up individual development accounts, which has been a high priority of Senator Lieberman, Senator Feinstein, myself, and others on both sides of the aisle. We have a laundry list of very positive things this legislation does, and we have a history of bipartisan cooperation. With some of the other legislation that may have been brought forward, I understand why the Senator from South Dakota may say, well, I do not want to take the chance, let's say, of the FSC bill, for example, or something going to conference; we do not know what is going to go on there and there may have been controversies around it. There has been no controversy around this bill. Other bills have passed and gone to conference we did not have great controversy about, we had a broad consensus about, and they were allowed to be worked out. For some reason, this was the first one grabbed and it has been held on to now for quite some time. One final thing. Senator Frist, the leader, and I have given a commitment the Democrats will be fully involved in this conference; there will be no backdoor meetings because, candidly, Senator Lieberman and I have worked hand in glove on this. We continue to work hand in glove, as have Senator Baucus and Senator Grassley. We will continue to work with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle because we believe it is so important to get done. I believe basically the four corners of the bill are fairly well established. It is now working on how we do it. Another thing that shows bipartisan cooperation is we have actually been working on a bipartisan basis on offsets. I know the Democratic leader has been rather insistent about having the tax provisions offset. We have been working, again in a bipartisan manner, on the Finance Committee. I know Senator Lieberman and myself have been trying to find offsets to get this bill in a position to get strong bipartisan support. I would make the point there may be instances in which the Democratic leader can justifiably say there has not been a cooperative venture in getting a bill through the Senate and we are hesitant about taking a bill to conference because of that. That has not been the case on this bill. The Senator has the commitment from the leader and myself that it will not be the case in conference, and I am hopeful that word and the track record of this bill will have some influence over the Democratic leader's decision to allow this bill to move forward in the process so we can get a good negotiation going with the House of Representatives to get this done. Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 7 I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 7, the charitable giving bill. I further ask unanimous consent that all after the enacting clause be stricken, that the Snowe amendment and the Grassley-Baucus amendment which are at the desk be agreed to en bloc; that the substitute amendment which is the text of S. 476, the Senate-passed version of the charitable giving bill, as amended by the Snowe and Grassley-Baucus amendments, be agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table; further, that the Senate insist upon its amendments and request a conference with the House; and lastly, that the Chair be authorized to appoint conferees with a ratio of 3 to 2, and that any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. SANTORUM. No, Mr. President, I do not. I ask that my unanimous consent be acted upon.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I am very disappointed we cannot get agreement. As the Senator from South Dakota said, there are two major issues. They are not particularly complex issues, but they are ones in which I think it is important for us to be in a position to be able to drive to a resolution. There has been no talk about extraneous matters being brought in. This is simply the four corners of this bill trying to be worked out. The way we have done it historically in this Congress and previous Congresses is to sit down with both bodies in a conference and work it out. I am very disappointed we do not have the opportunity to get that done for this very important bill.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I rise to offer a unanimous consent request having to do with the CARE Act. I noted that a week ago the Senator from South Dakota, the Democratic leader, sent a letter suggesting we should move forward on this legislation. I wanted to take him up on his suggestion. I believe, as he says in his letter, it is important for us to take a piece of legislation that passed with over 90 votes, has passed the House of Representatives, and give it the opportunity to be negotiated between the House and the Senate so we can get it to the President's desk in a timely fashion. I want to put in the Record about a dozen articles, letters, and press releases from a variety of groups--everything from the United Jewish Communities, to the Catholic Health Association, to the Farm Bureau, to the National Conference of State Legislatures, all of which are asking to either put this legislation on the bill we have before us or, more preferably, get this bill to conference where we can work out the differences. I ask unanimous consent that this information be printed in the Record.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I rise to commend the Senate for the passage yesterday by unanimous consent an amendment to extend for 2 years the Work Opportunity and Welfare to Work tax credits, and to make certain improvements to these programs that will make them even more effective in helping Americans transition from welfare to work. These credits clearly belong in a bill whose name is JOBS; I can think of few programs that have created jobs and provided basic workplace skills to a segment of the population that is badly in need of these resources with the efficiency and low cost of WOTC and W-t-W. I can also think of few jobs programs that have as positive an impact as these have on scarce state welfare resources. I am also pleased that Senator Bayh joined me as a cosponsor of this bipartisan amendment. I would also like to thank Chairman Grassley and Senator Baucus for their support of this important initiative as part of a larger package of extenders. WOTC and W-t-W are also key elements of welfare reform. Employers in the retail, health care, hotel, financial services, and food industries have incorporated this program into their hiring practices and through these programs, more than 2,700,000 previously dependent persons have found work. A recent report issued by the New York State Department of Labor bears this out in economic terms. Comparing the cost of WOTC credits taken by New York State employers during the period 1996-2003--for a total of $192.59 million--with savings achieved through closed welfare cases and reductions in vocational rehabilitation programs and jail spending--for a total of $199,89 million--the State of New York concluded that WOTC provided net benefits to the taxpayers even without taking into account the additional economic benefits resulting from the addition of new wages to the GDP or reductions in other social spending such as Medicaid. In that regard, the New York State analysis concluded that the roughly $90 million in wages paid to WOTC workers since 1996 generated roughly $225 million in increased economic activity. Perhaps even more importantly, the study found that roughly 58 percent of the TANF recipients who entered private sector employment with the assistance of WOTC stayed off welfare. I mention the New York State study because it is the first of its kind; however, I am certain that similar conclusions would be reached in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania or any of the other 48 States and the District of Columbia. These programs work and do so at a net savings to taxpayers. In fact, over a 7-year period there were more than 111,000 certifications for both WOTC and W-t-W in Pennsylvania alone enabling many to leave welfare and find private sector work. The legislation is supported by hundreds of employers throughout Pennsylvania and around the country. WOTC and W-t-W have received high praise as well from the Federal Government. A 2001 GAO study concluded that employers have significantly changed their hiring practices because of WOTC by providing job mentors, longer training periods, and significant recruiting outreach efforts. Mr. President, WOTC and W-t-W are not traditional government jobs programs. Instead they are precisely the type of program that we should champion in a time when we need to be fiscally responsible. These are efficient and low cost public-private partnerships that have as their goal to provide a means by which individuals can transition from welfare to a lifetime of work and dignity. Under present law, WOTC provides a 40-percent tax credit on the first $6,000 of wages for those working at least 200 hours, or a partial credit of 25 percent for those working 120-399 hours. W-t-W provides a 35-percent tax credit on the first $10,000 of wages for those working 400 hours in the first year. In the second year, the W-t-W credit is 50 percent of the first $10,000 of wages earned. WOTC and W-t-W are key elements of welfare reform. A growing number of employers use these programs in the retail, health care, hotel, financial services, food, and other industries. These programs have helped over 2,200,000 previously dependent persons to find jobs. Eligibility for WOTC is currently limited to: (1) Recipients of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families in 9 of the 18 months ending on the hiring date; (2) individuals receiving Supplemental Security Income, SSI, benefits; (3) disabled individuals with vocational rehabilitation referrals; (4) veterans on food stamps; (5) individuals aged 18-24 in households receiving food stamp benefits; (6) qualified summer youth employees; (7) low-income ex-felons; and (8) individuals ages 18-24 living in empowerment zones or renewal communities. Eligibility for W-t-W is limited to individuals receiving welfare benefits for 18 consecutive months ending on the hiring date. More than 80 percent of WOTC and W-t-W hires were previously dependent on public assistance programs. These credits are both a hiring incentive, offsetting some of the higher costs of recruiting, hiring, and retaining public assistant recipients and other low-skilled individuals, and a retention incentive, providing a higher reward for those who stay longer on the job. Despite the considerable success of WOTC and W-t-W, many vulnerable individuals still need a boost in finding employment. This is particularly true during periods of high unemployment. There are several legislative changes that would strengthen these programs, expand employment opportunities for needy individuals, and make the programs more attractive to employers. These changes are reflected in legislation which I introduced along with Senator Baucus, S. 1180, and these changes are as follows: The administration's budget proposes to simplify these important employment incentives by combining them into one credit and making the rules for computing the combined credits simpler. The credits would be combined by creating a new welfare-to-work target group under WOTC. The minimum employment periods and credit rates for the first year of employment under the present work opportunity tax credit would apply to W-t-W employees. The maximum amount of eligible wages would continue to be $10,000 for W-t-W employees and $6,000 for other target groups--$3,000 for summer youth. In addition, the second year 50-percent credit under W-t-W would continue to be available for W-t-W employees under the modified WOTC. Under current law, only those ex-felons whose annual family income is 70 percent or less than the Bureau of Labor Statistics lower living standard during the 6 months preceding the hiring date are eligible for WOTC. The administration's budget also proposes to eliminate the family income attribution rule. Current WOTC eligibility rules heavily favor the hiring of women because single mothers are much more likely to be on welfare or food stamps. Women constitute about 80 percent of those hired under the WOTC program, but men from welfare households face the same or even greater barriers to finding work. Increasing the age ceiling in the ``food stamp category'' would greatly improve the job prospects for many absentee fathers and other ``at risk'' males. This change would be completely consistent with program objectives because many food stamp households include adults who are not working, and more than 90 percent of those on food stamps live below the poverty line. I am very pleased that President Bush proposed a 2-year extension for these programs in his budget, as well as some useful modifications and improvements. The administration along with all of us in Congress are eager to continue our efforts to create jobs in America. The amendment would provide for a 1-year extension of current law to facilitate a transition period and then in the second year implement these important changes. I would prefer a permanent extension which would provide these important programs with greater stability, thereby encouraging more employers to participate, make investment in expanding outreach to identify potential workers from the targeted groups, and avoid the wasteful disruption of termination and renewal. A permanent extension would also encourage the state job services to invest the resources needed to make the certification process more efficient and employer- friendly. Yet the cost is a significant consideration in the current budget environment even though this is an excellent use of tax incentives which ultimately saves government resources while expanding opportunity for Americans. Finally, I commend the Senate for acting on this amendment and encourage support for cloture tomorrow and quick completion of this important underlying jobs bill. WOTC and W-t-W expired at the end of last year, and even though the extension we propose is retroactive, these programs will not be fully effective until they become law. The individuals who enter the workforce under these programs, and our States, that benefit greatly from the reduction in welfare that these programs generate, deserve quick action by the Senate on this bill. I urge all of my colleagues to support its passage.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.