More than a decade ago, when Kansas Republican Jan Meyers proposed making welfare reform a state-by-state grant program -- instead of a federally-run entitlement program -- she was under the impression that she was doing her party a favor. It was March of 1993, as Ron Haskins recounts in his Work Over Welfare, and the would-be reformers of the GOP were mired in disunity over a smattering of welfare ideas that were, as he delicately puts it, “in flux.” Meyers' proposal, which appealed to much of the party, broke the intellectual impasse. “The most important characteristic of block grants,” writes Haskins, “is that they greatly increase state and local, as opposed to federal, control of social programs.” In other words, it was about states' rights. And Republicans, as everyone knows, just eat that stuff up.
Or maybe not. On October 1, to very little fanfare, the state flexibility elements built into the original Temporary Aid for Needy Families (TANF) program met an ignominious demise.
It's worth remembering how we got here. In February, after a nail-splitting partisan vote, President Bush signed into law the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which changed TANF in two basic ways. First, it mandated that states “place half of all cases with adults and 90 percent of two-parent families in work activities.” And, second, it ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to “issue regulations to ensure uniform and consistent measurement of work participation rates”; states that didn't fulfill their requirements under the rules would lose grant money.
Those new HHS rules -- a narrow, tortured, 30-page meditation on the words “work activities” -- contain plenty that will and should annoy liberals. But it's worth asking why conservatives aren't upset about them, too. They certainly are not: In the Senate, 50 Republicans voted for the legislation that created them. In the House, 216 did. And that reflects more than just your standard-issue poor-hating. It reflects continuing hypocrisy about states' rights: Republicans are willing to let them go the moment they come into competition with other interests.
In theory, conservatives support states' rights because they like to see political power decentralized. When the might of government is wielded at a national level, it begins to look a bit like we're just a hop-skip away from the Soviet gulag. “Part of the birthright of Republicans is wariness about big government,” writes Haskins, on why Meyers' proposal was so attractive. “All the more reason for Republicans to look for ways to subtract authority from the federal government and give it to state and local government.”
And whenever the federal will trumps an obvious local preference, the states' rights people are supposed to get upset. Just think about the 1956 National Interstate and Defense of Highways Act, which created the modern federal highway system. Increased commerce, improved tourism -- a great deal for the states, right? Well, federalism mavens don't think so. Because the highway funds are federal, Washington had the power to withhold money from states that did not accept a variety of loosely related provisions, like a national drinking age. (Moves like this were almost always upheld by the Supreme Court, sometimes dubiously, under the Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause, and one of the things conservatives loved about the Rehnquist Court was that it limited the clause's application regarding policies with a less-than-obvious relationship to interstate commerce -- like, say, gun control.)
But the new welfare rules are, in essence, just like the highways act. They create a set of federal rules. And they link acceptance of those rules to federal funding: states risk losing a good deal of their block grants if they resist. Conservatives don't seem terribly distressed about any of this.
What the new rules prove is that welfare is a lot like marijuana. Alas, you can't get a great high from smoking those benefits. But both are issues with which conservatives' putative commitment to keeping governmental power decentralized (and in the hands of state and local governments) breaks down. We saw this last year in the case of Gonzales v. Raich, in which the Bush Justice Department argued against a California medicinal marijuana law, and found itself in agreement with the most liberal justices on the Supreme Court. Indeed, welfare reform joins a long and ever-growing list of issues -- abortion, gay marriage, and just glance at the GOP platform for more -- in which federalism has been abandoned in the pursuit of a narrow virtue.
That's a shame, because there's evidence that, in the case of welfare, flexibility has been good for the states. Following the release of the new rules -- which were opened up for comments and, eventually, revision -- the National Conference of State Legislatures sent a letter to HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt. Flexibility, the letter argues, was the “hallmark” of the original TANF legislation, and allowed a given state “to design a welfare program tailored to the needs of its TANF recipients and local conditions.” “We feel it is of the utmost importance,” the letter continues, “to keep state flexibility at the forefront of your decision-making process as you develop the final TANF regulations.”
Of course, HHS denies doing anything to the contrary. On the very first page of the new rules, the department lavishes praise on the original TANF legislation for giving States “broad flexibility to set eligibility rules and decide what types of benefits and services to provide clients.” This flexibility is good, in turn, because it lets states “try new, far-reaching initiatives that effectively addressed the needs of families.”
Don't be fooled: It takes exactly one page for the cognitive dissonance to set in. “Nevertheless,” HHS continues, some have noted that “the flexibility provided to States to define work activities has led to inconsistent definitions across States.” And if we let this injustice go unchanged, it would “perpetuate existing disparities in State definitions, and undermine the equitable treatment of States.” But of course, if you give definitional flexibility to states, it seems a little unreasonable to expect a set of consistent definitions. Those disparities aren't just an unfortunate side effect of flexibility; they're the whole point.
It's hard to know exactly what effect the new welfare rules and other DRA mandates will have -- though the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, and others, have had interesting things to say. Welfare rolls will probably fall, just as they did after 1996 welfare reform. (Of course, when you mandate a 50 percent cut under threat of massive grant reductions and drastically limit the welfare options states can employ, it's a bit hard to imagine any outcome other than states hemorrhaging beneficiaries left and right.) Conservatives will probably throw themselves a big victory party, and ask why those silly liberals were so worried to begin with. Silly liberals will wring their hands over a complicated and difficult-to-understand new set of poverty statistics, which will make its debut in some obscure academic journal, or, if they're lucky, near the bottom of a Washington Post story written seven months from now.
But the new rules will create one thing for sure: Bureaucracy. New federal jobs will have to be dreamed up to make sure states are complying. Paperwork will have to be filled out. Fines will have to be imposed. The free market will cry out in agony. There might have been a time when conservatives would have been bothered by this. But not anymore.
Conor Clarke is a Prospect intern.
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