This week, the House passed a bill that extends Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, for a year instead of leaving it up for reauthorization debate. As Yvonne Yen Liu writes in Colorlines, this is bad news for progressives. Welfare reform in 1996 was designed not to keep people out of poverty, but to get people off the welfare rolls and, in particular, prevent single mothers from being single mothers by promoting marriage and abstinence for single women. It's an old-timey sexism that devalues motherhood at the same time that it wants to reinstall men in traditional roles as heads of households without providing low-income men with needed social services.
Under Obama, progressives had a shot of reforming TANF to refocus the legislation on programs that would actually alleviate, or alleviate the suffering caused by, poverty. But, as I wrote last month, progressives aren't making as much headway on issues like these as they hope to with Obama at the helm, and that's likely to be even more true in the next Congress. So, as disappointing as it is to see this conservative re-imagining of anti-poverty policy continue, extending it may be the only bulwark against unwanted changes that would decimate help for the poor even more.
-- Monica Potts
