Editorial of the Day: Remembering Who Is Responsible for Welfare Reform
A subscription-only Wall Street Journal editorial recounts a history that bears repeating:
By the time it finally passed in Washington, the concept had been percolating in the states going back at least 30 years to Ronald Reagan’s tenure as California Governor. The Gipper took his ideas to Washington, proposing a work requirement, among others things. His 1986 proposal, “Up From Dependency,” was offered too late in his term to pass a Democratic Senate, but it advanced the debate.
Reform really took off in the early 1990s as Governors, led by Wisconsin’s Tommy Thompson, took the initiative. They battled for waivers from the feds, and then one of their own, Mr. Clinton, decided to run for the White House in 1992 using welfare reform as a way of proving his New Democrat bona fides.
He quickly shelved the idea in his first two years, bowing to a Democratic Congress. But when Republicans won the House in 1994, they made it one of their priorities. Mr. Clinton declared this week that the bill he signed was a “bipartisan” triumph, and in a narrow sense it was. But 98 Democrats opposed him on the House floor, including many of the Democrats who would chair committees in the House if they re-take Congress in November. Mr. Clinton also vetoed reform twice before finally signing it in 1996 after his political guru Dick Morris told him it was the one issue that could cost him re-election. Make no mistake: This was a conservative reform opposed every step of the way by the political left and its media allies.
Plenty has been written about what the Gingrich Revolution did or didn’t do, but no one can take away from it the fact that it finished the job of passing welfare reform by backing the opposition’s president into a corner and forcing him, while kicking and screaming, to do what he had to do to maintain his electoral viability.
