Gramm’s Proposal Tougher Leadership’s Blueprint For Welfare Denounced

Republican Sen. and presidential hopeful Phil Gramm and 11 conservative colleagues Thursday denounced their leadership’s welfare reform plan and offered their own tougher blueprint for overhauling the safety net for the poor.

The Gramm proposal resembles legislation passed by House Republicans this spring but would change the status quo even more by transferring additional anti-poverty programs from federal to state control and forbidding states from paying any benefits to households where the mother had failed to establish paternity of the children.

By offering a welfare plan that is much more conservative than the one Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas helped pass in the Senate Finance Committee two months ago, Gramm was again stressing the difference between his style of Republicanism, and that of Dole, the party’s presidential front-runner.

“Our goal is to stand up for what our party believes in,” the Texas senator told reporters.

The Republican Party, Gramm continued, “committed to the American people that if they gave us control of our government, we would dramatically reform welfare. We don’t believe that the Finance Committee bill lives up to that commitment.”

The Finance Committee bill would give states vast authority over cash benefits for poor families but would not set strict state requirements aimed at reducing out-of-wedlock births like the House and the Gramm plans. Both of those measures would forbid states from providing cash benefits to mothers younger than 18; give cash bonuses to states that reduced their ratios of out-of-wedlock births; and prevent states from increasing benefits for families on welfare who had additional children.

The Finance Committee bill was initially expected to be debated on the Senate floor in early June, but Republican in-fighting over out-of-wedlock birth provisions and the formula for distributing funds among the states proved so intense that the leadership has yet to forge a consensus.

To prevent an embarrassing public intra-Republican battle, Dole has delayed the floor debate but has said he intends to keep the Senate in ession in August until it passes welfare reform legislation. Senate staff and members have been meeting to try to negotiate a compromise.

By supporting a competing proposal, Gramm and other Republicans are risking the passage of welfare reform, which has broad support among Republicans and Democrats. However, if their efforts force Dole to embrace a compromise welfare package that includes provisions aimed at discouraging out-of-wedlock births, Gramm and other conservatives will score a political victory.

But if the split ends up killing welfare reform for the year, Republican observers warned, Republicans will have a political fiasco on their hands even greater than the president’s failure to pass health care reform last year,

“All of the Republicans over there can forget about being president if we don’t pass a welfare bill,” said Rep. Clay E. Shaw Jr., R-Fla., the main author of the House welfare reform plan.