Rush played a few clips today from a discussion on PBS News Hour last night where Heritage’s Robert Rector, who wrote most of the work requirement provisions in the current welfare reform law, defended his assertion that Obama gutted the welfare reform law and debated it with Peter Edelman, a law professor who opposed the welfare reform law with such vigor that in 1996 he resigned in protest from the Clinton administration. It’s a very enlightening debate and I’ve provided both the full PBS News Hour interview as well as Rush’s full segment on it. You can listen to one or the other, or both.
But in short, Rector is a man with facts and figures and explains exactly why and how Obama gutted the welfare reform bill and how he intends to implement his own measures. I do want to highlight a portion of the PBS News Hour that I think is important:
JUDY WOODRUFF: In other words, giving — as I understand, it’s giving states more flexibility to figure out ways to get people to work.
ROBERT RECTOR: It’s allowing states to be exempted from the participation rates entirely. They say that they will waive or do away with all of Section 407. That’s the entire work requirement in the bill. Every aspect, every clause, every phrase is now invalid. It no longer is binding. It’s gone.
PETER EDELMAN: That’s not true.
ROBERT RECTOR: It’s absolutely true.
And they’re going to replace it with something that they will design unilaterally, with no input from Congress, and that will be something that will be far more lenient than the existing law. The left wing of the Democratic Party has opposed this law from the beginning.
Half the Democratic Party voted against it in ’96. They attempted to repeal it in 2002. They were unable. They have now used a bureaucratic tactic to wipe it out.
“With no input from Congress” – so typical of this administration and I think this should definitely be a line of attack from Romney on this issue.
PBS News Hour interview in full:
Rush’s segment on the above debate along with his commentary: