A Welfare Experiment: Paul Ryan’s Opportunity Grant

Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI)

Representative Paul Ryan released a new discussion draft through the House Budget Committee called “Expanding Opportunity in America”. This expansive paper focuses on plans to combat poverty by tackling several areas: welfare programs, tax code, public education, criminal justice and regulatory reform. Some of the ideas are more original than others, but the most interesting by far is Ryan’s “Opportunity Grant”. The Opportunity Grant strives to reform the welfare system by letting the states experiment on welfare programs—and, hopefully, simplify them.

The welfare system in America is pretty complicated. There are no fewer than 11 different safety net programs and despite good intentions, the cumbersome rules and forms sometimes make the system confusing and even ineffective. If a family is in need of government assistance, they must research and determine their eligibility for any of the following programs:

1. Negative income tax (EITC and child tax credit)
2. Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program
3. Housing Assistance (Help finding affordable housing and paying rent)
4. Supplemental Security Income for the disabled, blind or elderly
5. Pell Grants (Money for students to help with room and board)
6. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
7. Job Training (Employment support)
8. WIC (Nutrition for pregnant women, nursing moms, and children under 5)
9. Child care and after school programs
10. Low Income Home Energy Assistance (Help to heat or cool a home)
11. Lifeline (Phone subsidy, including cell phones)

Navigating all of these programs takes considerable effort and many people who are struggling just don’t have the time. Paul Ryan’s Opportunity Grant proposal would simply this system by allowing states to consolidate all federal welfare funds through one state office. This way benefits can be coordinated on the federal, state, and community level. After meeting with a welfare provider of their choice, low-income families would receive a single payment based on their specific needs.

The Opportunity Grant provides flexibility first and foremost. Poverty takes on so many different forms, from temporary assistance to long-term disability, that solutions must be adaptable. States can experiment with a system that can cater to specific situations. Case management, for example, can make social services so much more effective because the solution is based on the individual’s needs. This type of system would avoid the “one-size-fits-all approach” by customizing each aspect of the process. In the discussion draft, Ryan outlines a situation where this responsiveness would be important:

“For example, it makes little sense to provide a household with a consistent stream of SNAP benefits when what the household may need most is reliable transportation to and from work. Giving providers this kind of flexibility will allow them to intervene early on with targeted benefits in cases where short-term assistance can prevent someone from falling into deeper poverty.”

At first, Opportunity Grant would only be open to a test group of states. In order to protect the needs of low-income families and individuals, participating states will be required to follow several criteria: (1) Each state has to spend the federal money on people in need; (2) Welfare recipients must follow work requirements; (3) States should have to use at least two different providers so that the state social welfare office would not be overworked; and (4) There must be a third party observer (other than the state or federal government) to monitor progress. Within these parameters, states would be free to experiment and create a new organization.

The main goal of the Opportunity Grant is to gather research from each of the participating states and use that information to find an approach to welfare that can be used nationwide. This type of experimentation is not new. In 2006, the state of Massachusetts passed a health reform law with the goal of universal health care coverage. The law was unique because of its idea of health care exchanges, set up to facilitate the purchase of insurance policies throughout the state. In this case, state experimentation in Massachusetts influenced how the federal government approached health care reform. When Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 health care reform bill borrowed this idea of health care exchanges.

Experimentation within the states is necessary for progress. Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously called states “laboratories for democracy”, meaning that the states are often better equipped to find solutions for policy challenges. Because the federal government is so large and cumbersome, it is much easier for states to do the bulk of political discovery. If five states participate in the Opportunity Grant program, there will be five different proposals for welfare reform and five sets of data showing the effectiveness of each system. This wealth of information can inform members of Congress. Instead of using untested theories to reform welfare, legislators can make informed decisions.

You can read Paul Ryan’s whole proposal here.

After you do, make sure to contact the House Budget Committee and let them know what you think: ExpandingOpportunity@mail.house.gov

Impeachment: What does a president have to do?

On Tuesday, July 8, 2014, Sarah Palin wrote an op-ed where she called for President Obama’s impeachment. Palin stated that the “unsecured border crisis” is the last straw “that makes the battered wife say ‘no mas’”. She is not the only conservative who has called for Obama’s impeachment. This political threat is a fairly common one. Democrats repeatedly called for President George W. Bush to be impeached when “weapons of mass destruction” were not found in Iraq.

But what does a president actually have to do to be impeached? In Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, the standards of impeachment are outlined simply:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

The Constitution only outlines two specific crimes for which impeachment would be appropriate: treason and bribery. Other than those two, the door is left fairly wide open. The phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is a holdover from British laws of impeachment, where leaders could be impeached for criminal or noncriminal activity that proved the president was abandoning his duty. Essentially, impeachment is reserved for the most serious cases of neglect. In fact, Congress has only seriously discussed impeachment four times.

I.               President Andrew Johnson was actually impeached by Congress because many representatives were dissatisfied with how he was handling the country after Lincoln’s assassination. Radical conservatives in the House accused him of violating the Tenure of Office Act by dismissing the Secretary of War, Edwin Staunton. Johnson was tried by the Senate, but he was finally acquitted by one vote.

II.             After President Harrison’s death, John Tyler gained the presidency and insisted on full executive powers. He vetoed several laws establishing a national bank on the grounds of state’s rights. As a result, Whigs in the House introduced a resolution of impeachment, but the resolution failed.

III.           President Richard Nixon was first elected in 1968. He won his reelection campaign in 1972, but soon afterwards, allegations surfaced that officials from his reelection campaign had participated in a break-in at the Democratic National Offices in the Watergate Hotel. This episode became known as the Watergate scandal. Congress began debating his impeachment, but Nixon resigned before he could be formally impeached.

IV.           After his reelection in 1996, Bill Clinton became the second president to be impeached by the House of Representatives as a result of an inappropriate relationship with a female intern. He was tried in the Senate and found not guilty. He apologized to the nation for his actions and was able to finish his second term.

Throughout our country’s history, the House of Representatives has only successfully filed for impeachment twice. In both of those instances, the Senate trial has found both of those presidents not guilty. This congressional power has not been used often and with good reason. In order for a president (or another executive officer) to be impeached, the measure would require majority support in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. When impeachment is used as a political threat, there usually isn’t enough consensus among politicians to go through with a successful impeachment trial.

Regarding Sarah Palin’s recent call for President Obama’s impeachment, most congressional conservatives are not on board. Senator John McCain—who is essentially responsible for Palin’s status as a politico after tapping her as his running mate in 2008—said that while he “respects” Palin’s views, her comments could actually hurt Republicans’ chances for winning Senate seats this fall. John Boehner also spoke out against impeachment, even after he filed a lawsuit against Obama. Besides lacking support among Republicans in Congress, Palin’s aggressive tactic would most likely fail because Democrats currently hold the majority in the Senate. Even if Republicans in the House managed to issue a resolution of impeachment, the Senate would certainly acquit President Obama.

In a nutshell, impeachment will never be successful if the arguments against a president fall along strict party lines. If the reasons for impeachment are political, and not the result of criminal neglect as established in the Constitution, it will never happen. Instead of talking impeachment, let’s start researching Senate candidates for the upcoming election—and make a serious political impact. 

Does Rep. Eric Cantor’s loss mean that compromise is dead?

Cooperation is bad for reelection.

On June 10, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Majority Leader (the second-highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives) lost the Republican primary in his district. He lost to David Brat, an Economics professor, who ran an impressive campaign. I had never heard of him, so I decided to look at his website. In one section, titled “ Reforming Washington”, it lists the usual reasons for ousting an incumbent representative—they’ve lost touch with their constituents, they’ve become part of the problem, etc. etc.

Image from David Brat's campaign website.

But then he goes for the jugular—“Cantor’s ‘leadership’ has been characterized by capitulation to the Obama agenda”. The top of the page features a picture of President Obama and Rep. Cantor talking, surrounded by people, presumably after a State of the Union or other Capitol event. At what point did talking to the President of the United States, let alone allowing yourself to be photographed doing so, become equal to a betrayal of the worst kind? Seriously? Heaven forbid coworkers should exchange a few words after a long day. Don’t we want our congressmen and women talking to each other? Being friendly? Getting things done? I certainly do.

In the Cantor/Brat campaign “amnesty” for illegal immigrants became the dirty word. David Brat claimed that Cantor was the biggest Republican supporter of amnesty. This assertion was a reaction to an interview Cantor gave where he said: “I have told the president, there are some things we can work on together…We can work on the border security bill together, we can work on something like the kids. So far, the president has just insisted that it’s all or nothing — my way or the highway. That’s not going to happen.”

Fundamentally, Cantor rejected most of President Obama’s plans for immigration reform. In terms of policy, Cantor stayed within the conservative camp. Instead of attacking Cantor’s policies, Brat was actually villainizing Cantor’s willingness to even consider cooperating with Democrats on immigration. That was Cantor’s “weakness”. Unfortunately, Brat isn’t alone in using this campaign tactic. Republican challengers across the country, for example, have accused incumbents of being “RINO”s or “Republicans in Name Only”, implying that these politicians have abandoned conservative ideals and started working with Democrats.

What is with this compromise-shaming tactic during election campaigns? It needs to stop. Our whole system of government is built on compromise. The Constitution itself reinforces the need for coalitions and cooperation. Our founding fathers were terrified of factions controlling the government. In the Federalist Essay No. 10, James Madison defines a faction thus: “By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” In short, a faction is a group with strong opinions that are adverse to (or opposite) the views and rights of the rest of the population. James Madison argued that factions contribute to distrust in public institutions and are a danger to personal liberty.

Madison goes on to argue that there are only two ways to control factions: either remove their causes or control their effects. Removing the causes of factions would be impossible because we can neither deny freedom of thought or opinion nor force citizens to share the same ideas. We are left with only one solution—controlling the effects of factions in government through checks and balances.

The whole reason checks and balances exist between branches of the federal government, and even within the branches themselves, is to prevent one faction from controlling the whole process of legislation. If any big piece of legislation passes, it has to be a result of cooperation between political parties. The Constitution requires Congress to have a majority to pass legislation. Often, even if a party has a majority in House of Representatives, it probably won’t have a majority in the Senate. Each law passed by both houses of Congress then needs to be signed by the President. If one party monopolizes both houses of Congress, a different party may occupy the White House. If an unconstitutional law happens to get through both the legislative and executive branches, the Supreme Court can strike it down. Our Constitution is quite effective at forcing collaboration—and cooperation is necessary in order for the government to work well.

There is a glaring double standard here. As voters, we get mad when a party single-handedly rams legislation through the system without the other party’s support—but then we get mad when our members of Congress compromise with the other party to get things done, as if compromise were a betrayal of principles. Where is the balance? We need our legislators to be friendly with each other. We need them to work together and get things done. Please stop shaming members of Congress every time they dare talk to the person sitting next to them—even if they are from the other political party.