Yesterday the U.S. House approved a bill seeking to prevent the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from allowing states to lift work requirements for federal welfare benefits. Republican arguments for the bill echoed false claims from Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.  

The Hill’s Pete Kasperowicz explained the concept behind H.R. 890, the Preserving Work Requirements for Welfare Programs Act.

The bill is a reaction to last year’s guidance from the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS), which told states that the so-called welfare-work requirement can be waived.

Republicans criticized the waiver as an attempt to gut what they said was one of the most important pieces of the 1996 welfare reform law. That law turned the federal welfare program into a block grant to states under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.

It also required that within each state, 50 percent of all families receiving help under TANF must be working or looking for work – states can be fined if they fail to hit that target. […]

Democrats defended the Obama administration’s policy by noting that HHS has said it would only let states waive the welfare-work rule if they can come up with a plan to boost the number of people moving from welfare to work by 20 percent.

“The President is not dropping welfare-work requirements, he’s allowing the states to experiment, and you’d think our Republican friends would be entirely in favor of letting governors experiment in getting people back to work fairly quickly,” Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said.

Remember this vote next time Republicans in Congress claim that the Obama administration is trampling on “states rights.”

House members approved this bill yesterday on a mostly party-line vote of 246 to 181. Republicans Tom Latham (IA-03) and Steve King (IA-04) supported the bill, as did all but three of their GOP colleagues. Bruce Braley (IA-01) and Dave Loebsack (IA-02) opposed it, as did all but 18 House Democrats.

Next year, I would not be surprised to see Loebsack’s Republican challenger in IA-02 and Braley’s opponent in the U.S. Senate race distort the meaning of this vote, the same way Romney’s presidential campaign wrongly asserted that President Barack Obama had gutted welfare reform. Republicans continued to make that claim even after multiple fact-checkers debunked it.

The real scandal is that the federal welfare program known as TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) was only a “weak safety net” during the worst U.S. recession in 60 years. According to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,

Nationally, the TANF caseload rose only modestly during the downturn and began to decline while need remained high. The caseload did not begin to grow until seven months after the recession started, and it rose only 16 percent before peaking in December 2010 (see chart).  In contrast, the number of unemployed individuals rose 88 percent over this period.  Over the course of 2011, the caseload fell 5 percentage points from that peak, while the unemployment rate remained at or above 8.5 percent throughout the year.

Naturally, Republicans won’t let reality get in the way of their claims that federal welfare benefits are too generous toward lazy people who don’t want to work.

To my knowledge, only one of the Iowans in Congress has publicly commented on yesterday’s vote. Steve King’s office sent out this press release (emphasis in original):

King Votes for Welfare to Work Requirements

Washington, DC- Congressman Steve King released the following statement after voting for H.R. 890, the Preserving Work Requirements for Welfare Programs Act, today. The bill prohibits the Obama administration from waiving the essential and original work requirements and extends the TANF block grant program, which gives benefits to low-income families with children.

“Americans understand that welfare work requirements were a positive bipartisan addition in 1996 to the welfare reform law signed by President Clinton,” said King. “Today I voted to prevent the Obama Administration from removing these accountability measures and to preserve these programs that do so much good for many families. The Obama Administration continually puts dependency on the government dime above what is best for individuals and our nation. Being held responsible for government assistance should not be a partisan issue.”