Asa Hutchinson: “as we hear the debate on removing the 21st century program from the Straight A's demonstration project, I am reminded…”

“as we hear the debate on removing the 21st century program from the Straight A's demonstration project, I am reminded very much of the fierce debate that occurred in the early and mid-1990s over welfare reform. I was in the House at the time and there were those of us who believed that the great reforms that were taking place in welfare were occurring at the State level--there were a number of Governors around the country who were in the forefront of reforming, and the Presiding Officer was one of those Governors--and that the best thing we could do on the Federal level after a generation of trying to micromanage welfare, and having done a miserable job at it and, in fact, having seen welfare dependence only increase in our country, many of us believed, on a bipartisan basis, that the best possible thing we could do was to give the States broad new flexibility in the reforms they would enact at the State level. There was a fierce debate over whether that was a good direction in which to go.”