Glenn English: “I particularly welcome the opportunity to come to the floor and invite my colleagues to support this extension on a…”

“I particularly welcome the opportunity to come to the floor and invite my colleagues to support this extension on a bipartisan basis. We have seen partisanship creep into the debate on welfare reform, and I think it has detracted from the seriousness of the endeavor. This has been, if not one of the greatest social reforms of the 20th century, certainly the most successful social reform of the last 20 years of the last century. We were successful in overhauling a failed welfare system. And as a result, some 3 million children have risen out of poverty since the bill that we had passed and we developed in the subcommittee, and I was there in 1996, and was signed into law by the last administration. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of American children experiencing hunger has plummeted to half the number in 1995. During this period, the welfare rolls were literally cut in half. In all, 3.5 million fewer Americans lived their lives in poverty than in 1995.”