Thomas Daschle: “Yesterday we had a very productive meeting with the President, a number of my colleagues here in the Senate, Governor…”

“Yesterday we had a very productive meeting with the President, a number of my colleagues here in the Senate, Governor Carper, Mayor Archer of Detroit, County Executive Rick Phelps of Dane County, WI, and Bill Purcell, majority leader of the Tennessee House of Representatives. It is clear that the Work First Coalition is growing. Government leaders at all levels agree that we need to move forward with welfare reform--that we can't let extremists hold this very important reform hostage. We have a plan. It is about work. It is about ending the cycle of dependency and helping single mothers and unemployed fathers become self-sufficient and stay that way. The bill that was reported from the Finance Committee is not about work. It's a huge unfunded mandate to the States. In fact, the head of the bipartisan U.S. Conference of Mayors may have put it best when he called the Republican welfare reform plan the 'mother of all unfunded mandates.' It's ironic that S. 1, the first bill the Republican leadership introduced this Congress, was a bill to stop unfunded mandates. Now they want to dump a $35 billion unfunded mandate on the States. Why is the welfare reform bill as reported from the Finance Committee an unfunded mandate? The reason is simple. The bill as reported by the committee freezes Federal funding to the States at the fiscal year 1994 level in each of the next 7 years.”