Jim Sensenbrenner: “the other gentleman from Wisconsin has claimed that nobody has had a chance to review the bill after the Governor has…”

“the other gentleman from Wisconsin has claimed that nobody has had a chance to review the bill after the Governor has made his line-item veto. The President of the United States has had a chance to review it, because the statements that he made in support of Wisconsin's W-2 plan were after the Governor vetoed parts of the W-2 plan and signed it into law. And he said, all in all, Wisconsin has the makings of the solid, bold, welfare reform plan. We should get it done. Now, what we are hearing from the other side of the aisle is that we should cloud the issue more. We should confuse the issue more. And we should end up giving the bureaucrats in the Federal Department of Health and Human Services the opportunity to modify the waiver request, as they usually do when waivers are requested, and thus end up by bureaucratic fiat changing the welfare reform plan that the elected legislators of Wisconsin and the Governor of this State have decided is in the State's interest. That philosophy is wrong. The reason this bill is before us today is so that Congress can allow Wisconsin to get on with the job of reforming its welfare system. Now, let me say that what we are doing here is really not unprecedented. There have been three instances in the last 10 years where Congress has legislatively approved welfare reform waivers requested by the Governors of various States.”