Goodlatte Statement at Hearing on: “Executive Overreach in Domestic Affairs Part 2 –IRS Abuse, Welfare Reform, and Other Issues”

Chairman Goodlatte: Thank you, Chairman King, for convening this third hearing of the Task Force on Executive Overreach.  Following up its last hearing, the topic today includes more recent case studies of the abuse of executive power, and I’ll focus my remarks on the President’s actions regarding the implementation of the work requirements in the bipartisan welfare reform laws, and its unilateral rewriting of federal energy laws. In 1996, President Clinton and a Republican Congress signed into law the bipartisan Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.  This program was designed to discourage dependency and encourage employment by placing certain restrictions on welfare. TANF provided that individuals could only receive benefits for up to five years and also required recipients to engage in work within two years of receiving benefits.  The work requirements in particular were recognized as the reason for TANF’s success in helping millions of Americans get back to work.  Welfare rolls were decreased by half and the poverty rate for African-American children reached its lowest point in U.S. history. Researchers studying the self-reports of happiness by former welfare recipients have shown that these work requirements increased the happiness of single mothers taking part in the program, concluding that “the package of welfare and tax policies changes targeting single mothers, and generally promoting work, increased single mothers’ happiness … The observed increase in happiness appears to result from both an increase in single mothers reporting a high level of happiness and a decrease in single mothers reporting a low level of happiness.  The magnitude of the effect appears quite large.”  These new workers confirm what many studies of human happiness have shown, and that is that one of the best means of achieving happiness is through earned success.  As other researchers have shown, paid work activities provide “social contact, a means of achieving respect, and a source of engagement, challenge, and meaning.” The Obama Administration, however, in a mere memorandum issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, deemed it that states no longer had to follow TANF’s work requirements and could dispense welfare even if recipients didn’t meet the TANF statutory standards.  In the 1996 welfare reforms, Congress provided a list of which statutory provisions the federal government could waive, and TANF’s work requirements, in Section 407, were not listed as waivable.  In the many years since the 1996 Act was passed, no Administration had ever asserted this authority because the statute’s clear text allows for no waivers of TANF’s work requirements.  The result, if waivers were fully implemented, would be more dependency and less of the sort of earned success that leads to greater happiness. The Obama Administration has also attempted to unilaterally impose energy use rules on the states without Congressional authorization.  Initially, 26 states – and now 29 states -- asked the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to intervene immediately to stop this abuse, and the Supreme Court promptly stayed the enforcement of the President’s plan pending a resolution of the constitutional challenges against it.  Even prominent liberal law professor Laurence Tribe, who taught President Obama constitutional law at Harvard Law School, wrote the following about President Obama’s Clean Power Plan: After studying the only legal basis offered for the EPA’s proposed rule, I concluded that the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority … Even more fundamentally, the EPA, like every administrative agency, is constitutionally forbidden to exercise powers Congress never delegated to it in the first place. The brute fact is that the Obama administration failed to get climate legislation through Congress. Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation’s electric generating system and power grid.  It does not. I look forward to hearing from all our witnesses today, who will discuss these and other abuses of executive power, and the means of preventing them. For more on today’s hearing, click here. Learn more about the Task Force here.