Bah, humbug!

Can a bid to soften welfare reform's blow make it past Tom Finneran? Plus, longing for Kennedy, rubber-stamping Gingrich, and coddling corporations.

Talking Politics by Michael Crowley

'Tis the season for charity and compassion. But as much as all the warm coats and canned food will help, what might have been the most valuable holiday gift Massachusetts's needy citizens could have received was snatched away last month by House Speaker Tom Finneran (D-Mattapan).

That would have been the passage of some modest but wise modifications to the state's sweeping -- and some say draconian -- 1995 welfare reform law.

Now, social service advocates and House progressives who championed the measures are planning their strategy for the new legislative session that begins in January 1998.

The task is urgent: on December 1, 1998, the law's two-year time limits will kick in for the first round of welfare recipients, cutting off benefits for 40,000 people.

But cushioning the blow won't be easy: an attempt to "fix" welfare reform in Massachusetts now seems caught in a legislative vise between Finneran and Acting Governor Paul Cellucci.

When it passed its annual budget last June, the legislature included three "outside sections" dealing with welfare; they specify new oversight powers for the House and Senate, new job-training programs, and a requirement that food stamp recipients on workfare be compensated at minimum-wage levels.

But in one of his last acts as governor last July, Bill Weld vetoed each of those attempts to tamper with his welfare reform baby.

Legislative supporters of the measures weren't surprised by Weld's vetoes, but they believed they could muster the two-thirds vote required to override one, two, or all three of them. Overrides must begin in the House, but Finneran never let a vote take place -- and finally blocked last-ditch efforts last month, in the closing minutes of the 1997 legislative year.

Frustrated legislators will renew this battle in '98. But to what avail? Cellucci is sure to veto any new attempts to tinker with the welfare law. And as long as Finneran continues to deny the provisions' supporters their constitutional power to override those vetoes, there's little they can do.

"We're completely dependent on, and at the mercy of, the Speaker," says Sean Cahill, a policy analyst at the Massachusetts Human Services Coalition, which has lobbied hard for the adjustments.

This situation is not only undemocratic; it makes for foolish policy. The changes in the law would not undermine the central -- and worthy -- goals of welfare reform: moving people from dependence to self-sufficiency, and ultimately out of poverty. Nor would they cost the state a dime.

The three provisions originally passed in June would:

Guarantee that welfare recipients who work for their food stamps under the 1995 law be compensated at no less than minimum wage-equivalent levels. Right now, unemployed food stamp recipients must work 80 hours a month at community service jobs for $120 in food stamps -- the equivalent of $1.50 an hour. The amendment would reduce the number of hours recipients must work.

Require the governor to win legislative approval for any new cuts or major changes in welfare programs. Last year's federal welfare reform ended long-standing federal checks on major welfare policy shifts by states.

Reorient the state's job-training programs, which now focus largely on such basics as résumé-writing and interview skills. This provision would make sure that training is tailored more specifically to recipients' needs.

"These were very moderate, incremental reforms," Cahill says. "Low-income people were really left out in the cold."

Dick Powers, spokesman for the state's Department of Transitional Assistance, confirms that the administration's policy has not changed under Cellucci, and that the acting governor would veto a new round of welfare adjustments from the legislature. (Now that the legislative year has ended, it is too late to override budget-related vetoes.)

Powers says passage of the legislative control provision "would discourage efforts to improve programs or efficiency in programs." And the new job-training programs being sought, he contends, would take too long to prepare recipients for the December 1998 time limit. "We feel it would jeopardize the ability of many recipients to become self-sufficient prior to the first imposition of time limits," Powers says.

As for the minimum-wage language, Powers says it's "not an argument about dollars, but an argument about attitude and behavior. Advocates are under a false assumption that by requiring recipients to do less, they're doing them a favor."

Finneran regularly shuts out the views of the House's small band of progressives. But in this case he is defying an apparent majority of House members. "The votes were there," says Representative Jay Kaufman (D-Lexington), who helped gather dozens of members' signatures in support of a vote on the session's last day.

Whether Finneran will be any more flexible in 1998 is an open question. He was out of town last week, and unavailable for comment.

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When Joe Kennedy backed away from the 1998 governor's race in August, liberals nervously wondered what that would mean for the political debate in an epochal election year.

Now they know.

Last week, Scott Harshbarger, Kennedy's successor as the Democratic front-runner, proposed a stunning $1.5 billion per year tax cut. All four announced candidates for governor now support enormous cuts, and the local media now talk cheerily of a bipartisan consensus for tax cuts.

But you can be sure that consensus wouldn't have emerged with Kennedy in the race. Despite some conservative tendencies, such as his support for a balanced budget amendment and the death penalty, Kennedy was the most effective liberal voice his party had to offer. Today, that voice is sorely missed.

It is hard to believe that Harshbarger's proposal is the work of a Democrat at all. It outdoes even a $1.2 billion per year income-tax cut supported by anti-tax activist Barbara Anderson and by the two Republican gubernatorial candidates, Acting Governor Paul Cellucci and treasurer Joe Malone. (Democratic gubernatorial candidate Patricia McGovern also backs this one.)

It's true that Harshbarger's cut is targeted at lower-income taxpayers than the one endorsed by Cellucci et al. And no one ever thought of Harshbarger as a fanatical tax-and-spender. But still.

The liberal Democratic establishment, long suspicious of the AG, is outraged. Senate president Tom Birmingham said last week that he was "surprised and disappointed." Stephen Gorrie, president of the powerful Massachusetts Teachers Association, calls Harshbarger's plan "very irresponsible and far too extreme."

But Harshbarger is far less interested in acceptance from Democrats like these than he is in the votes of the suburban independents who were so enamored of Bill Weld and his manic tax-cutting. (Harshbarger's campaign has even sent out a fundraising letter to Weld supporters boasting that he and Weld have "a lot in common.")

And with Harshbarger's announcement, these independents have won the game before the election year has even arrived. The question now is not whether to cut taxes; it is simply a matter of how much. The only potential candidate who has not endorsed a major cut is former Boston mayor Ray Flynn, whose ability to influence public debate is suspect these days.

That leaves Joe. Although Kennedy might not have ruled out tax cuts altogether, he certainly would have argued for a rigorous debate over the state's priorities. Shortly after backing out of the race, he did just that as a guest on WBUR's The Connection, in September.

"We're talking today about reducing taxes," Kennedy told host Christopher Lydon, "and yet what we don't have is any discussion of what the scope of the problems is." Sixty thousand Massachusetts children go to bed hungry, Kennedy said; between 400,000 and 500,000 people work full-time without health insurance.

"I mean, what is it in this state?", Kennedy said. "We don't even have discussions about these issues any longer."

A Kennedy aide reiterated last week that his boss will not reenter the gubernatorial contest under any circumstances. Given the sloppy way Kennedy has handled his personal troubles, perhaps that's the way it should be. But we are now beginning to see the broader political effects of Kennedy's fall, and they are not pretty.

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Jaded as we've grown to the ways of Washington politicians, this news from the Capitol last week was still galling: House Speaker Newt Gingrich, his wife, and two aides spent the week in London at a hotel where rooms start at $400 per night; the entire trip -- airfare, hotel, meals -- was paid for by the international oil giant Atlantic Richfield, which had flown Gingrich to London to speak at its annual dinner.

Atlantic Richfield does billions of dollars' worth of business in the US, and usually has major interests before Congress. And guess who would be a huge loser under any credible plan now being discussed to combat global warming?

To critics of the trip, Gingrich responded that it had been approved by the House Ethics Committee -- and in some ways that's the real scandal. After all, what's the point of having an ethics committee if it rubber-stamps escapades like these?

"These ethics committees in the House and Senate . . . are a fig leaf, or a Good Housekeeping seal for members of Congress," says Charles Lewis, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity. "The members will say, `I would like to do this. Is that okay?' and they'll get a letter back from some ethics lawyers who will say that it technically doesn't violate the law. And then they will tell that to the public and reporters."

"It's a little game that gets played in Washington almost every day," Lewis says.

Sadly, trips like Gingrich's violate no House rules, and they are all too common -- though Lewis says that the junket's length, the cost of the hotel, and the inclusion of his wife and aides makes this one worse than most.

But, as Lewis says, "whether or not it's against the rules that politicians made for themselves is irrelevant."

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Speaking of corporations and their allies in Congress:

By now you're used to hearing congressional Republicans complain that middle-class American families bear an unfairly heavy tax burden. Well, an IRS report released this month sheds some light on how that burden is distributed.

It seems American corporations now pay much less in taxes than they used to. In 1994, according to the IRS, corporations paid $135.5 billion in income tax -- just 12.5 percent of all tax revenue collected by the government. In the 1960s, big business accounted for more than 20 percent of tax revenue.

Republicans like to portray working families as victims of a plunderous government that drains money for ineffective social programs and bureaucracy. They don't like to talk about their role in shifting the tax burden from the Fortune 500 giant to you and me.

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.