Our euphoria was short-lived. Two days later, Bob Dole, after having told me earlier that we would work out a compromise on the issue, announced that he would block any health-care legislation and make my program a major issue in the November congressional elections. A few days later, Newt Gingrich was quoted as saying the Republican strategy was to make health-care reform unpassable by voting against improving amendments. He was as good as his word. On June 30, the House Ways and Means Committee voted out a universal coverage bill without a single Republican vote. The Republican leaders had received a memorandum from William Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, urging them to kill health-care reform. Kristol said the Republicans couldn’t afford to allow anything to pass; a success on health care would present a “serious political threat to the Republican Party,” while its demise would be a “monumental setback for the President.” At the end of May, at a Memorial Day retreat, the Republican congressional leaders decided to adopt Kristol’s position. I wasn’t surprised that Gingrich would follow Kristol’s hard line; his goal was to win the House and push the country to the right. Dole, on the other hand, was genuinely interested in health care and knew we needed to reform the system. But he was running for President. All he had to do was to hold forty-one of his fellow Republicans for a filibuster and we were sunk. On June 21, I transmitted to Congress a welfare reform bill designed by Donna Shalala, Bruce Reed, and their topflight policy people to make welfare “a second chance, not a way of life.” The bill was the product of months of consultations with every affected interest group, from governors to people on welfare. The legislation required able-bodied people to go to work after two years on welfare, during which time the government would provide education and training for them. If there was no privatesector job available, the welfare recipient would be required to take a government-subsidized one. Other provisions were designed to make sure recipients wouldn’t be worse off economically in the workforce than they had been on welfare, including more money for child-support enforcement, and continuing health and nutritional coverage for a transition period under Medicaid and the food stamp program. These changes, plus the large EITC tax cut for low-wage workers enacted in 1993, would be more than enough to make even low-wage jobs more attractive than welfare. Of course, if we passed health-care reform, lower-income workers would have permanent, not just temporary, health coverage, and welfare reform would be even more successful.
I also proposed to end the perverse incentive in the present system under which young teen mothers received more aid if they moved out of their homes than if they continued to live with their parents and stayed in school. And I urged Congress to toughen the child-support enforcement law, to force absent parents to come up with more of the startling $34 billion worth of court-ordered, but still unpaid, child support. Secretary Shalala had already granted several states “waivers” from existing federal rules to pursue many of these reforms, and they were producing results: the welfare rolls were already dropping sharply.
June was a big month for international affairs: I tightened sanctions on Haiti; Hillary and I hosted a state dinner for the emperor and empress of Japan, both highly intelligent, gentle people who spread goodwill for their country wherever they went; and I met with King Hussein of Jordan, and the presidents of Hungary, Slovakia, and Chile. By far the biggest foreign policy issue, however, was North Korea. As I mentioned earlier, North Korea had prevented inspections by the IAEA to make sure their spent fuel rods were not being reprocessed into plutonium for nuclear weapons. In March, when the inspections were stopped, I had pledged to seek UN sanctions against North Korea and refused to rule out military action. It got worse after that. In May, North Korea began to discharge fuel from a reactor in a way that prevented the inspectors from adequately monitoring its operation and determining what use was being made of the spent fuel.
