244 The making of American domestic policy
and to present the president with the straight choice of either assenting to or
vetoing a welfare reform bill.
The development after 1932 of New Deal policies, particularly in the field
of social welfare, had centralised political power, forcing the states to ac-
cept the policy of the federal government and to provide a large part of the
finance for them. For many years Republican presidents had talked of swing-
ing the balance of power back towards the states and away from the federal
government. Richard Nixon had proposed a ‘New Federalism’, and Reagan
and Bush had each attempted to find a different basis for the distribution
of functions between the two levels of government. They had had little real
success in this endeavour, so it was ironic that it was the Democrat, Bill Clin-
ton, who was obliged to sign a bill which for the first time achieved a really
significant shift of power to state governments. The problem of a Democratic
president facing a Congress dominated by the Republicans is clear in the vot-
ing patterns in Congress when the critical vote was taken on the legislation.
The Republicans, although they had had to give up their attempt to reform
Medicaid, were virtually unanimous in support of the Bill – only two Repub-
licans in the House of Representatives and no Republican Senators voted
against. The situation in the Democratic Party was very different. President
Clinton had announced that, although there were parts of the Bill to which
he was deeply opposed, nevertheless he would sign it. Thus a vote for the Bill
was a vote in favour of the president’s policy. But only half the Democrats
in the House could bring themselves to vote for the Bill – ninety-eight in
favour and ninety-eight against. In the Senate the situation was little bet-
ter; twenty-five Democratic Senators voted in favour of the welfare reform
proposal, and twenty-one against. Particularly noticeable was the fact that a
majority of the Democratic Senators representing Northern states opposed
the Bill, whereas all but one of the Southern Democrats supported it. Black
and Hispanic congressional representatives were overwhelmingly opposed to
the Bill. The president had been forced to participate in a process of reform
that was never in his control and that deeply divided his own party.
The mechanism that was adopted in the legislation was the use of block
grants. The grants-in-aid made by the federal government to the states un-
der the Social Security Act had been accompanied by very explicit conditions,
leaving little discretion to the states in the way that the programmes were
administered, or in the amount of their own revenue that they had to contrib-
ute. Under the new legislation block grants were made to the states totalling
$16.4 billion a year, leaving the states to decide on levels of benefit and eli-
gibility requirements for participants, and requiring the states to contribute
significantly less from their own resources than before. One major effect of
the new law was to increase the extent to which welfare programmes could
differ from state to state, reflecting the political philosophies of state legisla-
tors. The State of Wisconsin adopted a radical approach to welfare, abolishing
the entitlement to benefit unless the recipient of the welfare payment under-
took some kind of work. Other states adopted their own ways of reforming