The new Republican majority in Congress is pledging to do this year what it refused to allow President Clinton to accomplish last year: End Welfare as We Know It.
Monday the House will begin marking up the GOP welfare reform proposal in the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources, chaired by Rep. E. Clay Shaw, R-Fla.
Mr. Shaw's bill would end individual entitlement to cash benefits from the federal government and replace it with block grants to the states, which could use the money however they saw fit. It would limit benefits to two years, ban extra benefits for women who had additional children while on welfare and deny assistance to unmarried teen-age mothers and to most immigrants.
The Republicans justify these Draconian "reforms" as "tough love" -- needed, they say, because we have created a "culture of dependency" that traps generations of poor people in poverty.
Their solution is to get people off welfare and into the work force. Mr. Shaw's bill would require welfare recipients to work after two years. In no case could they get benefits for more than five years.
One doesn't have to be a defender of the present system to recognize that these proposed "reforms" are misguided. There are legitimate grounds for criticizing the present system, but Mr. Shaw's proposed reforms don't address them.
Instead, Republicans are offering a mean-spirited agenda that would punish millions of poor children while doing almost nothing to get their parents to work -- or to lift them out of their poverty.
For example, conservatives blame welfare for the breakup of the traditional family and the loss of "values" that has produced the great rise in out-of-wedlock births, violent crime and social pathology over the last three decades.
The irony in this is that conservatives like Mr. Shaw were the ones who insisted on making family breakups a condition of the original welfare program. Remember the "man in the house" rule? That was the one that said families couldn't get assistance if there were an able-bodied man in the house. It was enacted because opponents of welfare, particularly Southern conservatives, simply couldn't abide the idea of government "handouts" to male heads of households.
So, if a man lost his job, he literally had to leave home if he wanted his children to be eligible for government surplus cheese, beans and peanut butter. Somehow conservatives persuaded themselves that this encouraged "family values."
With the advantage of 20-20 hindsight it's easy to see how the policy had exactly the opposite effect. It accelerated the fragmentation of poor families just when low-skilled factory jobs were disappearing.
The expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s coincided with the decline of the factory economy in the worst possible way because the no-man-in-the-house rule actually encouraged the breakup of stable, two-parent families.
One solution to the structural changes in the economy over the past three decades might be a massive jobs program that would give poor men employment with incomes sufficient to support their families.
But conservatives will have none of that. Instead, what they want is, in effect, a massive jobs program for poor women to enable them to support families without help from the children's fathers.
That almost certainly would be an unintended consequence of Mr. Shaw's bill. Because if government requires women to work after two years, it will also have to provide job training and -- ultimately -- public-sector jobs when private business can't absorb them all.
So, Mr. Shaw would replace the "man in the house" rule with a "woman out of the house" rule. Even if states could fund the millions of new public-sector jobs needed to implement this "reform, " its consequences over the long run would likely prove as disastrous as the present mess.
If you doubt that, consider what a truly sensible reform might look like: a rule that said no family could receive assistance unless both parents lived at home and both completed job training to prepare them for the work world.
That would be an example of a family policy that truly helped children by encouraging poor people to form stable, two-parent families.
There's little chance the country in its current vindictive mood will adopt anything resembling such a plan, however, because that would be too much like doing right.
Glenn McNatt writes editorials for The Baltimore Sun.