We're "Keeping Them Honest" tonight two times with two powerful presidential campaign ads, one from each side. Now each one goes straight for the gut, seeking to reinforce their negative views about either Mitt Romney or President Obama. As pieces of political theater, as tools of political warfare, each one is formidable. And each one is false, as in not true.
Tonight, "Keeping Them Honest," we will confront the defenders of these dubious ads. As always, we're not taking political sides. We're simply trying to report facts. We begin tonight with the new Mitt Romney ad.
In 1996, President Clinton and a bipartisan Congress helped end welfare as we know it, by requiring work for welfare. But on July 12th, President Obama quietly announced a plan to (gut) welfare reform by dropping work (requirements). Under Obama's plan, you wouldn't have to work and wouldn't have to train for a job. They just send your welfare check. And welfare to work goes back to being plain old welfare.
Well, in a moment, you will hear from Newt Gingrich, who joins us to defend that ad, but who also makes a pretty stunning admission about whether the ad he is defending is strictly speaking true to the facts.
But first, I want to show you how Mitt Romney is campaigning on the claims made in that very ad.
With a very careful executive action, he removed the requirement of, well, work from welfare. It is wrong to make any change that would make America more of a nation of government dependency. We must restore and I will restore work into welfare.
Now, listening to that and watching the ad, you would think that the White House, with the sweep of the pen, somehow managed to (undo) all that your elected representatives, Democrats and Republicans, (accomplished) back in the late 90s on welfare reform.
You get the impression the Obama administration wants an America where hardworking Americans pay taxes and lazy ones sit around collecting welfare. And in case you missed the implications, Romney surrogate Newt Gingrich today spelled it all out.
I think on the hard left, there's an unending desire to create a dependent America. It's not just that Obama's a radical, but the people he appoints are even more radical.
Obviously, the White House, the Obama campaign strongly disagree. And they're not alone. A string of fact checkers have blasted the ad as false. PolitiFact gave it a Pants on Fire rating. "The Washington Post" fact guy weighed in with four (Pinocchios). That's their rating system.
What in fact the White House and Department and Health and Human Services proposed doing was give governors more flexibility to tailor the program to their own states. And these were changes, by the way, requested by the Republican governors of Utah and Nevada. But what about this claim?
If President Obama didn't want people to think that he was going to waive the central work requirement in welfare reform, his administration shouldn't have written a memo saying it was going to waive the work requirements in welfare reform.
Well, "Keeping Them Honest," here's the relevant portion from that very memo from the Department of Health and Human Services. And I quote, "HHS will only consider approving waivers relating to the work participation requirements that make changes intended to lead to more effective needs of meeting the work goals."
The administration is insisting they're not trying to waive the work requirement. They're in fact trying to make it less bureaucratic and more effective, precisely what those Republican state governors have asked for. As we said, Newt Gingrich has defended the ad, going beyond it as well in some respects. But as you will see later on in this interview, Speaker Gingrich, who I talked to just a short time ago, also makes a surprising admission. I spoke with the former presidential candidate just a short time ago.
Mr. Speaker, so this ad says, and I quote, "Under Obama's plan, you wouldn't have to work and wouldn't have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check." Now, according to pretty much every nonpartisan fact-checking organization, that's not true. President Clinton, who signed the law, which you worked on as well, says it's not true. Even Ron Haskins, who worked on the original welfare law, served as George W. Bush's welfare policy, said quote, "There's no (plausible) scenario under which this new policy constitutes any kind of serious attack on welfare reform." Are they all wrong?
Well, Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation, who was the original developer of welfare reform, worked with Governor Reagan and then President Reagan, he was the first person to come out aggressively and say, look, this will in the end gut welfare reform.
And his reasoning is pretty straightforward. Once you start allowing states, this is why, by the way, the law itself does not permit waivers. The president actually could not waive Section 407 which says there can't be any waivers to the work requirement, so he (fudged) and found a way to get around it, which I suspect will be, turn out to be illegal.
Governor McDonnell of Virginia has come out and said he thinks that this is clearly gutting welfare reform. The two governors that the Obama administration is hiding behind, the governor of Utah and the governor of Nevada, have both come out and said that's not accurate, this is not what they wanted. This is not the flexibility they asked for.
And I think that this is going to become a genuine argument. Those of us who favored welfare reform and who worked hard to get it felt deeply that, particularly in liberal states, if you didn't have some kind of strong requirement, you know, they used to have things like getting a massage counted. Going, you know, going through drug rehab counted as a work program. It was amazing the range of things prior to 1995, the year 1996 that you could do and pretend they were work.
Speaker Gingrich, I appreciate you being on. Thank you.
Thank you.