I'm kicking myself because several weeks ago, various people sent me things encouraging me to comment on the possible inclusion of welfare reform in the budget reconciliation bill. And I got distracted and didn"t do anything with it. And now here it is, almost passed into law, and I finally start looking at it. It"s outrageous.

Consider that Congress and the Clinton administration spent four years in a highly public debate about welfare reform in the 1990s.

Actually, it goes back longer than that. The law that first created work requirements was passed in 1988 and the politics of welfare flared up again in 1991 or so, prompting Clinton's campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it." There were endless hearings, floor debates, and Congress passed a bill in 1995 that Clinton vetoed, followed by one in 1996 that, after a long internal debate, he signed. It was far from a good outcome, but the 1996 bill was a hundred times better than the 1995 bill, and, having been on the inside,  I have to admit that the long open process did work to continually improve the legislation.

That law "expired" in 2001. And since then, it's fair to say that the Republicans didn't put much energy into the effort to reauthorize it. (Obviously, as with the Patriot Act, a law's expiration is not its end.) Bush and the congressional Republicans talked about tougher work requirements, but didn't push too hard. The governors were pretty happy with things as they are (since the block grant is very generous to them) and Democrats were happy to have welfare off the political agenda.

So after four years of sitting around and not reauthorizing the welfare law, all of a sudden it became a matter of such urgency that it had to be shoveled into the reconciliation bill, so that it can be passed with just 50 Republican votes plus Dick Cheney. But as I've mentioned before, the consequence of shoving things into budget reconciliation bills without debate, which are not meant for major policy changes, is that you get bad, awkward policy changes, even apart from the intended bad policy changes.

In this case, here's what it meant: Under the Byrd Rule (which was the procedure that Senator Conrad used to force the bill back to the House one more time), a budget reconciliation bill cannot include provisions have no impact on the budget. Provisions can increase spending, decrease spending, cut or raise taxes -- but they can't be ordinary legislation that has no budget impact. That's a reasonable rule -- if these special, closed procedures were open to anything, Congress would never do anything the normal way.

The welfare provisions include new work requirements. To make sure that the work requirements have a budgetary impact, the majority made them so strict that they know -- and the Congressional Budget Office estimated -- that many states would fail to enforce them and take a financial penalty instead. Thus, a budget impact.

I'll try this a different way. Let's say, for argument's sake, that we all agreed that the work requirements for welfare recipients should be even tighter than they are. You could increase them somewhat, all states would comply, and people on welfare would work more. But that would have no budget impact. You couldn't get away with sneaking into budget reconciliation.  Or, you could increase the requirements to a ridiculous level, where states would find it easier to pay a fine than to spend what it takes to get people working (an estimated $8 billion in costs in this bill). The result: Now you have a budget impact and you can sneak welfare reauthorization into the budget reconciliation bill. But welfare recipients in those states that don't comply won't work more. In fact, they'll probably work even less than they would under the first plan.

In the end, the Republicans' desire to push this reauthorization through an undemocratic procedure was a higher priority than their desire to actually make sure that welfare recipients work more.

Further proof that the manipulations of the process required to maintain total one party control of government produce absurd results even beyond the already absurd results that the majority sets out to achieve. For a little more on this, see this report.