Romney attacks President Obama on removing requirement for welfare recipients to work
Mitt Romney is accusing President Obama of turning the clock back on welfare reform.
The Republican challenger Tuesday launched a new ad charging Obama with gutting the landmark 1996 welfare reform law that requires recipients to work to receive benefits.
President Barack Obama talks with former President Bill Clinton backstage at the New Amsterdam Theater in New York, N.Y., June 4, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
“You wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job,” says the ad, which begins with another Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signing the legislation into law. “They just send you your welfare check.”
Romney says an Obama administration offer to waive some federal welfare rules for state programs — an effort, the administration says, to experiment with ways to put welfare recipients into jobs — ends the requirement that recipients of government assistance must work.
Clinton, who signed the law requiring work as a condition of welfare payments, said Tuesday night that Romney’s claim is “not true” and that his campaign ad is “misleading.”
Romney’s ad says: “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.”
At a campaign event Wednesday in Des Moines, Romney reiterated the attack against Obama. “He removed the requirement of 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,” Romney said.
Gingrich — in a conference call Wednesday with reporters arranged by the Republican National Committee— said that Republicans’ “immediate assumption is that (Obama) is setting up a dramatic reduction in the work requirement.” The 1996 work requirements were designed “not to be waivable” because Republicans “deeply distrusted liberals who, we were convinced, would go back to the pre-1996 model,” Gingrich said. “There’s a deep, deep bitter opposition to work requirements in the hard-core left.”
