President Obama claims absolute power, acknowledges no Constitutional limitations on his "Executive Power" and he repeals the Welfare Reform Act by executive fiat!

Today, the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an official policy directive rewriting the welfare reform law of 1996.
The new policy guts the federal work requirements that were the
foundation of the reform law. The Obama directive bludgeons the letter
and intent of the actual reform legislation.

Welfare Reform under Clinton

Welfare reform replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent
Children with a new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
(TANF). The underlying concept of welfare reform was that able-bodied
adults should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of
receiving welfare aid.

The welfare reform law is often characterized as simply giving state
governments more flexibility in operating welfare programs. This is a
serious misunderstanding. While new law (the Personal Responsibility and
Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996) did grants states more
flexibility in some respects, the core of the act was the creation of
rigorous new federal work standards that state governments were required
to implement.

The welfare reform law was very successful.
In the four decades prior to welfare reform, the welfare caseload never
experienced a significant decline. But, in the four years after welfare
reform, the caseload dropped by nearly half. Employment surged and
child poverty among affected groups plummeted. The driving force behind
these improvements was the rigorous new federal work requirements
contained in the TANF law.

Obama’s Trick to Get Around Work Requirements

Today the Obama Administration issued a new directive stating that
the traditional TANF work requirements can be waived or overridden by a
legal device called the section 1115 waiver authority under the Social
Security law (42 U.S.C. 1315).

Section 1115 states that “the Secretary may waive compliance with any
of the requirements” of specified parts of various laws. But this is
not an open-ended authority: Any provision of law that can be waived
under section 1115 must be listed in section 1115 itself. The work
provisions of the TANF program are contained in section 407 (entitled,
appropriately, “mandatory work requirements”). Critically, this section,
as well as most other TANF requirements, are deliberately not listed in
section 1115; they are not waiveable.

In establishing TANF, Congress deliberately exempted or shielded
nearly all of the TANF program from the section 1115 waiver authority.
They did not want the law to be rewritten at the whim of Health and
Human Services (HHS) bureaucrats. Of the roughly 35 sections of the TANF
law, only one is listed as waiveable under section 1115. This is
section 402.

Section 402 describes state plans—reports that state governments must
file to HHS describing the actions they will undertake to comply with
the many requirements established in the other sections of the TANF law.
The authority to waive section 402 provides the option to waive state
reporting requirements only, not to overturn the core requirements of
the TANF program contained in the other sections of the TANF law.

The new Obama dictate asserts that because the work requirements,
established in section 407, are mentioned as an item that state
governments must report about in section 402, all the work requirements
can be waived. This removes the core of the TANF program; TANF becomes a
blank slate that HHS bureaucrats and liberal state bureaucrats can
rewrite at will.

Congressional Research Service: “There Are No TANF Waivers”

In a December 2001 document, “Welfare Reform Waivers and TANF,” the
non-partisan Congressional Research Service clarified that the limited
authority to waive state reporting requirement in section 402 does not
grant authority to override work and other major requirements in the
other sections of the TANF law (sections that were deliberately not
listed under the section 1115 waiver authority):

Technically, there is waiver authority for TANF state
plan requirement; however, [the] major TANF requirements are not in
state plans. Effectively, there are no TANF waivers.

Obviously, if the Congress had wanted HHS to be able to waive the
TANF work requirements laid out in section 407, it would have listed
that section as waiveable under section 1115. It did not do that.

Define “Work”…

In the past, state bureaucrats have attempted to define activities
such as hula dancing, attending Weight Watchers, and bed rest as “work.”
These dodges were blocked by the federal work standards. Now that the
Obama Administration has abolished those standards, we can expect “work”
in the TANF program to mean anything but work.

The new welfare dictate issued by the Obama Administration clearly
guts the law. The Administration tramples on the actual legislation
passed by Congress and seeks to impose its own policy choices—a pattern that has become all too common in this Administration.

The result is the end of welfare reform.

It
would seem that the constitutional limitations on the powers of the
President and the Executive Branch no longer apply to the Emperor in the
Oval Office!

"The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or unlimited

sovereignty, or absolute power, is the same in a majority of a popular assembly,

an aristocratic council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor."
-- John Adams

, Letter to Thomas Jefferson [November 13, 1815]