Mayor 1%. Kari Lydersen
to crack cocaine, the disparity had a blatantly racist effect. In spring 1995 the US Sentencing Commission decided the penalties should be equalized. This would have happened with no action from Clinton or Congress, but Congress soon passed a law (which Clinton signed in October 1995) perpetuating the sentencing disparity—arguing that crack was decimating inner cities and that a heavy hand was needed.51 Furious members of the Congressional Black Caucus sent Clinton a letter saying the continued policy made “a mockery of justice.”52
In 1996 Clinton signed another sweeping crime bill, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), in which Emanuel likely also played a significant role.53 Introduced after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the AEDPA significantly curbed habeas corpus rights by severely limiting appeals. Defense attorneys said this created a greater chance that an innocent person would be executed. A prime example was the high-profile case of Troy Davis, who was executed in September 2011 for the 1989 killing of an off-duty police officer working security at a Burger King in Savannah, Georgia. An international movement supporting Davis’s claims of innocence, including Amnesty International, former president Jimmy Carter, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, argued that no physical evidence linked Davis to the crime, and noted that seven of the nine witnesses whose testimony had led to his conviction later recanted. Nonetheless, Davis was killed by lethal injection after the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole refused to grant clemency and a last-minute appeal to the US Supreme Court was denied. Legal experts said that the AEDPA curbed Davis’s legal recourse. The Nation described the bill as “greas[ing] the wheels of this death machinery by curtailing prisoners’ rights to appeal their sentences.”54
The AEDPA dovetailed with the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), also signed by Clinton and likely orchestrated at least in part by Emanuel. Immigrants’ rights advocates decried the bill as inhumane and ineffective, saying it did little to solve larger problems with the country’s immigration system. The combined effects of the two acts nearly doubled the number of immigrants in detention in just two years. The American Civil Liberties Union noted that the laws essentially created indefinite detention for immigrants who could not be deported to their home countries. And the laws’ focus on deporting permanent residents with criminal convictions meant that many generally law-abiding people who had been in the country for years were placed in deportation proceedings because of relatively minor convictions like drug possession and statutory rape.55
Welfare Reform
Emanuel was also at Clinton’s side as senior policy adviser for the sweeping welfare reform legislation that revamped an admittedly dysfunctional system but also eviscerated the whole concept of a guaranteed safety net.
In his 2006 book The Plan, cowritten with Clinton aide Bruce Reed, Emanuel described welfare reform as “an excruciating dilemma” for his boss. During his campaign Clinton had vowed to “end welfare as we know it.”56 But how to do it became a bitter battle both between Republicans and Democrats and among Democrats in the Clinton White House.
Republicans—who had taken over the House with their 1994 “Republican Revolution”—proposed bills that gutted numerous protections for the most vulnerable, including young women, children, and immigrants. Clinton vetoed two Republican bills that would have drastically cut food stamps and nutritional programs, benefits for documented immigrants, aid for disabled children, and other supports, while also imposing lifetime limits on benefits.57
In 1994 Clinton had proposed a bill that would have required welfare recipients to go to work but provided significant funding for job training and job creation and maintained safeguards if they couldn’t find work. That bill was expensive; the cost, among other political considerations, killed the measure.58
As the 1996 presidential election approached, Clinton was under increasing pressure to keep his promise and pass some kind of welfare reform. In typical fashion Emanuel was central to making this happen, brokering compromises and pressuring not only Republicans but, perhaps more important, Democrats who objected to deep cuts.
By summer 1996 Clinton was considering a bill from Republicans that didn’t include as many cuts as their previous proposals but still transformed the very nature of welfare by creating five-year lifetime limits on benefits.
Internal discussions over the bill pitted White House liberals against New Democrat conservatives. Cabinet opponents of the bill included health and human services secretary Donna Shalala, treasury secretary Robert Rubin, labor secretary Robert Reich, and housing secretary Henry Cisneros, as described in a book by Clinton’s assistant secretary of health and human services, Peter B. Edelman.59
Another ardent critic of the proposed reform was New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist by training who predicted the bill would lead to desperately poor children “sleeping on grates.”60 Fortune magazine noted that Emanuel “had a very public run-in” with Moynihan, who suspected Emanuel was behind an anonymous quote that “we’ll roll all over [Moynihan] if we have to.”61
Emanuel’s side ultimately won out. The reform bill Clinton signed in August 1996 fundamentally changed welfare into a temporary assistance program administered primarily through states, focused on moving people off public aid.62
For sixty years poor people had been guaranteed cash aid from the federal government. Clinton’s Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act changed that, incorporating several of the major tenets of the Republican bills Clinton had vetoed.63 It created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which gave block grants to states for services meant to move people to work. The bill placed a five-year lifetime limit on benefits while allowing states to set even shorter limits. TANF recipients also had to meet work requirements, and many ended up in low-paying jobs that left them in poverty or, down the line, again unemployed.64
Liberals were outraged at the reform law. Edelman and Mary Jo Bane, Clinton’s assistant secretary for children and families, quit the administration in protest.65 Edelman would spend the next few years studying the impact of welfare reform on the poor. He wrote that the bill “broke faith with America’s children” and created a new class of “disappeared” people abandoned by the government and turning to desperate measures to survive.66
On the tenth anniversary of welfare reform’s passage, Emanuel remarked in Congress that “I am proud to have played an active role in the passage of this legislation during my time in the White House.” He recited numbers of people moving off public aid in Illinois and praised the legislation for “connecting a generation of children with a culture of work.”67
During Clinton’s presidency millions of families did indeed rise out of poverty and find work. “While Bill Clinton ended welfare as we had known it, America responded in heroic ways,” Emanuel and Reed wrote in The Plan. “Businesses stepped forward to hire and train people. States overhauled their bureaucracies to help recipients find jobs. Most of all, people who had been trapped on welfare flocked to work in record numbers.”68
But that was in the midst of a strong economy. In a 2012 report the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted that when poverty increased following the financial crash of 2008 the safety net that previously would have caught needy people and helped them get back on their feet was torn or nonexistent.69
“Because relatively few families receive TANF and benefits are very low, TANF plays a much more limited role in helping families escape poverty or deep poverty (i.e., income below half the poverty line) today,” compared to the previous welfare program, the report explained. It noted that 2012 poverty levels exceeded 1996 levels, and “over the last 16 years, the national TANF caseload has declined by 60 percent, even as poverty and deep poverty have worsened. . . . These opposing trends—TANF caseloads going down while poverty is going up—mean that a much smaller share of poor families receive cash assistance from TANF than they did prior to welfare reform.”
The center added that “many families left the welfare rolls without gaining employment, leading to a substantial increase in the number of families disconnected from both welfare and work.”
In other words, Clinton’s welfare reform may have looked good in the short term, but it contributed to the desperate poverty and