While conservatives currently rue many of these decisions, it is not clear that Nixon himself would have: he had a more traditionally Republican (that is, not ideologically conservative) outlook on most social issues. Yet, while his record of appointments to the court proved uneven, he unquestionably began the push against the Warren-era court’s social activism—especially in the area of expanded criminal-defendant rights—and engendered what would become a prevailing critique among conservatives against “activist judges” who interpreted the Constitution and statutory law according to their own predilections. The critiques Republican candidates make in campaign after campaign—against judges who “legislate from the bench,” for instance—have become deeply familiar to millions of Americans, and not in a positive sense. Nixon, then, was the president who put the brakes on the court’s liberal momentum; made the court a political field of battle in which certain issues strongly favored conservatives; and discredited the concept of judicial activism in the public mind.
Social Welfare
In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the historic Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, legislation that reformed the nation’s welfare system to encourage work among the poor. The law included a work requirement and a five-year cutoff period for welfare benefits. It was the most sweeping change in the nation’s welfare policies since the 1960s. Today, welfare reform is counted among President Clinton’s most significant achievements in office. Yet the law had many liberal critics who felt that it stigmatized poor mothers and did not provide adequate job training. And its cutoff period—after receiving two years of consecutive benefits or five years of cumulative benefits—was decried by liberal advocates as too harsh. They saw the Clinton bill as a betrayal of the Democrats’ historic commitment to the poor.
What some older Democrats might have recalled was that, a quarter-century earlier, they had had a chance to pass a much more comprehensive, and more generous, welfare plan. But this plan was offered by a Republican president, Richard Nixon, with whom they were often engaged in political war. For various political reasons that I will describe in detail in chapter 4, liberals, who should have been the most reliable supporters of Nixon’s welfare reform effort, largely blocked it. Nixon’s pioneering effort to transform the nation’s welfare system didn’t come to fruition, but the effort to do so is an important and fascinating part of his domestic record.
Nixon was not expected to be a voice for the poor, but he began proposing initiatives to assist them when his administration was in its early days. In May 1969, in his “Special Message to the Congress Recommending a Program to End Hunger in America,” Nixon called on Americans to support a range of legislation and executive action that would alleviate poverty and especially hunger. “That hunger and malnutrition should persist in a land such as ours is embarrassing and intolerable,” Nixon said. “More is at stake here than the health and well-being of 16 million American citizens. . . . Something very like the honor of American democracy is at issue.”42 On the issue of hunger, Nixon’s actions matched his words: he quadrupled spending on food stamps from $610 million in 1970 to $2.5 billion in 1973.
Thus Nixon’s most remarkable initiative in social welfare policy came in an area in which, in the end, he failed to win legislative approval: welfare reform. When thinking of Nixon today, few would note that he was a welfare reformer, much less that he was one even before there were welfare reformers. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, welfare was a system largely accepted by liberals; though conservatives detested the welfare system, most didn’t envision realistic prospects of changing it. Yet Nixon did. In an August 1969 speech, given over the opposition of his most conservative advisors, he unveiled the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), his attempt to address poverty in America, especially among children. Under Nixon’s plan, which would replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the existing welfare program, all families with children would be eligible for a minimum stipend—$1,600 for a family of four, amended to $2,500 in 1971.
“What I am proposing,” Nixon continued in his 1969 congressional message on hunger, “is that the Federal Government build a foundation under the income of every American family with dependent children that cannot care for itself—and wherever in America that family may live.”43
Yet Nixon’s program was more conservative than it looked. All able-bodied heads of families, except for mothers with children younger than six, would be required to accept work or job training—very much in the manner that Clinton later envisioned. And if that parent refused, his or her portion of the welfare benefit would be cut off, even though the child’s payment would continue. Moreover, the FAP, unlike the AFDC and later welfare proposals, would have directed a substantial amount of aid to working-poor families, as opposed to solely focusing on non-working-poor families if it had passed. By one calculation, under the FAP, a family of four with an income of $12,652, in 2013 dollars, would have seen its income increase by nearly half—to $18,725, in 2013 dollars.44
The FAP was designed to provide the means to guarantee all American children a stable annual income—regardless of the behavior of their parents—and to provide such aid to three times the number of children covered by the AFDC. The FAP, Hoff concluded, “would have revolutionized welfare by switching from providing services to providing income.”45 It was, she wrote, “the most comprehensive welfare reform ever proposed by a United States president.”46
Initially, editorial pages hailed the FAP as a reform on the order of social security. “A Republican President has condemned the word ‘welfare,’ emphasized ‘work’ and ‘training’ as conditions of public assistance, suggested that the states and the cities be given more Federal money to deal with their social and economic problems, but still comes out in the end with a policy of spending more money for relief of more poor people than the welfare state Democrats ever dared to propose in the past,” wrote James Reston in the New York Times. “Mr. Nixon has taken a great step forward. He has cloaked a remarkably progressive welfare policy in conservative language. . . . But mainly he has dealt with the intolerable paradox of American life. He has insisted that poverty in a prosperous country must be eliminated.”47
The FAP passed the House in April 1970, 243 to 155, but it bogged down in the Senate, where Senator Russell B. Long, who opposed the bill, held long hearings, allowing interest groups from around the political spectrum to organize opposition. Hard-line conservatives saw the FAP as a guaranteed-income handout and opposed it. Liberal opponents also objected to the FAP on various grounds—one being, predictably enough, money. The grants were far too low, they said. They proposed grants of $6,400 for a family of four, an amount that would sink the program’s budget and lose support from the American middle class. Radical welfare rights groups also lined up in opposition, and organized labor wasn’t crazy about the FAP, either, seeing a guaranteed income as a threat to the minimum wage. Still others objected to the work requirements.
Yet in his 1971 State of the Union address, Nixon pressed on:
The present welfare system has become a monstrous, consuming outrage—an outrage against the community, against the taxpayer, and particularly against the children it is supposed to help. . . . So let us place a floor under the income of every family with children in America—and without those demeaning, soul-stifling affronts to human dignity that so blight the lives of welfare children today. But let us also establish an effective work incentive and an effective work requirement. Let us provide the means by which more can help themselves.48
But the partisan hurdles were too much to overcome, and the FAP died in the Senate in October 1972, three years after it was first proposed. “Clearly, partisan politics prevented reform of the country’s welfare system,” Hoff wrote.49 By that time, the FAP had taken a pounding in the political debates and