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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (172721)	8/19/2001 8:42:26 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Faith can move mountains. Can Lieberman move Daschle? Today's Featured Article in the Wall Street Jounal. Joe's Moment Faith can move mountains. Can Lieberman move Daschle? Sunday, August 19, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT We have it on the authority of St. Paul that faith can move mountains. Thus far, however, it has yet to move Tom Daschle, at least in terms of getting the Senate Majority Leader to bring any piece of faith-based legislation to the floor for a vote. Which means that the moment now belongs to Joe Lieberman--if he'll take it. Recently we reported the Connecticut Democrat's warning to his party about its growing values gap with ordinary Americans. Speaking to a "New Democrat" convention, he drew from his own experience to mention the "constitutional coronary" some groups had when, as the party's Vice Presidential nominee, he "expressed the truly outrageous view" that religion was a good thing for America and that "faith-based groups can help government solve pressing social problems." Add to this mindset a Democratic Senate's reluctance to hand George W. Bush, already victorious on the tax front, another win on a key plank, and it's easy to see why faith-based legislation is now languishing in Senator Daschle's limbo. Not that Mr. Bush doesn't have skeptics on his own team. Whereas the left objects to funding anything that isn't a federal bureaucracy, many on the right worry that federal funding will transform religious charities into bureaucracies--and there is more than enough precedent with, say, Catholic Charities or Lutheran Services in America, to make this a legitimate concern. Yet though the House bill includes funding provisions, the two pieces of faith-based legislation Mr. Daschle now has before him, introduced by GOP Senator Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania and Senator Lieberman, do not. All they do is change certain tax incentives, for example, by allowing people to roll over IRAs to a charity with no tax penalties or by raising the limits for corporate givers. Though Senator Santorum does plan to introduce funding legislation, the first two pieces help remind us that the wider purpose of Mr. Bush's faith-based initiative is not so much about channeling federal dollars to religious charities than encouraging individual Americans and their ministries to do what government cannot: Be their brothers' keepers. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, John DiIulio discusses a new study released by his Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. A summary of audits into how five cabinet agencies contract with nonprofits for social services, the study concludes that federal regulations and restrictions work to exclude small, religious-based community organizations in favor of large bureaucracies--bureaucracies, moreover, with no real measures for performance. Throughout the debate over embryonic stem-cell research, not least of the arguments advanced was that without the imprimatur provided by federal funding, the private sector would not make the necessary investments. Plainly that dynamic is at work in private giving. In one of the more overlooked passages of his Notre Dame speech, President Bush noted that six out of 10 of the largest corporate givers "explicitly rule out or restrict donations to faith-based institutions, regardless of their effectiveness." If the President did nothing else with his faith-based initiative than remove this irrational animus, that would be significant enough. The excuses for not moving forward, moreover, are fast evaporating. True enough, some Democrats have expressed concern about the special protections written into the House version that exempt faith-based organizations from anti-discrimination laws, for example, dealing with their hiring practices; Senator Lieberman himself has intimated that if his concerns are not addressed, he'd introduce his own bill. But the bills now in the Senate already have his name on them, and in a meeting with both Senator Lieberman and President Bush two weeks back, Senator Santorum suggested addressing these concerns by substituting for the House version the same language used in President Clinton's welfare reform legislation. Not only was this language that both Republicans and Democrats signed on to, it was language repeated in at least four subsequent pieces of legislation backed by the Clinton Administration and passed with bipartisan support. After all, it wasn't Candidate Bush who first brought up faith-based initiatives in the campaign. It was Senator Lieberman's own running mate. In a 1999 speech in Atlanta to the Salvation Army, Vice President Al Gore called for putting faith-based organizations "at the heart of our national strategy . . . not to be merely a shining anecdote in a pretty story told by a politician, but to have a seat at the national table." Well, Senate Democrats now have before them the chance to begin to clear away that seat at the table Mr. Gore promised. Yet Senator Daschle is making noises that he might not bring the legislation to the floor this year. If Senator Lieberman is serious about rescuing his party from what he has attacked as its knee-jerk hostility to all things religious, surely this is his moment of truth: The time to tell his own leadership in no uncertain terms that language and principles acceptable to both Republicans and Democrats when pushed by Bill Clinton and Al Gore should not be anathema now simply because they bear the name of George W. Bush. opinionjournal.com tom watson tosiwmee