San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A GOP-driven welfare emerges post-Roe
Sending cash to parents, with few strings attached. Expanding Medicaid. Providing child care subsidies to families earning six figures.
The ideas may sound like part of a progressive platform. But they are from an influential group of conservative intellectuals with a direct line to elected politicians. They hope to represent the future of a post-Trump Republican Party — if only, they say, their fellow travelers would abandon Reaganomics once and for all.
These conservatives generally oppose abortion rights. They’re eager to promote marriage, worried about the nation’s declining fertility rate and often resist the trans rights movement.
But they also acknowledge that with abortion now illegal or tightly restricted in half the states, more babies will be born to parents struggling to pay for the basics — rent, health care, groceries and child care — when prices are high and child care slots scarce.
“A full-spectrum family policy has to be about encouraging and supporting people in getting married and starting families,” said Oren Cass, executive director of the American Compass think tank. “It has to be pro-life but also supportive of those families as they are trying to raise kids in an economic environment where that has become a lot harder to do.”
The idea of spending heavily on family benefits remains an outlier within the Republican Party, which only recently rejected Democrats’ attempts to extend pandemic-era child tax credits.
But a number of conservative members of Congress have embraced new benefits for parents, including Cass’ former boss, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, as well as Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Josh Hawley of Missouri and J.D. Vance of Ohio.
And in President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Tuesday, he called on Republicans to join him in providing families with child care, paid leave, child tax credits and affordable housing.
Now, Cass and conservative allies are hoping to shape ideas for the 2024 Republican presidential primary and beyond, targeting ambitious governors who have emphasized making their states family-friendly, such as Ron DeSantis of Florida, Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia.
A key priority for this new network of conservative thinkers is for the federal government to send parents cash monthly for each child, a sea change from decades of Republican thinking on family policy. They hope the cash could encourage people to have more children, and allow more parents to stay home full or part time when their children are young.
“The work of the family is real work,” said Erika Bachiochi, a legal scholar who calls herself a pro-life feminist and has written influential essays and books.
She and others debate to what extent benefits should be tied to work requirements, but even the more stringent proposals do not require full-time work. These conservatives believe that many young children are better off at home and are skeptical of policies that would place more in child care centers. And they point to polls that show many parents would prefer to cut their work hours and take care of their babies and toddlers themselves.
In a Republican Party hoping to become the party of parents, these conservative intellectuals do not share the outraged tone of right-wing activists like Christopher Rufo, the “parental rights” crusader battling what he sees as leftist ideology in school curriculums.
While they may agree with much of that cultural critique, supporting families financially, they say, is a pragmatic way to prop up conservative values alongside new restrictions on abortion.
In arguing this, Bachiochi, Cass and others in this network are making a big ask: for Republicans to reject what they call the outdated, rigid agenda of the Reagan era, which not only cut working parents from welfare programs but also vilified mothers receiving public benefits, often in starkly racist terms. If Republicans are to grow support among working-class, multiethnic voters, they say, the party must match profamily rhetoric with profamily investments.
The group has founded think tanks, published statements of principle and organized discussions with policymakers to push its cause. Cass, 39, said his ideas on policy had been shaped by his own family life. His wife has her own career, and they both work from home in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.
Cass was the domestic policy director for Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. In 2020, he founded American Compass, a think tank that has tried to build conservative momentum for more generous government support to working families. Its priorities include child cash benefits, wage subsidies and even reviving the labor movement.
Bachiochi, the mother of seven children, 4 to 21, is a fellow at two think tanks: the Abigail Adams Institute and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her husband is a tech executive and, she said, much more of a baby person than she is. In an interview, she recalled struggling to get reading and writing done while her babies were napping.
She celebrates mothers finding paid work that adds meaning to their lives but believes government should help parents of both sexes spend more time on child-rearing.
The job of parents, in her view, is to create “adults with virtue who can go out and be good friends, spouses, good employees, good citizens.”
The primary problem, she said, is that “the family is so overtaxed economically that they don’t have time with one another to do that work” of raising children, which is, by nature, time intensive.
Patrick T. Brown, 33, a former congressional staffer and current fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, previously cared for his children full time. Now, he works part time from home in Columbia, South Carolina, and takes charge of his four children after school while his wife works as a college professor. He supports child cash benefits, expanding Medicaid to more mothers and increasing the supply of affordable housing.
“There are definitely some conservatives who still point to the 1950s as a normative vision for family life,” Brown said, referencing the “Leave It to Beaver” white, suburban family with a stay-at-home wife.
“That debate is stale,” he added. “We shouldn’t expect we can turn back the clock — and we shouldn’t really want to.”
Brown, Cass and Bachiochi are well known on Capitol Hill.
Their influence can been seen in Romney’s bill to expand the child tax credit, which would provide families earning up to $400,000 with $350 in cash per month for each child under 6 and $250 per month for children 6 to 17.
Romney and Rubio have a separate proposal to allow workers to draw from future Social Security payments to fund parental leave.
And last year, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., introduced a bill that would subsidize child care for families earning up to 150% of their state’s median income, which in some states approaches $200,000 for a family of four.
These proposals have attracted criticism from both conservatives and liberals.
When Romney first introduced his Family Security Act in 2021, it offered cash to parents no matter their work history. After an outcry from Republicans and Cass, he revised the proposal in 2022 to require $10,000 in family income to receive the full benefit.
Hawley, a close ally of former President Donald Trump, has also proposed monthly cash payments to parents of children younger than 13 who meet a modest work requirement.
Progressives have criticized these plans for favoring married couples and leaving out caregivers without earnings, such as college students, parents with disabilities or retired grandparents.
The family policy ideas in the Democrats’ Build Back Better bill were more sweeping. But none became law.
Now, some Republicans and Democrats say that a bipartisan deal on family policy would likely require Republicans to rally around proposals like Romney’s — a difficult goal.
Romney is committed to building support for “federal policies to be more pro-family,” he said in a written statement. “This includes earning support from Republican colleagues.”