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Legislative advocacy
The following article originally appeared in Salt of the Earth. It is posted here for private use only. It may not be reprinted in whole or in part without the permission of Salt of the Earth magazine.
Special interests:
how Catholics lobby for the poor
An interview with Catholc Charities USA's Sharon Daly
IN AN ERA OF MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR CAMPAIGNS and Gucci-clad hallway monitors promoting anything from genetically altered tomatoes to high-tech arms transfers, there's at least one Washington lobbyist who doesn't fit the stereotype. When Sharon Daly goes to Washington, she makes her appeals on behalf of the people who rarely have access to the powerbrokers in the nation's capitol: America's poor and America's voiceless. Daly brings 18 years of experience working for and with low-income people to her job as Catholic Charities USA's Deputy for Social Policy.
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH HAS RARELY been as visible in American politics as it has been during the recent welfare debate. Why have you and other Catholic leaders taken such a prominent role?
IT WAS PRETTY INCREDIBLE all the attention we got. I was getting calls to be on National Public Radio shows like "The Diane Rheim Show," "All Things Considered," and "Morning Edition." One day I was on CBS news in the morning and Ray Suarez's radio show "Talk of the Nation" in the afternoon.
But in one sense it shouldn't be all that surprising that we had such a high profile on welfare reform. The church has always been very involved in welfare work in this country. Since 1919, when the bishops in the United States adopted a program for reconstruction after World War I, they have called for a national system of support for families.
There is a long tradition in the church, especially in the United States, to press government to be part of the solution to social problems. That doesn't mean government has to be the whole solution, but that for big problems that require universal solutions, government has to be involved in a big way.
WELFARE REFORM IS NOT EVEN a new issue to the church in terms of the current debate. Welfare reform was a big part of "Economic Justice for All," the 1986 U.S. bishops' pastoral letter on the U.S. economy, and long before the elections, before Bill Clinton started talking about welfare reform, before Newt Gingrich and company discovered welfare, Catholic Charities said that welfare reform was its number-one priority. In fact, in 1991 Catholic Charities USA commissioned a special committee to look at the welfare system. That committee spent well over a year studying the system before it wrote our position statement.
I think we produced a very nonpartisan document that calls for policies that are not typically in either the Democratic agenda or the Republican agenda.
SO CATHOLIC CHARITIES just became a good resource for media people or Congress to tap?
YES, BUT THERE WAS A LITTLE more to it than that. I don't know how many people would be listening to us today if the debate had not taken on the character that it has.
After the November 1994 elections and the Republican majorities that resulted in Congress, President Clinton became awfully quiet on welfare reform, and the whole focus of the debate became the Congress.
But in this new Congress—especially in the House of Representatives—there's a real hostility to traditional advocacy groups on economic and social issues. Those groups could not get heard, could not get appointments with members of Congress, couldn't get interviewed by the press. For a while there, they couldn't even get arrested in Washington.
IT WAS NOT NEWS THAT the Children's Defense Fund or the Child Welfare League of America opposed the Republican cuts, but it was news that the conservative Catholic Church was opposing it. That became a very important counterpoint to some of the reform rhetoric most people were hearing.
The image of welfare reform as being done for the good of the poor was tarnished somewhat when Catholic bishops across the country stood up and criticized the proposals.
In New York Cardinal John O'Connor wrote three columns attacking different aspects of the Republican welfare-reform plan in his archdiocesan newspaper, and that got big publicity. The L.A. Times and the Washington Post and the New York Times all picked up that story.
That kind of coverage just made the church as a whole much more visible on this issue. Catholic Charities USA itself became prominent because of our 1,400 member agencies all across the country. We had better luck in getting called in to testify before Congress and in getting media to come to our press conferences.
HOW EFFECTIVE DO YOU THINK the "Catholic lobby," if we can call it that, was in shaping the debate around welfare?
WE MADE SOME SPECIFIC SUGGESTIONS for changes in the House bill, but even more important we undermined the aura of irresistibility and "rightness" around welfare reform. By the time it went into conference with the Senate, a lot of people saw that these so-called reforms were going to look really bad and hateful toward children.
We were also able to reach a lot of the members of Congress. Not all of the House members—even if they voted for many of the welfare-reform provisions—are entirely behind it. Some of them feel really squeamish about the direction reform is taking. The other thing that members of Congress told me over and over again is that they were interested in what we had to say because we serve 10.5 million people a year. Catholic Charities is the biggest network of social-service agencies in the country. We do more for the poor than anybody else does.
THEY RECOGNIZED WE HAVE a lot of history in taking care of pregnant teenagers, unwed mothers with child care, children with foster care, old people. We have practical experience on these issues that they need to hear about.
They have an idea of what we're doing and that's a tremendous help in getting in to see them. They know we're not just jumping on the latest political bandwagon, that we're really rooted in this work both spiritually and practically.
WHAT DO YOU THINK your participation brought to the debate?
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH HAS a very distinctive voice in a debate like this—partly because our defense of people is based on the principle of the human dignity of every person.
That means that even a teenager who gets pregnant out of wedlock is deserving of the support of society and government and that a baby who is conceived by a woman who's been on welfare for five years is no less deserving of government support, that society should not turn its back on that child and allow it to be aborted because of the circumstances of its conception.
THE CHURCH SAYS THE SAME thing about access to health care and welfare benefits and social services. The fact that we may disapprove of the behavior of one or both of the parents doesn't mean the child is not deserving. It was that distinctive moral voice that made us so visible during the debate.
Nobody is arguing that welfare doesn't need reform. In fact, the welfare system is terrible. Nobody hates it more than the people on welfare. But certainly what we don't want is a system that abandons government's responsibility to the poor.
I guess what we brought to the debate was an alternative vision of what real welfare reform could be and the practical experience to back that up.
HOW WELL RECEIVED was that vision?
AT THE VERY LEAST, we gave a lot of House members something else to think about besides what the Washington think tanks were telling them. You know a lot of these guys sincerely believe they're doing the right thing for poor people by shutting down the welfare system.
They believe that, yeah, some children will suffer in the short term, but in the long run it will be good for the country as a whole because all these people won't have babies anymore. Their attitude isn't, "How do we take the babies that were born and make sure they're not poor." It's, "How do we keep those babies from being born in the first place."
That's what the pope calls a "contraceptive mentality"—that we don't welcome children who prove to be too inconvenient to us personally or as a society.
NOW, OBVIOUSLY I'M NOT saying that we are in favor of having sex out of wedlock or having children out of wedlock. But we do believe that once they're coming, the children should become the focus of our efforts: how do we take care of them? But this Congress seems to have a sense that the country would be a lot better off if poor people just didn't have children.
When you challenge them on this, when you say that cutting off support means encouraging abortion, they say, "But we can't reward this immoral behavior."
What immoral behavior? Was having the baby the immoral thing? We think once you're pregnant, abortion is the immoral thing, having the baby is the moral thing.
Then they say, "Oh, we mean they shouldn't be getting pregnant."
OKAY, SO ARE YOU SAYING they shouldn't have been having sex or that they should have been better at using contraception? Is that true of Americans as a whole—that they don't have sex out of wedlock? That's not what the data shows. The data shows that a lot of other Americans are also having sex outside of marriage.
Eventually it appears it's only immoral to have sex or children if you're poor. If you are well-to-do and you can afford them, go right ahead and have children before you're married or as a single parent. Two thirds of the children born out of wedlock are not poor, they're born to working and middle- and upper-income people, Donald Trump and Marla Maples. But they're not seen as immoral; it's these teenagers who are immoral. I guess because their kids wind up on welfare.
YOU DON'T HAVE MONEY or a big corporation behind you. How do you even get in to see members of Congress? Why do they even open the door when you come calling?
THE PROLIFE CONNECTION helps. If I meet a Congress member who sincerely wants to protect unborn children, that gives me a bridge to talk about a whole range of other concerns that he or she might not agree with us on: how do we make sure that the mother also gets prenatal care; how do we make sure she's got a safe place to live, that she gets treatment if she's using drugs or alcohol, that she has enough money to take care of this baby; how do I get them to understand that when we say we're prolife, our responsibility doesn't end at birth.
Many of them sincerely underestimate what it takes to help the poor. You can take all the proposed cuts just in the programs for people below the poverty line and divide that by the number of churches and synagogues and mosques across the country. Each of them over the next seven years would have to increase its fundraising by anywhere between $1.5 to $2 million just to make up for the gaps Congress proposes to create.
WE'RE NOT TRYING TO say that churches can't do more or that churches shouldn't have to raise more money, but the government is cutting so much, so deeply, and so broadly, the churches can't hope to keep up. And it's not just welfare, it's Medicaid, housing, energy assistance, foster care, and programs for abused children—it's everything.
I recently visited a Catholic community center in a very poor neighborhood in Los Angeles, and the staff there gave me background material that described each of the kinds of services they provide—help for pregnant girls, emergency housing, emergency counseling for substance-abuse problems, help in finding day care. Well, every single one of those programs was either being eliminated or cut 30 percent under current budget proposals.
I also think members of Congress open their doors to us because they know we have this practical experience in doing different social-service programs. We've got agencies open all across the country. That's a real help to me personally because that kind of a presence makes a great network for information.
Before I see a representative or a senator, I call the Catholic Charities agency in his district and I ask them: "Have you talked to him lately? Has he invited you to see him? Has he been out having his picture taken at one of your programs? Have you been sending him any letters about what's going on? What can you tell me about him?"
HOW HAS YOUR OFFICE been weathering Washington's "Republican Revolution"?
IT'S BEEN TOUGH. I think one of the biggest challenges for us is having to do so much of this advocacy work alone, feeling so much pressure because the other groups couldn't be heard.
In addition, our local agencies are not just worried about federal cuts for their programs and the people they serve; they're all facing state and local cutbacks, too. Their attention is sometimes focused on other things. When I'm pushing them to get out letters to their members of Congress, the state Catholic Charities is pushing them to finish letters to their state assembly members.
ALSO THE SHEER NUMBER of issues to tackle at one time has been somewhat daunting. In the past, Congress would throw maybe one or two of these major issues at us during a session and ordinarily we would just be fighting cuts in one or two programs, but to have every single program in danger of being abolished or cut back at the same time has just made our work that much harder to do. Which issues do we focus on? Where can we make a difference? Where will our voices add something to the debate instead of just being a "me too" demand for a piece of the federal pie?
It's been a totally defensive game. We're not going forward anywhere. We're just trying to keep things from slipping away entirely. Winning has become just holding the line.
SO IT'S A WHOLE new world in Washington?
IT IS. I'VE BEEN in Washington 18 years; everything I've ever learned about working in the House of Representatives has been totally changed. In the past, for example, when there were new policy initiatives, there would be public hearings where both the majority and the minority got to present witnesses.
That not only allowed everyone to get a chance to present their position, it really slowed down the process so Congress members had a chance to think about these issues and the public got a chance to learn about them and become informed about them.
That hasn't been happening with this Congress. It's used a lot of procedural rule changes to move bills through much more quickly than in the past. Some people have been saying they hope the Democrats are learning something from this experience so that if they take over the House again, they'll do the same thing.
I don't agree with that. We're citizens here, and democracy matters. We should be heard.
ANOTHER THING WE'VE HAD to relearn is who the key people are for us to connect with on the various congressional committees: who on the subcommittee will issue a statement, who will speak in support of our position, who's going to carry the water on foster care, who will carry the water on public aid, who will look after disabled kids. You lobby all the members of Congress, but in the end you also have to find a few champions.
Obviously with the majority of Congress being Republican, we've had to find some Republican champions for our issues. Unfortunately what's happened a lot of times is that when we actually found a Republican member who would agree to offer an amendment for us, within 24 hours of getting assurance from them, they would call us back and say, "I'm sorry, the chairman and the staff explained to me that we can't offer this amendment." They were being told by the Republican leadership that if they got out of line on any issue, they would lose their committee positions.
THERE'S MORE party discipline?
THIS IS BEYOND party discipline. I've never seen this kind of power before. The normal ways of lobbying just don't work in the House of Representatives anymore.
Recently we have seen signs of that discipline breaking down a little.
WHAT DOES work?
WHAT WORKS BEST IS HAVING good research, having good statistics, and being able to talk about real-life cases, about children who have been taken care of by our agencies, the homes for teen moms and kids.
I don't just go out and talk to our social workers and staff. I try to go out and meet real people who are being served by us so I can talk about someone we're helping and make her a real person to members of Congress or their staffs.
Getting legislators out to see the reality behind their policy decisions is also important. We try to set up appointments with members of the House to get them out to the real world and visit some of the programs we're running.
I'll take them to a Head Start center and let them see all these cute little kids in this preschool environment and all the parents coming to them and how wonderful it is. Or I'll take them to see a good prenatal care program and the hundred or so women waiting patiently for five hours to see the doctor. They'll see that when there's treatment available people will come to it.
WE HOPE THEY'LL UNDERSTAND that something like good prenatal care for moms and their children isn't just an issue of the mom's personal motivation, that it's also an issue of access and availability—get them to understand that public policy has to be part of the solution.
I explain the cost-effectiveness of these programs: that prenatal care costs $700 for the whole pregnancy, while the neonatal intensive care unit costs $2,000 a day. And that for every dollar you put into Head Start, you save $4 later on from your remedial-education bill.
So the strategy may include pointing out a little self-interest, a little nudge toward cost-effectiveness, but what really affects them is making them see the children. They can never forget those little babies who have died because they didn't get the right prenatal care. They can never forget those dull-eyed children they meet in a "normal" kindergarten and how different the kids were in the Head Start program. They get a different mental image of the parents they meet than of the welfare-moms-smoking-crack-all-day image they may have.
We need to do more of that, but that's going to be harder for Catholic Charities and parishes to do because we're going to be even busier in the future running soup kitchens and food pantries and sheltering people who get evicted because they didn't get a welfare check. I don't know how we're going to do both.
CAN PARISHES PLAY a role as lobbyists, too?
SURE, PARISHES CAN BE effective lobbyists in a number of ways. What they need first of all is a core of people who are really active, who monitor what's going on politically and keep everybody else informed. Then they have to begin cultivating relationships with local elected officials. That's very important.
Members of Congress or state legislators need to know people, to see faces, and to see them over and over again—two or three times a year. Let them know you're coming back again next year and when you plan to do it.
If you have trouble getting acquainted with your local politicians, go to where they're speaking. If they're speaking to the Rotary Club, I bet you've got some people in your parish who belong to the Rotary Club. Get them to go and ask questions.
TRY TO FIND SOMETHING that you agree on as a starting point, but really try to form a relationship that can be enriched. Let them know you know how they voted on issues that you care about. Ask them what they're going to do and tell them what you're doing.
Make it clear that you're not some ideological group, that your concerns come out of the teaching of the church but also what you do as a parish—that you've got a food pantry that's empty by the 12th of every month and you have to turn people away.
Bring some reality to them. This is a service to your representative, to let him or her know what is really going on in the district. That's your duty as a citizen as well as a member of the Catholic faith.
WHAT'S THE BEST way to start?
FIND OUT WHO THE KEY person in the district office is and talk to him or her on a regular basis, and then find out the name of the person in the Washington office who handles the issue that you're working on and call and begin to form a relationship with him or her. Tell that key person who you are, what parish you're from, and how many people you represent. It's like being a salesperson.
Members of Congress usually have local offices that are pretty accessible. Reaching your senator may be a little harder—especially in the big states where their offices could be quite some distance away—but it's not impossible.
Senators make frequent visits to their home states. Contact their nearest office, find out when your senator's coming to your community, tell them that you're working with 50 people from this parish or you're part of a legislative network from the diocese that represents X number of people, and say that you'd like to have a few minutes of the senator's time. Numbers are always very impressive to these people—in all sorts of ways.
ONE OF THE WORST TENDENCIES in parish advocacy is people giving up too easily. People tell me all the time how they wrote one letter and their legislator didn't change his or her mind, so they think their work didn't do any good and they give up.
I always say people should think about elected officials as little children. You can't just ask them once or twice to pick up their clothes; you have to ask them to do it every single day.
Positive reinforcement is also important. Don't just let your relationship with your representatives be that you call or write only when you want to criticize them or positions they take.
Let them know when you support them, that you appreciate it when they go out on a limb and take risks. Tell them: "You stood up and told the truth, and we're proud of you."
THERE SEEMS TO BE quite a lot of psychology involved in your work.
ALL POWER IS psychology. Strategy and persuasion play a big role. Sometimes your strategies don't work, so you just keep trying new things.
When you're trying to teach a child to read and one method doesn't work, you try another method, you don't just conclude the kid is dumb and give up, right? That's what lobbying is like.
Some groups really undermine their effectiveness by name-calling and assigning bad motives to people. But what you need in this work is an effective relationship—you need to be able to speak to people and get feedback from them. It's hurtful to that relationship to lash out at people.
A FEW PEOPLE IN SOME ADVOCACY groups can get especially unpleasant, and then they can never really have their say again. But what you need to be able to do is express your disappointment without calling people "Nazis." Lots of my colleagues talk about how mean-spirited this Congress is, but I don't think that helps nor do I think it's necessarily true.
The welfare debate is a perfect example of that. Now, viewed from the outside, you might think all these people in Congress are just plain mean, but what you didn't see was all the work that was put into getting them to support some of these "reform" provisions.
NEWT GINGRICH WAS a genius; he was able to convince all of these House Republican members that it is really better for the poor to be cut off from these benefits, that in the long run they'll be better off if they can't get welfare. And it's not that unreasonable for them to think that because very few of them know any poor people, or if they do, it's their brother-in-law who's an alcoholic and whom they never liked anyway.
So their experience is very limited—especially the experience of seeing programs that work. They're at a disadvantage in trying to come up with a real reform package. They don't have another vision.
When a lot of these new members of Congress came into office, they were met by a heavy-duty education program from the Heritage Foundation that some might call propaganda. They were given all this data and research from Washington think tanks, but they haven't heard from the other side. So they really think that poor people will be better off.
WHAT ARE SOME EASY ways people can get involved in the political process?
I THINK LEGISLATIVE NETWORKS are great. I think a lot more people should be making calls and writing letters. You know, a lot of people are too scared to try something like that because they think they haven't got an original argument or they don't know anymore about this than anyone else.
What happens in a congressional office is that letters come in and they're read by people just out of college, legislative correspondents or interns, and those letters get put into stacks. Whatever seems to the intern to be the point of the letter is the stack it goes on.
It doesn't really matter how persuasive a writer you are. What matters most is that you're this representative's constituent and you're making a point that he or she has to listen to. It also doesn't matter if you wrote a letter last month; your letter counts just as well.
ANY STYLE POINTS people should remember?
ONE THING PEOPLE DO wrong all the time is write complicated letters. They try to hit an array of social concerns and sort of get it all over with. That really doesn't help your cause.
Remember the intern stacks? Focus on one issue at a time. If you take Medicare and welfare reform and minimum wage and throw that all together into one letter, forget it, they won't even know what pile to put it in.
Your letter needs to be clear: "I'm against taking welfare benefits away from teenagers and their children, this is a mistake." Two or three sentences; it's that simple. That counts as much as if you sent in a Ph.D. dissertation.
I really encourage people in the parishes to just get out and do some of this work. They can handle it; this isn't brain surgery.
YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE MINDS of our senators and members of Congress with one letter or even with one lobbyist like me. But you can change their minds when a lot of people are working together.
It's being part of the Body of Christ. It's all of us staying together; that's where we can make a difference.—END
© 1997 by Claretian Publications