Never been a better time to be a freeloader.

Via Heritage:

President Obama had been seeking ways to circumvent the 1996 welfare work requirements since coming to office, according to a 2009 memo released Tuesday by Representative David Camp (R–MI) and Senator Orrin Hatch (R–UT).

“From the first year the Obama Administration took power, it was trying to find any legal and policy justification to permit the weakening of welfare reforms that demand work in exchange for government benefits,” said Hatch in a press release on Tuesday. “They used states’ desire for flexibility as a stalking horse to justify this massive executive branch power grab.”

Last July, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services released an official policy directive effectively gutting work requirements from the successful welfare reform of 1996. The Administration claimed it was simply responding to states’ requests for flexibility to implement innovations. However, the memo released Tuesday shows that the White House was actively looking to waive the work requirements much earlier—and that the Administration “sought authority to waive much more than just work requirements.”

“I’ve been more than a little skeptical of the Obama Administration’s argument that they were purely responding to the needs of the states when they unilaterally chose to undermine welfare work requirements, and this memo confirms my skepticism,” said Hatch.

The five-page memo, with the author’s name redacted, attempts to legally justify waiving welfare work requirements. But Obama has no such legal authority. Heritage expert Andrew Grossman writes:

Keep reading…http://weaselzippers.us/2013/05/08/memo-...nts-since-2009/