The End of Welfare Reform As We Know It

One of Bill Clinton's signature achievements was the 1996 welfare reform bill. Now Mickey Kaus tells us that for various technical reasons hidden in the stimulus bill, that reform has been effectively repealed:

my colleague Bob Wright routinely ridiculed me as paranoid for worrying that if Democrats got back in power they would unravel welfare reform. Even I thought I was paranoid. If only for political purposes, I figured, Dems would have to wait a few months or years before sabotaging Bill Clinton's major domestic achievement. It took them two weeks.

I am not enough of an expert on this topic to know if Kaus is right. But if he is, it is an underreported story.

Update: More on this topic here and here and here.