The Long Shadow Of Bill Clinton Over The ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’

Republicans are using the former president as a shield against Democratic attacks on work requirements.

WASHINGTON – An unexpected name kept coming up as House Republicans crafted their multi-trillion dollar legislative package slashing Medicaid and taxes for the wealthy: Bill Clinton.

On the House floor, during committee hearings and in hallway interviews, several Republicans have justified their Medicaid cuts by pointing to the Democrat who served as the 42nd President of the United States.

“We are reintroducing Clinton-era work requirements,” Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-N.Y.) said in a floor speech this week. “One of the most popular things Bill Clinton achieved in his presidency, and he worked with Congress to get it done, was bringing commonsense work requirements to social welfare programs.”

Work requirements — better understood as benefit limits for the unemployed — are the centerpiece of Medicaid and food benefit cuts Republicans are using to offset part of the cost of tax cuts at the heart of their so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Work requirements were the core of a 1996 welfare reform bill that Clinton signed into law.

There is, however, little evidence work requirements actually encourage unemployed Medicaid or SNAP recipients to find jobs and lots of evidence they bombard aid recipients with paperwork, causing even some employed people to lose benefits when they can’t keep up. Their return is one of several bitter pills Democrats are swallowing as the GOP advances a bill amounting to a massive redistribution of wealth from poor to rich.