The
Doofus Department
by Stephen
Baskerville
by Stephen
Baskerville, PhD
       
Those madcap child support officials are at it again. Ever
vigilant in their pursuit of the elusive deadbeat, these Wile E.
Coyotes of family policy are devising ever-more outlandish schemes
to snare their quarry. It is ironic that a prominent theme in
today's media culture is so-called doofus
dads, bumbling fools invariably defeated by the superior wisdom
of their wives and children. For despite ever greater outlays of
taxpayers' money for ever more intrusive incursions into civil
liberties, it is not so much the fathers as their pursuers who are
shooting
themselves in the foot.
Their latest escapade concerns Viola Trevino, who discovered
she could obtain a child support order against a man without the
inconvenience of actually having a child. Steve Barreras was forced
to pay $20,000 for a child that, it turns out, never existed.
Barreras protested for years and produced documentation that no
child could possibly exist, but he was ignored by New Mexico's Child
Support Enforcement Division. "The child support system in this
state is horrible," an Albuquerque woman tells a reporter. "A woman
can walk into their office with a birth certificate and a ‘sob’
story and the man on that birth certificate is hunted down and
forced to pay child support." Yet the agency – which ironically
claims to be keeping an eye on other people's parental
"responsibilities" – claims they were not responsible for the
shakedown of Barreras, because they were "merely enforcing child
support already ordered by a judge." No automatic provision requires
the return of the fraudulently ordered payments, so to recover his
money Barreras must hire more attorneys and sue.
Though officials try to dismiss such shenanigans as
aberrations, they proceed logically from the child support system,
which was created by lawyers and feminists not to provide for
children but to plunder fathers and transfer their earnings to other
grown-ups. In an increasingly typical decision, a Massachusetts
Appeals Court ruled in November that a mother could collect full
child support from two men for the same child.
But
mothers are not the only ones using children to make a fast buck.
Such apparently inane rulings are explicable only by the fact that
child support is a moneymaker for lawyers, judges, bureaucrats, and
government coffers, plus private hangers-on – all at the expense of
fathers and federal taxpayers.
Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox recently hailed the
passage of six (!) new laws that he says will help collect child
support. But Cox already has egg on his face from his ill-fated
scheme to recruit the state's children as government propagandists.
Cox offered free Domino's pizzas to children who designed billboards
vilifying their own fathers as deadbeats. He even invited mothers to
express their feelings about their former husbands through their
children's artwork. But far from shaming the supposed scoundrels, it
was Cox who was forced to retreat with his tail between his legs. He
cancelled the campaign when first the public and then Domino's
directed more anger against him than against the fathers. One
political cartoonist showed Cox telling a young child that she could
not see her father but she could have a pepperoni pizza.
Michigan's enforcement methods have been the subject of
federal legal challenges. Attorney Michael Tindall relates in
Michigan Lawyers Weekly how he was arrested without warning
when his payments were current. Wayne County enforcement agents
admitted under oath that they frequently increase accounts without
valid court orders. A federal court ruled that Michigan violated
Tindall's due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet the
agency defied the court and even initiated another round of
enforcement using the same illegal procedures to collect the same
arrearage they had admitted was erroneous. Cox's campaign came as
Michigan was set to lose $208 million in federal funds if it did not
meet federal guidelines for organizing its collection system. To
comply, the state promised to accelerate the very measures that the
federal court had ruled were in violation of the Fourteenth
Amendment.
In
just the last few months, repeated exposés of mismanagement and
fraud throughout the child support system have poured forth from
journalists, scholars, and even some officials themselves. These
include charges of illegal and unconstitutional
practices that violate basic civil liberties.
In
Society, Bryce Christensen writes, "The advocates of
ever-more-aggressive measures for collecting child support…have
moved us a dangerous step closer to a police state and have violated
the rights of innocent and often impoverished fathers." In The
Law and Economics of Child Support Payments, William Comanor
and a team of scholars have documented horrific abuses. Ronald
Henry's essay calls the system and its rationalization "an obvious
sham," a "disaster," and "the most onerous form of debt collection
practiced in the United States." The fraudulent and predatory nature
of the child support system has been documented in peer-reviewed
publications by the Independent
Institute, the National Center
for Policy Analysis, the American
Political Science Association, and repeatedly in Society.
In
2002, a Georgia superior court ruled that the state's guidelines
"bear no relationship to the constitutional standards for child
support" and create "a windfall to the obligee." Characterizing the
guidelines as "contrary both to public policy and common sense," the
court noted that they bear no connection to any understanding of the
cost of raising children. "The custodial parent does not contribute
to child costs at the same rate as the non-custodial parent and,
often, not at all," the court notes. "The presumptive award leaves
the non-custodial parent in poverty while the custodial parent
enjoys a notably higher standard of living." The court anticipated
the findings of Comanor and his team: "The guidelines are so
excessive as to force non-custodial parents to frequently work extra
jobs for basic needs…. Obligors are frequently forced to work in a
cash economy to survive."
A
Wisconsin court likewise found that state’s guidelines "result in a
figure so far beyond the child’s needs as to be irrational." When a
court struck down Tennessee's guidelines on similar grounds, the
state Department of Human Services (which jails fathers for
violating court orders), announced they would not abide by the
ruling.
One
may disagree with these assessments. Yet despite admitting that the
system it oversees is "way out of balance," the federal Department
of Health and Human Services (HHS) has never even acknowledged these
scathing allegations or made any effort to correct them.
Last
summer, HHS's Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) held an
invitation-only meeting for local officials and a few organizations
and announced (in a perhaps unfortunate wording) a new "five-year
plan" called the National Child Support Enforcement Strategic
Plan.
OCSE
Director Sherri Heller promised to develop fairer procedures. Yet
nothing in the Plan addresses the violations of constitutional
rights and civil liberties. In a peculiar example of Orwellian
newspeak, the Plan promises to build a "culture of compliance," in
which parents support their children "voluntarily" but also says
that "severe enforcement remedies" will be used against parents who
fail to volunteer.
The
Plan includes nothing about the desirability of observing due
process of law or respecting constitutional rights. No concern is
expressed that guidelines be just and appropriate. Nowhere is the
charge addressed that child support may be subsidizing family
breakups, nor is the possibility raised of using federal subsidies
to encourage shared parenting, which would relieve the overall
enforcement load. No concrete measures or incentives are advanced
for requiring or encouraging the involvement of non-custodial
parents in the decision-making or raising of their children.
None
of the scholars who have criticized the system's ethics and methods
was invited to speak at this or any other meeting sponsored by OCSE.
Instead house academic Elaine Sorensen was trotted out to reinforce
the official line. Sorensen dismissed the Georgia Superior Court
decision as "only one judge's opinion."
If
any public official (plus millions of citizens) is alleging that
federal police operations are sending innocent people to prison, one
would think this at least a matter for discussion, if not
investigation – especially in an agency that acknowledges its
operations are "way out of balance." But OCSE have their fingers in
their ears. One official acknowledged that in preparing the Plan no
solicitation of public comments was ever issued and no systematic
citizen input was collected.
The
appointment of a new HHS secretary offers the Bush administration
the opportunity to honestly confront the sprawling welfare machine
in its destructive entirety. Though Mike Leavitt seems to have
little experience in these matters, he may also arrive free of the
ideological baggage that made his predecessor Tommy Thompson one of
the most authoritarian and disliked figures in the
administration.
The
Associated Press reports that Indiana is losing more than $57
million a year in state and federal tax dollars to collect child
support payments averaging about $54 a week. Yet in a bold leap of
logic, the AP blames the boondoggle not on the legislators who are
wasting taxpayers' money but on unnamed malefactors who are about as
real as Viola Trevino's baby.
December 27, 2004
Stephen Baskerville [send him
mail] is a political scientist at Howard
University and president of the American Coalition for Fathers and
Children.
Copyright © 2004 Stephen Baskerville | 