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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 is a political scientist and former president of
the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. The views
expressed are his own.
Copyright
© 2004 Stephen Baskerville
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