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
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