Here is a small story that tells you a great deal about how Washington actually governs.
In 1996, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed a welfare reform law — the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, a bipartisan measure that, among many other things, required states taking federal welfare money to report anyone they knew to be in the country illegally to federal immigration authorities. Two years later, the same Clinton administration quietly instructed its own lawyers to read that requirement into near-nonexistence. This week, the Trump Justice Department undid the workaround and restored the law to what it plainly says.
The mechanism is worth understanding, because it’s a case study in how a statute gets neutered without anyone ever having to repeal it.
The 1996 law, PRWORA, uses the word “State” and defines it. The reporting duty falls on the “State.” In 1998, Clinton’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion narrowing “State” to mean only the specific agency administering a given benefits program — not the state government as a whole. The practical effect was to wall the reporting obligation off inside one office, so that the rest of a state’s apparatus could see an illegal alien collecting benefits and have no duty to say a word. The law stayed on the books. It just stopped meaning anything.
The new OLC opinion withdraws that reading and says the obvious: “State” means the state, including all its component agencies, because that is how the statute defines the term. The opinion notes that the 1998 version reached its conclusion only by disregarding PRWORA’s own definition and assigning the same word two different meanings within a single provision — the kind of interpretive move that gets a first-year law student marked down. Restoring the plain text isn’t an act of aggression. It’s an act of reading.
This is the part worth sitting with, whatever you think of immigration policy. The 1998 maneuver wasn’t legislation. No bill was introduced, no vote was held, no member of Congress had to defend softening a law he’d just supported. An executive-branch legal office simply reinterpreted a key word and changed what the statute required in practice. That’s governance by definition — and it’s a tactic available to any administration willing to use it, which is precisely why it’s corrosive regardless of the topic. A law should mean what Congress wrote, not what the current OLC prefers it to mean.
Expect some – well, all– Democrat-run states to resist, and expect litigation. But the underlying point survives the fight: for 27 years, a plainly written reporting requirement was kept dormant by a lawyer’s footnote. It took a new opinion to remember that the words in the law were there the whole time. Beyond fixing this, it’s way past time to start holding these ne’re-do-well blue states accountable, financially and otherwise.
