Machinations

The good news: Mark Yost at the Pioneer Press is the first major media figure in the Twin Cities who has an interest in fairly covering the debate over family court reform in Minnesota.

The bad news: There is so much work to do.

Yost's latest column describes the machinations over the various family court reform bills going on at the Capitol this session.

As we mentioned a few weeks ago, there is some motion toward reform in the House. Unfortunately, the Senate is still controlled by the DFL And when it comes to family law, nobody holds more sway than the clacque of feminist fundamentalists that seem to control all famlly law legislation in the Senate; Ellen Anderson, Linda Higgins, Becky Lourey, Jane Ranum, Sandy Pappas, and Linda Berglin. These are senators for whom, if you read their literature, the family would seem to be defined as "womenandtheirchildren".

Yost:

n much of politics, where you come down on the issue depends on who your constituency is. That's clearly the case in the debate over SF630.

Proposed by Sen. Tom Neuville, SF630's key provisions would have more fairly divided the financial responsibility for children between divorcing mothers and fathers. Child support would be based on the income of both parents, not just the payee (usually the father).

Enter Sen. Linda Berglin, the powerful chair of the Finance Committee's Health and Human Services Budget Division. She introduced SF1900, which basically gutted SF630. Because of the power structure in the Senate, it was clear to Sen. Neuville early on that he would lose in a tug-of-war over competing bills.

"This is the same legislator that has stood in the way of this bill the past few times it has made it to the Senate," said Rep. Tim Mahoney, who has proposed legislation in the House to make joint physical custody the law of the land in Minnesota. "To expect her to change her habits now would be surprising."

A bit of history, here.

About ten years ago, a bill that would have reformed the way family courts enforce visitation - which would, among other things, have given non-custodial parents additional rights to enforce visitation orders - was squashed in the Senate when then-senator Andy Dawkins, husband of Ellen Anderson, killed the bill in his committee, sayng that given a choice between having children see their non-custodial parents (almost always fathers, in Minnesota and nationwide) and making sure they get their child support payments, you go with the money .

For all the opposition's palaver about children, it really is about the money - or in this case, making sure that the state's social-service bureaucracy has a ready stream of cash.

Back to 2005:

No doubt. What was surprising — or perhaps instructive — was what came out in the debate last Thursday. Sen. Berglin's aim clearly isn't fairness, but using the child-support guidelines to make up for what she sees as shortcomings in the state's social service programs for low-income single mothers.

"The purpose of the family law system is not to subsidize the public welfare system," Sen. Neuville said. "It's to be fair to both parents."

Not to mention the children.

Disclaimer: I'm a divorced father of two. My complaints are not personal; I have joint custody, and while I pay all of my kids' bills, I am not subject to a child support order. I have my kids a fair percentage of the time. I am, in short, a member of one of the most exclusive minorities in the nation.

Here's how the system works in Minnesota:

1. Divorce is a "winner take all" proposition; whoever gets custody of the kids, gets the child-support money. That support is determined by the estimated expenses involved in raising a child, without regard to the custodial parent's income.
2. Custody is, officially, determined by a list of objective criteria. In practice, those criteria are usually slanted toward women, including what amounts literally to a count of who physically spends the most hours with the kids. Judges score the evaluation like a hockey game; whoever gets the most points, gets the kids. End of story.
3. Other factors conspire against fathers.
   • For lower-income families, the welfare guidelines are set so that is is much easier for a single-parent family to qualify for benefits, and more of them. Families who approach Ramsey County Human Services at one point were routinely told that they'd be much more likely to get benefits if they filed for divorce and if the father didn't live with the family. Naturally, "not being in the home" counts against the parent that moves out, when that checklist is run. it also makes all child support payments the property of the county - so they take a very keen nterest in collecting; most County Attorney's offices in Minnesota have large, busy Child Support Enforcement divisions.
   • The domestic abuse system in Minnesota is based on the principle 'better that a thousand innocent suffer than one guilty person go free". The system makes it notoriously easy for false allegations to be filed - and domestic abuse allegations, proven or not, carry great weight in divorce proceedings, especially in the custody phase.

Yost touches on both the economics, and Berglin's cynicism:

Minnesota collected $590 million in child support last year, according to the Department of Human Services' 2004 report. About $30 million of that went to low-income mothers, according to Sen. Neuville. So Sen. Berglin is gutting a bill that would correct a decades-old, system-wide injustice in the name of 5 percent of the program's recipients. Talk about your special interest.

There's no doubt that there are low-income divorced mothers who are in dire financial straits and that in some ways the state's social services system comes up short. But to try to right those wrongs through the child-support guidelines is simply wrong — and perpetuates the long-held stereotype that noncustodial fathers are nothing but a piggy bank.

But the Berglin/Anderson/"feminist" clicque in the Senate isn't interested in disproving any stereotypes.

Read Yost's piece for the details of the negotiations. In the end:

He and Sen. Berglin are expected to lock themselves in a room later this week with foam bats and see what they can work out. But it's clear that if it makes it to the Senate floor, SF630 will be a shadow of its former self and do little to reform the system — the bill's original intent.

There is good news, of course:

More promising is HF1321, scheduled to be heard today by the House Jobs and Economic Security Committee. Sponsored by Rep. Steve Smith, with input from Rep. Mahoney and Rep. Rob Eastlund, its most important provision is for a presumption of joint physical custody. That's important because under the current system all benefits flow from the designation of "custody." That has often resulted in all-out thermonuclear war between mothers and fathers, with the most harm often done to the children. Under HF1321, joint physical custody would be the default remedy if two parents can't agree on a parenting plan or try to use "custody" as a wedge to extract more money.

"It would have a more profound effect on reducing child support than my bill," Sen. Neuville said of the House legislation. More important, if it passes, it would go to conference committee, along with SF630, and, we can hope, be melded into law.

Assuming, of course, it gets past Ellen Anderson and Linda Berglin, who stand firmly astride the path to reform, rejecting all who come their way.

Posted by Mitch at April 5, 2005 08:13 AM | TrackBack