I always giggle at the complaints our traditional civil libertarians make about the PATRIOT Act because any abuse of essential rights and freedoms in the name of anti-terrorism pales in comparison with the things our government has been doing for twenty years in the name of child support collection.
Every month each bank, public utility, and state employment commissions has its records searched for names matching a deadbeat dads database; child support levels are set ex parte some 40% of the time, with no provision for correction; arrearages pile up if the dad loses his job or has to take a lower paying one (like our reservist soldiers in Iraq) and the law forbids correction of provable errors. That’s right, the so-called Bradley Amendment forbids courts from correcting injustices in child support matters no matter how thoroughly they can be proved.
Radley Balko has stumbled onto the issue thanks to an excellent column by Phyllis Schlafly,which Matt Welch posts to the restricted-comment Hit and Run board.
The child support collection system is a nightmare created by some people who had good intentions and some who didn’t. It’s a perfect example of why we need a meaningful dialectic in Washington, because more or less all of it was passed without debate.
The horrendous abuses contained within this system are the main reason I support Republican politicians and people like Schlafly even though they have weird ideas about evolution and the planet. The alternative is just too vile and hateful for me to countenance.
Schlafly’s column is unusual because it gets all the main issues and gets them right. It’s well worth reading:
Although there are no official statistics, estimates are that more than 100,000 fathers are jailed each year for missing their child-support payments. Another perverse feature of the current system is that child-support payments have nothing to do with whether the father is allowed to see his children and there is no enforcement of his visitation rights.
Debtors’ prisons were common in colonial times, but they were abolished by the new United States government, one of the great improvements we made on English law. Then we adopted bankruptcy laws to allow people a fresh start when they are overwhelmed by debt, but child-support debts are not permitted to be discharged in bankruptcy.
The federal Bradley Amendment, named for the liberal Senator Bill Bradley, takes us back to the cruel days of debtors’ prisons. It requires that a child-support debt cannot be retroactively reduced or forgiven, and the states enforce this law no matter what the change in a father’s income, no matter if he is sent to war or locked up in prison, no matter if he is unemployed or hospitalized or even dead, no matter if DNA proves the guy is not the father, and no matter if he is never allowed to see his children.
Charles Dickens famously said, “The law is an ass.”
This issue is not completely foreign to Democrats. When I lobbied the California legislature, two of my best allies (Sen. Charles Calderon and Assemblyman Rod Wright) were Democrats, but their efforts were frustrated by members of their party, primarily the infamous Sheila (Zelda Gilroy) Kuehl.
When Democrats start to address the injustices in this system, I’ll reconsider my party membership, but I’m not holding my breath. It’s been screwed up for 20 years and it just keeps getting worse.
The prejudice against men, not for children, characterizes the “legal” system in regard to child custody and support.
Once I was taken to court for allegedly being late on support payments. Actually, I was about 3 months early in making these payments, net, with only a couple of day or two “late” payments due to banks not being open. The judge did not award me attorney’s fees. The mother knew I had been over-punctual. I could prove this by deposit receits. Such treatment of males is the rule in my total experience.
My vistitation was often illegally denied and otherwise interfered with. Once I was actually arrested for picking up my kids!
The system is corrupt and apparently has not changed significantly. Looney, immature women, greedy lawyers, and non-caring, prejudiced judges run it.
Something is going to give.
I worked on the system for five years, watched for five more, and still see no signs of change except for a few slightly more sympathetic scripts coming out of Hollywood.
I blame the spineless politicans.