Bill Clinton: “It's hard to know what it means. No bill has passed yet, but there's been a lot of moving around. I said yesterday in…”

“It's hard to know what it means. No bill has passed yet, but there's been a lot of moving around. I said yesterday in this room what I thought about the crime bill, and I had--all the law enforcement officers in the country were symbolically represented here. We don't believe it should be changed in ways that weaken our commitment to putting 100,000 police on the street, and basically spend more money on prisons and less money on police and prevention. With regard to the welfare reform, I think that I owe it to them to review the substance of the bill, and I will. You know what my position is. My position is we should change the system in ways that promote more work, more responsible parenting, give more flexibility to the States but have a strong, strong protection for the interests and welfare of the children of this country. There is a national interest in making sure that the food, the nutrition, the health care of the children of this country are protected. That is not a State-by-State interest; that is a national interest. Now, I'm willing to go a long way toward letting the States implement and design their own welfare reform programs. We should. The other issue I want to--I didn't see in the summary today is that the Republican Governors were very strong in saying that they did think the one area where we needed stronger national action was in the area of child support enforcement, that the States were not capable of having the kind of tough child support enforcement that we need because fully more than a third of the orders today that are not enforced involve more than one State. So I want to review all these details, but I think, let's keep the principles in mind. I will evaluate their proposal by those principles. And if it promotes work and family and protects children, then I will be favorable toward it, even with a lot more flexibility to the States; I want that. But I want all those criteria protected. So I'm going to have to look very closely on the, it sounds to me like on the child protection issue, and I will do that. Mexican Loan Guarantees”