Bill Clinton: “I think the prospects for real welfare reform really depend upon whether the Senate Republicans, or at least the block…”

“I think the prospects for real welfare reform really depend upon whether the Senate Republicans, or at least the block of moderate Republicans who understand these issues, will work with the Democrats on something like the Daschle bill. You know, there is a hard core in the Senate who are demanding that there be no welfare reform bill unless all aid is cut off to unmarried mothers and their children born out of wedlock, even though the Catholic Church, the National Governors' Association, your group, everybody I know says that that would be unfair to children. If the rest of the Republicans will leave that block and join with Senators Daschle and Breaux and Mikulski and the others who are on this bill, we could work out a bill that would make a real difference. And let me say, one of the important things, I think, about the Daschle bill is that it really heavily emphasizes the importance of child care. As I look back over the time that has elapsed since, as a Governor, I worked on the welfare reform bill of 1988, if you ask me what its single biggest shortcoming was, I would say that we should have done more in child care. And if we do what I have suggested here--and I think a lot of the Republicans want to do this--and we take all these various training programs and put them into a big block and let unemployed workers access them, then that could help to provide the training money for an awful lot of people on welfare who want to move to work, so that if the Daschle bill itself or any future amplification of it that could have bipartisan support in the Senate, could really focus on child care, I think we could get a welfare reform bill that is tough on work and good for children, instead of the other way around. So I would urge all of you--especially the Republican mayors; you have a lot of allies in the Republican Party in the Senate--welfare reform ought to be a bipartisan issue. If we could get a good bill out of the Senate, I feel confident that we could have a bipartisan majority in the House that would vote for it as well if we could get it out of the conference committee. So that is what I would implore you all to do. This is a huge deal for the United States. And the Daschle bill is an opening, an outreach for a genuine bipartisan compromise that doesn't just dump a lot of money back on the States and localities--excuse me, a lot less than you used to have, in a way that would lead to people being cut off with nothing good happening. [Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, IL, vice president, U.S. Conference of Mayors, asked what the mayors could do to ensure continued funding for policing and other crime prevention efforts.]”