Bill Clinton: “Well, I think they adopted two good amendments today. But I think the question that you ought to ask yourself in…”

“Well, I think they adopted two good amendments today. But I think the question that you ought to ask yourself in evaluating that bill, including the amendments that were adopted, which I favor, is does this weaken the protections we give to children in our country? That's the major issue to me. A lot of the savings in the welfare bill actually have nothing whatever to do with welfare. They're just part of the budgetary calculus of the overall balanced budget plan. They're necessary to finance the tax cuts and the other things in their plan. And so I just don't want to do anything that hurts kids. They adopted two good amendments. I applaud them for doing it. The bill's going to go to conference. I'm going to keep working with them, and we'll see if we can all agree on something that is acceptable. The actual provisions of the bill that apply to welfare per se are much better and basically pretty good, including putting several billion dollars more for child care. The savings in the bill that I don't agree with, except for the voucher--the absence of giving the States the option to provide some assistance for people who run out of their time limits are for their children. That's the only welfare issue that I'm aware of that's still hanging out there. The rest of the issues basically relate to budget cuts that will affect poor working people, as much as anything else, and their children. A lot of these food stamp cuts will affect poor working mothers, minimum-wage mothers and their children. Or the cuts to legal immigrants are likely to affect people who come to this country and may be middle class, may be even upper middle class, but then through no fault of their own, after paying taxes here for years, something happens to them that affects their children, they get in a car wreck, they get cancer, they get mugged. These are things that happen to people who live anywhere in the world, and they can happen to people here. So I'm concerned about the impact of some of the provisions of this on children. But I still believe--since it's getting better, I'm optimistic we can make it even better in the conference, and I'll just keep working at it and try to get it done.”