Dan Coats: “Let me state that I support very much what Senator Dodd and Senator Mikulski are attempting to do here. This is…”

“Let me state that I support very much what Senator Dodd and Senator Mikulski are attempting to do here. This is essentially the same legislation that we are attempting to restore that we enacted in the 1990 child care legislation. This gives States a great deal of flexibility. For instance, the State of California has a program called Trust Line which allows the State to require background checks, criminal background checks, of child-care providers. In those background checks, they found 5 percent of those who had applied to be State-certified child-care providers had criminal backgrounds and they had to disqualify them. Not all States have chosen to operate on that basis, although I think that is a reasonable requirement that a State might want to impose on a child-care provider. That is just one example of the flexibility that a State has to impose, those minimal conditions for safety and health, under child-care provisions. Now, the House Ways and Means committee has supported this. The House Employment Economic Opportunity Committee, President Bush supported this in 1990, the Congress supported it on a bipartisan basis, the Governors have supported this.”