Political Quotes

“I know we will be offering amendments throughout the afternoon, and we look forward to ample debate and discussion on them. I want to reiterate my appreciation to Senator Burr for the way we have worked together on this bill. He was very generous in his comments to me and about me, and I appreciate it. But what I so appreciated in working with him is that his whole focus was: How do we protect these children? And his work to ensure that the children are safe when they are at the daycare, regardless of the size of the provider, was important. So, yes, we have good background checks. At the same time, we were looking at health and safety standards, making sure the staffs are at least trained in the elements of first aid, so that if the children needed help because they swallowed something--until the 911 responders could be there--they would have that training. That is really important. Yet we had to look at it in a way in which we did not overregulate. So we wanted quality standards, but we did not want to have so many rules, so many regs--exactly what Senator Alexander cautioned us about: Let's not overregulate so that we then stifle or end up shrinking the pool. So we, again, worked on what--the phrase ``sensible center'' comes from Colin Powell: that if we work hard and listen to each other, we can find that sensible center.…”