January 28, 1998

Mr. President, let me, first of all, commend my colleague from New Mexico for the very thoughtful statement on education, on the importance of it. I did not hear all of the statements made earlier. I know my colleague from West Virginia, the senior Senator from West Virginia, Senator Byrd, discussed the issue of transportation and the importance of the ISTEA bill, the intermodal transportation system bill, which has to be brought up very quickly here. I heard our junior Senator from West Virginia discuss the issue of Medicare and health care. So a number of these items the President discussed last evening in his State of the Union Message have been the subject of some discussion here today.

I think all of us were very impressed with the agenda the President has laid out for this session of this Congress, the remaining 70 to 120 days. The distinguished majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Senator Lott, has indicated this will not be a long session. So we have a relatively short amount of time for an agenda that I think is important for the country. I hope many of these items will be considered in a strong bipartisan sense. Some will obviously provoke some disagreements. Minimum wage and family and medical leave are two items that come to mind immediately. But I hope on things like Medicare and Social Security and building our public schools and campaign finance reform, we can find some common ground here and get the business of the country done.

Mr. President, I would like to focus some remarks, if I could, on a subject that is I think critically important. The President spent some time discussing it last evening. It is one that I had worked on for about a month and a half here, during the month of December and a good part of the month of January, with a bipartisan group of Republicans and Democrats, and that subject is child care.

Unfortunately, in the last week, I received some correspondence from our colleagues on the Republican side who decided to pull out of the effort basically to come up with another bill. I understand Senator Chafee of Rhode Island has introduced a bill that, in many ways, reflects the work product of those 6 weeks, where I had tried to see in that quiet time if we could come out with a proposal that we could rally around here. Unfortunately--and this happens--these things break apart. I hope at some point we will come back together again. This is important. We have introduced a bill on our side, so there are two bills out there. The President laid out some thoughts and ideas on it. Let me say to you, Mr. President, how important this issue is. We are talking about millions of families in this country that are either single parents raising children, or two-income parents that need both incomes. They may have children and have to pay the tremendous cost of child care because, obviously, you can't leave them home alone. Maybe they don't necessarily have grandparents or aunts and uncles around to take care of them on a daily basis. It poses a serious problem for parents. When schools close down for snow days during the winter. What do you do with your children when you have to go off to work? You have the job you need and the children you love. How do you reconcile these issues?

In the past, many of us grew up in a situation where you had neighbors and friends and you would accommodate an occasion when a crisis like that emerged. Today, it is a daily effort, if a family is to make ends meet and fulfill these obligations. The average cost of a child care setting is between $4,000 and $9,000 per child per year. If you are making, as the average family does, $30,000, $35,000, $40,000 a year, with two children that need some care because they are minors or infants, you immediately get a sense of how difficult a situation people can be placed in financially.

What we have proposed is to expand the block grants, to come up with some tax credits--by the way, tax credits not just to families who have children they want to place in care, but to families who decide they are going to try and get along with one income. Some parents are going to stay home. We provide the credits for them as well. We make it refundable, too, Mr. President, because people who make that $30,000 and below don't pay taxes. Yet, many of them are out there just barely getting along. If they don't have a refundable tax credit, they don't get any benefit at all. So we refund the tax credits for those families that either want to stay home with their child or place that child in a child care setting, because they need that extra help to get along. On the stay-at-home parent idea--and I am delighted to see more and more coming to this issue--I authored something called the Family and Medical Leave Act, which was a source of some controversy back in the 1980's. It took me 7 years. It went through 2 vetoes, and as the President said, it was the first bill he signed into law in 1993. That was basically a stay-at-home parent idea. The idea was that if your child is facing a medical crisis or serious problem that could be documented, that a parent could make the choice to take 12 weeks away from their job, up to 12 weeks, without pay, without losing their job. We were the only country that I could find among industrialized nations that didn't permit a family and medical leave policy, giving parents the ability to stay at home and care for their children without losing the job that they need.

So the idea of providing some assistance for parents who want to stay at home and care for their children, I think, is a very sound idea. I hope we don't get into the situation where we cause stay-at-home parents and those who must work to be pitted against each other, to cause a quarrel, if you will, between parents who don't have that choice. If you are raising 2 or 3 kids on your own, the idea that you have a choice to stay home and watch them is nonexistent. You don't have that choice. Or if you are a two-income family barely getting by or you want to invest money that you are earning for their education, or to buy a better home, or to plan a vacation, you should not be branded somehow as an uncaring parent because you made that choice. I don't want to see us get into a debate here and suggest somehow that parents who need that second income are less caring about their children because they make that choice, any more than I want to see us deprive parents who make that choice to be at home by not providing them with help so that they can do that.

So I am hopeful that we can come to some common ground here. We have begun Welfare to Work. We have a lot more people in the work force. We don't have the child care vacancies, and we don't have the high-paying child care workers, as the average income is $12,000 a year. I don't know anyone who can now get along on that income. How do you attract good people to care for our children in this society?

There have been studies done recently about the quality of child care programs around the country. Some 17 States now have certification processes. Yet the Ziegler Child Study Center at Yale University would tell you that even in the States that have certification and accreditation processes the quality of child care is embarrassing. It is mortifying.

So for States that do not have that certification process you can imagine what it is like. In fact, if you pick up almost any daily newspaper in any city or any State in the country, you will find a case almost on a daily basis of parents who placed their child in what they thought was a safe, quality child care setting only to discover, of course, that child is not safe, and lost its life as we have seen in numerous cases. So we need to be far more conscientious.

We don't deal with quality here in Washington. We don't set standards. I realize that is too high a hurdle to probably overcome. So we let the States set the standards. There is nothing in our Federal bill that mandates what standards are. But we do think there ought to be at least health and safety standards. We require that for our pets. If you leave them at a vet or in one of these weekend kennels, you get a State requirement of safety and health standards for your puppies. It seems to me, if we are going to require that minimum standard for animals that we might try it for our own children in this country.

So our bill provides assistance to employers and providers of child care, and to parents who want to have the security of knowing their children are in safe places.

To give you an idea of how serious this problem is, in the State of Florida today, there is a need of 40,000 spaces for child care that are nonexistent in the State. We are told with Welfare to Work that number will increase by 440,000 in the coming year. So you are going to have an explosion, I guess, of child care providers. What will be the quality? How much will the cost be? Is it accessible to people? The State of Florida may be an example where the vacancy rate is particularly high. But it is not unique. Other States across the country are facing similar problems.

I was disappointed when I saw the list of the 19 priority items that the majority leader has placed before us in this brief session that child care is not on that list of 19. Child care is not on that list. We went through the debate on welfare reform a year or so ago. One of the promises made in this Chamber was that as we moved people from welfare to work, we would do something about caring for the children of these people who have been on welfare. What we are being told now, with this priority list of 19, is that child care is not on that list; that working families who are trying to make ends meet in caring for their children are not going to be a part of this agenda in the next 70 or 120 days of a legislative process. I am hopeful that agenda can change, that it is not written in concrete, that there will be an opportunity to make the case that we ought to be able to come up with a compromise bill if need be between Republicans and Democrats that takes out the partisanship on this issue and says that we ought to be able to come up with some idea here that can assist these working families.

I know my colleague from Utah, Senator Hatch, with whom I wrote the child care block grant program 13 years ago, and my colleague from Kansas, Senator Pat Roberts, care very much about this issue. Senator Jeffords cares about this issue, and had his own bill up earlier. Obviously, Senator Chafee does. He has a bill in. I know my colleagues from Maine, Senator Collins and Senator Snowe, and Senator Specter have an interest in this. I am just disappointed. I can't hide it--that having invested 6 weeks of staff time and effort to try to come up with a compromise bill that it all falls apart literally in the last few days after we pretty much had a work product.

So I am going to continue to raise this issue. I am glad the President did last night. I am glad he highlighted it. I think a lot of people in this country understand in very graphic ways how important this issue is to them for their neighbors and their coworkers. They understand it. They see every day what goes on, how difficult this is, how costly it is, and how worried people are. After-school care is a big issue in this context. We put over $3 billion over 5 years in after school care. 5 million children every day are home alone between 3 o'clock and 6 o'clock and 7 o'clock. Any police chief in any town will tell you the problems that kids get into is not after 11 p.m. at night when people want to put in curfews. Where kids get in trouble is in the afternoon between 3 o'clock and 8 o'clock. That is when trouble occurs. Seventy percent of our schools in this country have no after-school care programs at all. It seems to me that we ought to do something about that. I am not just talking about infants but young children in elementary schools. Try and dial a phone in a relatively small community between 3 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. in the afternoon. There is a delay between the last digit you dial and when the phone actually clicks in. That is because the phone system is overloaded with parents calling their homes to make sure their kids have gotten home safely.

So after-school care is a part of our effort and a part of this proposal that we will put before this body.

So with those thoughts I am urging our colleagues to see if we can't find some common ground. Hopefully the majority leader will change that agenda to include child care on it with the recommendation of the administration. We are not arguing now with an executive branch over whether or not we ought to do this.

There are two bills here that it seems to me we should move on. I am going to raise this issue at every opportunity I can in the coming weeks to see to it that before this session of this Congress adjourns that this U.S. Senate will address child care, after-school care, and care for parents who want to stay at home, and that these parents are going to get some relief before we call it quits. I think it is a critical issue and one that ought to be one of our top priorities rather than not a priority at all.