[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
[June 24, 1998]
[Pages 1033-1036]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks on Signing the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act of 1998 and an 
Exchange With Reporters
June 24, 1998

    The President. Thank you very much, Sonia. 
And Jonathan and Jesse, welcome to the White House. Thank you, General 
Reno. Thank you, Senators Kohl and DeWine, for coming. And 
Congressman Hoyer, thank you for your hard 
work on this. I'd also like to thank Congressman Henry Hyde, who is not here, for his leadership on this legislation. 
Welcome Judge David Ross, the Commissioner of the 
Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement; United States Attorney 
Helen Fahey; child support advocates; and Leslie 
Sorkhe and Gerri Jensen, two other mothers who are here. I thank you all for 
being here.
    I am very pleased to sign a vital new law that shows what we can 
achieve when we act in the national interest. For 5\1/2\ years now we 
have renewed our economy with a strategy that balances the budget while 
it invests and instills the future of our people and in the strength of 
our families. The key to expanding opportunity in this new century I 
want to say, though, is education.
    I want to say a little more about child support in a minute, but 
these two young men behind me and all the children of our country 
deserve a world-class education. I have asked the Congress to help me in 
that, to help us to reduce class size by hiring 100,000 teachers and 
building or repairing 5,000 schools. I have asked them to help me 
institute high standards to connect all classrooms to the Internet, and 
I've asked them to make child care for working parents more affordable.
    Yesterday the Republicans in the House of Representatives took a 
huge step in the opposite direction. Last night they began to 
dramatically cut education investments from Head Start to after-school 
to antidrug programs. This is out of step with our values and with 
America's shared vision of our future. In the coming months I'll have 
more to say about this, but you can be sure that I am going to keep 
fighting to advance education, to invest more in education, to lift 
education standards, to expand education opportunities. And if they 
continue to fight against all these things it will, I expect, be the 
major conflict of the coming months.
    I still hope that I will not have to sign an education bill or veto 
one that short changes the future of our children. I don't intend to 
sign it. I hope a veto won't be necessary, but there is no excuse for 
this. We have a balanced budget. We're going to have a surplus. We have 
the money. We ought to give it to the children and their future.
    This bill today is a gift to our children and the future. The quiet 
crisis of unpaid child support is something that our country and our 
families shouldn't tolerate. Our first responsibility, all of us, is to 
our children. And today we all know that too many parents still walk 
away from that obligation. That threatens the education, the

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health of our children, and the future of our country.
    One of the main reasons single mothers go on welfare is that fathers 
have failed to meet their responsibilities to the children. Even when a 
family manages to stay out of poverty, a father's failure to pay child 
support puts mothers who are raising children by themselves under 
terrible pressure. A lot of women are forced to work two jobs, to work 
at night, or simply to worry sick about their children either because 
they're away from them all the time or because they're with them but 
they don't have enough to support them.
    When fathers neglect support of their children, it aggravates all 
the other problems a family faces. When I was Governor and then when I 
ran for President the first time in 1992, I made child support 
enforcement a big part of my concerns. I've always asked parents to take 
responsibility for their children. I've always pledged to do my best to 
force them to do so if they refused.
    We have waged an unprecedented campaign to make deadbeat parents 
live up to their obligations. Thanks to tougher laws, more sophisticated 
tracking, powerful new collection tools we've increased child support 
collections by 68 percent in the last 5 years. Almost a million and a 
half more children are getting child support today.
    There are two other signs of success that I would like to report. 
Last year our effort to find out the identity of fathers allowed us to 
establish paternity in 1.3 million cases, up from only 510,000 in 1992. 
Our new national database for identifying deadbeat parents across State 
lines has found more than 1 million delinquent parents in just the first 
9 months of its operation. Before we created this database, deadbeat 
parents found it easy to avoid paying up by skipping from job to job or 
State to State. But with this database there is no where left to run.
    With these and other successful child support initiatives, we 
believe that we've made a real difference for people like Sonia and her 
two fine sons. But we can and must do more. Current law is too soft on 
the most serious cases of neglect, the cases in which a parent flees 
across State lines or national borders and skips out on supporting 
children for a year or more. In 1996 I asked the Attorney General to draft legislation to crack down on this appalling 
practice. Senators DeWine and Kohl and Congressman Hyde and 
Hoyer championed their cause, introduced 
versions of the legislation, and helped to secure an overwhelming 
bipartisan majority for the bill I am proud to sign into law today.
    The Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act of 1998 deals with child support 
evaders in the most serious cases. From now on if you flee across State 
lines and refuse to pay child support you may be charged with a Federal 
offense, a felony offense, and may land in jail for up to 2 years. One 
way or the other people who don't support their children will pay what 
they must.
    I thank all the Members of Congress and all the children's advocates 
who are here today, who contributed this major victory to our children. 
Now we can work together to ensure that the progress we have made on 
child support is not accidentally undone; let me mention that, one more 
very important issue. Under bankruptcy reform bills now in the Senate 
and House some mothers could find themselves in competition with 
powerful banks and credit card companies to collect the child support 
they need. In that competition I think we all know who would lose, our 
children.
    We are working with Congress now, and we will continue to do so to 
produce a bankruptcy reform bill that demands responsibility from both 
debtors and creditors and stems abuse. But any bill must make protecting 
child support payments a high priority. It would be ironic indeed, after 
all this work we have done, to increase child support collections--and 
here we are signing a bill today to make it more difficult to avoid the 
collections--if we turned around and passed a bankruptcy bill that put 
mothers and their children back in the pack along with other creditors. 
That's not the right thing to do. So I hope that we will see action on 
the bankruptcy bills and on the education bills that will reflect the 
same priority for our children that this bill does today.
    And again, let me thank all the advocates and all the sponsors and 
let me thank Sonia and her two fine sons for being here. This is 
a happy day for Attorney General Reno and me, and 
I would like to ask you all to come around now, and I'll sign the bill.
    Thank you.
    You guys stand on either side here. Sonia, you come up here and I'll 
show you how I

[[Page 1035]]

sign a bill into law. See I have all these pens because there are all 
these people who want one. [Laughter] I have to find a way to use every 
one of these pens when I sign this. So don't start laughing at me, all 
right?

[At this point, the President signed the bill.]

China's Refusal of Radio Free Asia Visas

    Q. Mr. President, hasn't this latest rebuff by China cast a really 
severe pall over your trip to China now? They've really turned you 
down----
    The President. You mean the Radio Free Asia thing?
    Q. ----on special appeal--visas.
    The President. I think they made a mistake. And before I leave here, 
as a matter of fact in just a few minutes, I'm going to do an interview 
with Radio Free Asia correspondents to send a clear signal that we don't 
believe ideas need visas and that we support freedom of the press in our 
country.
    I think in a way it will help to highlight some of the very 
important issues that we wanted to discuss. I hope that this trip will 
not only allow me to learn more about China and allow the American 
people to learn more about China but will help me to explain America and 
what we believe in and why to not only the Government but to the people 
of China and this is a good beginning here.
    Q. Well, have they encouraged you to----
    The President. I will do my best to do that. I think they made a 
mistake. And as I said, ironically, is the Chinese granted more visas to 
more journalists from more different media outlets than they ever have 
before. So they were actually showing a greater openness than they have, 
and because they reversed themselves on the Radio Free Asia visas, for 
reasons I don't understand, they have denied themselves that credit. So, 
I intend to press this issue by doing the interview in just a few 
minutes.
    Q. Is this going to mean that it will be harder for you to reach 
agreements with the Chinese on detargeting nuclear missiles, on market 
access--is this disagreement going to make that a harder process?
    The President. I don't know. I hope that we can deal with all these 
issues independently. I think the Chinese understand, as we do, we've 
got a big common stake in nonproliferation of weapons of mass 
destruction. I expect to make some progress. We have a big stake in the 
Asian economic situation and the difficulties there. We have a big stake 
in our own bilateral economic relations and the impact that a lot of 
this will have in terms of integrating China into the global economy.
    So I would think that they would not let this get in the way of what 
is in their self-interest, just as I won't let it get in the way of what 
is in the interest of the United States, but our values are an important 
part of our interest.
    We don't live by money alone, or even by power alone, but also by 
our ideals and convictions, so I think it is important to point this up. 
But I also think it's important that you see it in it's proper 
framework.
    The irony--as I said, this is an ironic situation because the 
Chinese granted more visas to more different media outlets apparently 
than ever before. They granted this visa and then reversed themselves. I 
think it was a mistake, and I'll do my best to make it clear why.

President's Visit to China

    Q. Are you going to see dissidents now--I mean, as a retaliation?
    The President. I'm going to see a number of people from different 
elements in Chinese society, and I'm going to do what I think is best to 
promote the cause of human rights.
    Q. Is the White House taking any symbols of democracy, as has been 
suggested by some Republican lawmakers such as copies of the American 
flag or the Constitution?
    The President. I'm sorry, I don't have anything to say about that.

Nuclear Detargeting Agreement

    Q. What about detargeting? You didn't mention that specifically, and 
I had asked you about it. Do you see an agreement on that?
    The President. I think it would be a good thing if we could reach an 
agreement on it. I think it does two things. It literally delays 
significantly the amount of time it takes to arm a missile and aim it, 
therefore, eliminating the possibility of accidental firing. And it also 
really increases, I think, the confidence between the countries that 
were moving to reduce the nuclear threat. So I hope we can do that, but 
I don't know yet. I don't have an announcement to make. But you know--
I've made it very clear that I would like to do that.
    Thank you very much.

[[Page 1036]]

Note: The President spoke at 9:10 a.m. in the Oval Office at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Sonia Evans, who introduced the 
President, and her sons, Jonathan and Jesse.