Jesse Helms Quotes

Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are facts of life which must be faced.

Now, Mr. President, the point is this. We cannot tolerate and the American taxpayers ought not to be required to finance such unbridled growth. I suggest that anybody who may doubt what I am saying should look at the figures. I cannot justify to my constituents--and no other Senator can really--the spending of almost $1 billion of the taxpayers' money to educate foreign students when we have such tight budget constraints here at home. So there are many, many things that we need to look at, and this bill addresses most of what I had in mind. The rest of them I am going to try to do by amendment. Now, title III authorizes the international broadcasting activities of VOA, RFE/RL, TV and Radio Marti, Radio Free Asia, and other broadcasting elements under the new International Broadcasting Bureau to be guided and directed by the Broadcasting Board of Governors. This kind of broadcasting effort has been fraught with great controversy, and I intend to listen carefully to the debate on all the provisions. My mind is pretty well made up, but I wish to hear both sides of the argument.

In closing, I reiterate my appreciation to Senator Pell and Senator Kerry and Senator Pressler and their respective staffs for their stewardship in guiding this legislation through subcommittee and to floor debate. I say again, as I have said so many times publicly, I am most grateful for the consideration and cooperation of Claiborne Pell for his efforts to accommodate the concerns of Senators on this side of the aisle. I do hope we can move this legislation on to conference in an expeditious fashion. That concludes my statement, Mr. President, and I yield the floor.

I am going to seek to eliminate the "hall walkers" at the State Department, that is to say, those Foreign Service employees who refuse to accept new assignments to meet urgent personnel needs. If they are offered an assignment they do not want, they turn it down and they walk the corridors of the State Department still being paid by the taxpayers, and I think that is an outrage. I wish to stop that. The bill creates a capital investment fund, a much needed management tool, to encourage investment in information technologies to improve and modernize the State Department's functions. This bill promotes cost-effective property management techniques. It proposes to ensure that rewards may be provided for information about acts of terrorism, and it proposes to reduce the number of mandated reports, which nobody reads in the first place. The Foreign Relations Committee also agreed to direct the President of the United States to conduct a Government-wide review of all Government-sponsored international educational and cultural exchange programs. This year the American taxpayers will spend, or be forced to furnish more than $800 million in exchange programs managed by 22 different Federal agencies. That, too, is an outrage. These programs have been expanded and enlarged by 45 percent in just the past 3 years and have doubled since 1980. Nobody even knows how many programs there are. Nobody knows how much money is being spent. You try to get the information from anybody in this Government, and they say, "Well, we don't know. We will look it up." And you never get a return telephone call.

Mr. President, before I conclude, I feel obliged to comment briefly on two amendments that I intend to offer, designed to assist U.S. citizens who have had their property confiscated--that is to say illegally stolen--by foreign governments receiving foreign aid from the taxpayers of the United States. The Senate passed one of these amendments 96 to 4. I stood down there during the vote and Senators came in and said, "good amendment" and all of the rest of it. The State Department, however, and other U.S. officials turned a deaf ear to U.S. citizens whose property had been unlawfully taken from them. Unfortunately, the Senate must again send a wakeup call to the U.S. State Department. That message must go to the countries abusing the rights of U.S. citizens, and those countries ought to be denied even one dime of foreign aid money until they cut this out.

During the past few weeks, I have talked by telephone on numerous occasions with a fine, Christian lady whose face and voice are familiar to most Americans. Her name is Anita Bryant. She has stood beside Billy Graham during his televised crusades. No doubt you have seen her also as she appeared on television commercials advertising Florida orange juice.
She is a lovely person, deeply committed to Christianity. She is also a concerned American- concerned about the erosion of moral principles and indecency in all of the forms spreading out across America. She has warned that unless America returns to basic principles, our freedoms are in jeopardy. Not so long ago, she spoke out against America's growing tendency to give respectability to homosexuality. And that's where her troubles began.

In particular, she condemned legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on January 4 by Congressman Edward I. Koch (pronounced "Kosh"), a member of the New York delegation in Congress. Mr. Koch was nominated by both the Democratic Party and the Liberal Party of New York. The bill that he introduced bears the number H.R. 2998. The title of Mr. Koch's bill states that its purpose is to prohibit discrimination on the basis of affectional or sexual preference... Specifically, the bill would amend the so-called Civil Rights Act of 1964 in several ways. Among other things, employers would be required by federal law to seek out and hire homosexuals on a quota basis. This would include schools, hospitals and other institutions. Failure to comply with the requirement (to hire homosexuals) would result in the loss of federal aid.
When Anita Bryant dared to speak out against this bill she found herself in deep trouble. In Miami, her home city, the homosexuals (who call themselves "gays" organized, and began a pressure campaign to intimidate the Singer Sewing Machine Company, whch was to have been the sponsor of a television series featuring Anita Bryant.
Anita's contract for the television series was abruptly canceled. An official of the Singer Company made clear that, all of a sudden, Anita Bryant was "controversial."

I reject that criticism because this is indeed another kind of holocaust, by another name. At last count, more than 40 million unborn children have been deliberately, intentionally destroyed. What word adequately defines the scope of such slaughter? [After 9/11] the American people responded with shock, sadness and a deep and righteous anger — and rightly so. Yet let us not forget that every passing day in our country, more than three thousand innocent Americans are killed [through abortion].

The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights.

Mr. President, I thank the Chair. I, of course, thank my friend, the distinguished chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations. It has always been a pleasure to work with him. He and I have managed a number of bills in the years that we have been here. He has been here longer than I have, and he has managed more bills. But I have to say, Mr. President, that none of the pieces of legislation with which I have dealt in my 21 years in the Senate have met with the cooperation and the effective working together by all Senators and all staff members to produce this bill that we call the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for fiscal years 1994 and 1995. The short form on that is, of course, the State Department authorization bill. I say to my friend from Rhode Island, it is a pleasure to work with him always. Mr. President, every committee has to make some tough choices in an effort to save the taxpayers money at a time when this Congress has run up a total of nearly $4.5 trillion in debt. I am pleased that the Foreign Relations Committee did an adequate job in connection with this bill in that respect.

In committee, I offered an 8.5 percent budget reduction amendment designed to require the State Department to review its organizational and operational requirements seriously. You know how bureaucrats in this town operate. They hear a mandate or presumed mandate of Congress and then they go about doing what they want to do instead of what Congress has asked them to do. My amendment, as perfected by Senator Kerry and Senator Pressler, cut the administration's fiscal year 1994 request by $504 million, out of a $6.4 billion request. It cut it down to about $5.9 billion in terms of an authorization bill. And it reduced the administration's fiscal year 1995 budget authority by almost $450 million. That is a $950 million reduction over 2 years. As the saying goes, that is not exactly chopped liver. The authorized levels in this bill are $253 million below last year's actual level for the State Department, the USIA, and related agencies. S. 1281--this bill--also includes authorization for the Peace Corps at virtually no-growth levels in terms of expenditures. Ordinarily, the Peace Corps is authorized as a separate bill or included in the foreign aid authorization bill. It is a little bit different this year. In addition to the budget reduction, there are some positive legislative provisions in this bill. For the first time, this bill caps--puts a cap on--the end strength of the Foreign Service officers who can be hired. I intend to offer a technical amendment giving the Secretary of State authority to RIF--that means reduction in force--the Foreign Service office employees if he finds it necessary to do so. The bill eliminates Foreign Service performance pay. It ensures adherence to statutory pay ceilings so that nobody can make more than the Secretary of State. And it provides mandatory reassignment or retirement of Presidential appointees within 90 days.

White women in Washington who have been raped and mugged on the streets in broad daylight have experienced the most revolting sort of violation of their civil rights. The hundreds of others who had their purses snatched last year by Negro hoodlums may understandably insist that their right to walk the street unmolested was violated.

Compromise, hell! That's what happened to us all down the line -- and that's the very cause of our woes. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?

I'm not going to put a lesbian in a position like that. If you want to call me a bigot, fine.

My intent is, as a manager of this bill, to strongly support Senator Dole and Senator Pressler when they offer major amendments to restructure the U.S. participation in the U.N.-sponsored activities and require withholding of U.N. assessments until an inspector general is appointed at the United Nations. Mr. President, Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti are all disasters, every one of them, disasters that must not be repeated. The answer is not in rewriting the War Powers Resolution. Forget that. The answer is better decision-making, a much closer scrutiny of U.N. actions, and a more thoughtful understanding of the practical consequences of pursuing a policy of what they call aggressive multilateralism. The same people who throughout the 1980's wanted to blame America first have now written a new draft of a Presidential decision, Directive PD-13, that is intended, and I quote, "sacrifice Americans first." This new invented game of surrender your sovereignty is to be played out in the United Nations by the nonelected officials committing the U.S. Treasury and the troops of the United States to U.N. objectives without congressional approval. They just go ahead and do what they want to do. I do not know about other Senators. But this Senator says no, not with my vote would it happen.