Jesse Helms Quotes

[Voters] "sent me to Washington to vote no against excessive Federal spending, against forced busing of little schoolchildren, and to vote no against the forces who have driven God out of the classroom.

In June of last year, the administration contended that the only way to save $250 million over the next 4 years was to consolidate VOA and RFE/RL. And today, January 1994, the administration contends that it can accede to the Senate--what do you know--and permit there to be true surrogate broadcasting, that is to say, keep RFE/RL and Radio Free Asia and still save $250 million. So you might say that saving $250 million in a budget like ours is not a giant step, but it is a step in the right direction. Either Mr. Duffey was wrong in June or he is wrong now, and I look forward to the debate on this issue. We will have friendly debate, and I hope that the Senate will carefully measure the information on both sides. Now, Mr. President, I do not think I have ever been more disappointed in the good-intentioned efforts announced at the beginning of this administration a year ago to restructure the State Department. Oh, I had bureaucrat after bureaucrat come up to see me saying, "Senator, you are going to love this." And I did like what they were saying. But nothing happened. Nothing happened. The administration and Congress deserve a D minus on this matter.

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

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.

When the Foreign Relations Committee heard from Secretary-designate Christopher on January 13-14 last year, 1993, the Secretary-to-be said: "We need to do more with less." I am sitting there applauding, saying, "Praise the Lord." But subsequently, his Deputy Secretary, Cliff Wharton, and his Under Secretary for Management, Brian Atwood--two nice fellows--appeared before the committee and--I am quoting them exactly--they promised to "streamline the bureaucracy, consolidate responsibilities, reduce personnel, and reinvigorate management." What happened? They were off in the stratosphere, wild blue yonder, or whatever you want to call it. Now, we heard the Secretary and Deputy Secretary announce with great fanfare a broad-based reorganization to, guess what, reduce excessive layering, that is, bureaucracy on top of bureaucracy on top of bureaucracy. The State Department would, according to the Secretary a year ago, "do its fair share" to participate in, guess what, "reductions and cutbacks that President Clinton would impose on the entire Federal Government." Promises, promises.

But I could not believe my ears when I heard all that good news a year ago. I remember pulling out my hearing aid to see if it was working right. I thought finally somebody had acknowledged that the State Department was a topheavy, bloated, inefficient bureaucracy in need of massive reorganization and reductions. No wonder I said, "Glory, glory, hallelujah," because that had been something on my agenda for a long time, at least 21 years or more. But what happens? Mr. President, as we have seen in endless and countless instances over the years, the State Department's rhetoric far exceeded its actions. One year later Secretary Atwood with his good intentions to reorganize the State Department--and I have no doubt about his good intentions. I believe that he meant what he said a year ago. Anyway, Secretary Atwood is gone--promoted, I guess you might call it, to AID, the Agency for International Development, to tackle that behemoth of a mess.

Efforts to establish such an international criminal court drives right to the core of our basic constitutional liberties and guarantees. But you will not read that in the press. They will say, "What is that fellow talking about?" If they say anything at all. Well, the constitutional lawyers know what I am talking about, and you watched Sam Ervin talk about it. This court, Mr. President, has the potential of sitting in judgment of American citizens, U.S. corporations, the U.S. Government, and, yes, even the legislative acts of Members of Congress. So it does matter. It does need and deserve and cry out for consideration of the implications of such a court. This provision should not be included in this bill in any shape, fashion, or form--not one. I wish Sam Ervin were back here. The committee reported a freestanding resolution some months ago to find its way to the other committees' jurisdictions. I hope the Senate anticipates that the Senate Judiciary Committee will conduct a thorough, careful review of the impact that this proposal threatens to our constitutional prerogatives. We will ignore this issue at our own peril, and worse, at the peril of the governance of the American people.

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?

Look carefully into the faces of the people participating. What you will see, for the most part, are dirty, unshaven, often crude young men and stringy-haired awkward young women who cannot attract attention any other way.

I didn't come to Washington to be a 'yes man' for any president, Democrat or Republican. I didn't come to Washington to get along and win any popularity contests.

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 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.

Dr. Wharton may be a good and decent man, praised for his organizational abilities a year ago to spend substantial efforts on reorganizing and restructuring the State Department. But to the dismay of a lot of us, we waited a much "ballyhooed" reorganization report which was delayed, rewritten, scrubbed, and never materialized beyond another document that was leaked to the press. A year later, here we are. We find Dr. Wharton in a caretaker status dismissed supposedly because of a lack of attention to policy matters. One of the only substantive records we have of the administration's reorganization effort is the administration request for a 33 percent increase in the number of Assistant Secretaries, from 18 to 24 in number, and an increase in the number of Executive Level IV positions in the State Department. Mr. President, what an incredible response to the promise last year to streamline the bureaucracy. Maybe all of this has been reported in the media, but I have not seen it. They are too busy with other things.

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.