Greatest Senator of our time

Human Events, Aug 27, 2001 by Jeffrey, Terence P

Long after today's liberal elitists have returned to the dust from whence they came, some honest historian will dare to tell the truth: Jesse Helms was the, greatest U.S. senator of the last quarter of the 20th Century.

No one else comes close. On the issues that mattered most, Jesse Helms stood closest to the truth, and fought hardest to defend it. He sometimes stood alone. But he never flinched or retreated.

Helms is one of the few modern-day politicians who never lost his grip on what Russell Kirk called the First Canon of Conservatism: that there is "a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience," which means that "[p]olitical problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems."

In an age of libertines, in a city where many exalted men think nothing of lying under oath or committing adultery with aides or interns, Helms provided a living, if lonely, link to the great souls of the American past. He put his faith in the permanent things that made America great, and always held fidelity to unchanging values 'above mere party loyalty or the much vaunted, and very often phony, collegiality of the Senate.

Helms was a hero, not just for the conservative movement, but for the American cause.

Three Great Struggles

His courage shone most brightly in the three great struggles of our time-the Cold War, the Culture War and the long march to subsume American sovereignty into a New World Order of unelected international bureaucracies.

In the 1970s, when President Nixon, a Republican, advanced a policy of dente and accommodation with Soviet and Chinese Communists, Helms fought back, first as a commentator then as a senator. In the years before Ronald Reagan was elected President, he became the voice of Reaganism in Washington-the voice of victory in the Cold War.

In 1990s, when the Big Business wing of the Republican Party joined with the Clinton Democrats in advancing international trade agreements that undermined the U.S. Constitution, Helms challenged his GOP colleagues to stand up for their country. "Newt Gingrich made a good point at a hearing last Friday," Helms noted in a 1994 statement on the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement, when "he said, `We are transferring substantial power to an international body that can coerce us to change our behavior. In 50 years, historians will look back and say this was a very important, defining moment."'

But, then, Newt Gingrich voted for Clinton's WTO. Jesse Helms, calling it a "UN of world trade without a veto," voted against it. Only 10 Senate Republicans joined him.

It didn't take 50 years to prove Helms right and Gingrich wrong. It took two.

In 1996, European nations used the WTO to challenge, a law sponsored by Helms that allowed U.S. citizens who owned property in pre-Castro Cuba to sue foreign corporations that, in cooperation with Castro, had expropriated that property for their own use. Rather than uphold the U.S. law and the property rights of U.S. citizens,-President Clinton suspended the law, ignored the property rights, and heeled to the WTO.

This elicited hardly a whimper from the Republican congressional leadership, which soon turned to promoting Permanent Normal Trade Relations and WTO membership for the brutal Communist regime of the People's Republic of China. Here, again, Helms was a lonely and resolute resistor. A few years time will prove him right on this one, too.

Events are already redeeming Helms's efforts in the Culture War.

When Bill Clinton, for example, nominated radical lesbian Roberta Achtenberg to be assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, few Republicans were ready to follow Helms into the breach. But he charged the wall anyway.

"It is like my father told me many years ago," Helms explained. "He said, `Son, the Lord does not require you to win. But He expects you to try.' And I am trying. I may not be on the winning side and the liberal news media, predictably, will say, `Ha, ha, ha, Helms got beat again.' But that does not bother me."

Achtenberg, a member of the San Francisco board of supervisors, had earned notoriety for celebrating the homo sexual lifestyle and for using the power of government to attack those who did not. She had instigated a movement to deny the Boy Scouts of America the use of San Francisco public school facilities because the Scouts did not accept homosexuals, and she had sponsored a resolution to remove city funds from the Bank of America because the bank had contributed money to the Scouts.

The year before her nomination, she had ridden in the San Francisco Gay Pride parade in a convertible with her "partner," whom she hugged and kissed as the car made its way through the streets of the city. Next to them was seated "their" son. On the car was fixed a sign: "Celebrating family values."

Other conservatives scrambled for a reason to oppose Achtenberg other than the obvious one: Her nomination was an attempt to normalize homosexual behavior. Helms didn't dodge the issue. "[My opposition is not merely because the nominee is a lesbian," he said. "It is because she has been a militant activist, demanding that society accept as normal-as normal-a lifestyle that most of the world's religions consider immoral and which the average American voter instinctively finds repulsive."