JESSE Helms has gone and lost his mind. Thank God. The Republican senator from North Carolina and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, known for his opposition to foreign aid, wants to add half a billion dollars to the American contribution to a fund for fighting AIDS in the developing world.
Perhaps AIDS activists should have seen it coming. Last June, Helms went to a U2 concert and invited lead singer Bono to lunch to discuss the African AIDS crisis. As Bono jokingly remarked, the meeting was "bad for both of our images." A month after that lunch, Helms announced that he would not run for another term.
The temporal proximity of these events leads to a possible explanatory theory: Jesse Helms always has been a decent person, and just had to act like a monster to keep his constituents happy. Now that he does not have to get reelected, he can rejoin the human race.
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Admittedly, the theory shifts even more blame for Helms' record onto the voters, but for once let the people take responsibility for their politics. History's opinion now counts for more than that of North Carolinians, and Helms should be worried about how he will be judged.
In the forthcoming AIDS documentary "A Closer Walk," Bono says, "God will judge us" for how wealthy nations dealt with the epidemic. At the age of 80, Helms will be facing that judgment soon, as he notes in a March 24 column in The Washington Post "We Cannot Turn Away." Perhaps he has realized that any Higher Power worth the name gives points for how a powerful man treated the earth's most vulnerable, and not for how he saved American taxpayers some money.
In his nearly 30 years as a senator, including a stint as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms has done much on issues related to Africa, AIDS and foreign aid to deserve his reputation as an archconservative.
In 1986, he opposed sanctions against the apartheid South African government; in 1988, he opposed AIDS research funding; in 1993, he opposed allowing foreigners with AIDS to become U.S. citizens. When the Ryan White Act first came before Congress in 1990, Helms proposed and voted for an amendment to strike $441 million from the budget to treat and care for AIDS victims, and he fought to cut funding again in 1995, when the Act came up for reauthorization.
Helms did begin to support aid to Israel after pro-Israeli groups nearly prevented him from being reelected in 1984. However, his general attitude is best expressed in his remarks after the 1994 elections, when he said, "The foreign aid program has spent an estimated $2 trillion of the American taxpayer's money, much of it going down foreign ratholes to countries that constantly oppose us in the U.N."
In 1995, Helms proposed the Foreign Relations Revitalization Act, which would have abolished the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID). He also drafted the Foreign Aid Reduction Act of 1995, which would have required that the government spends all aid money in the national interest, that countries receiving aid have sufficient economic freedom, and that a sunset provision be included in all projects.
Recently, Helms has altered his pattern of disfavor toward AIDS patients and poor nations. He voted for a bill to help children orphaned by AIDS in July 2000. That year he also stated his approval of forgiving developing nations of the crippling debts they owe the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In Jan. 2001, Helms changed his position on the foreign aid budget and proposed is increased - after two decades of Congress's cutting it down relative to GDP.
Helms' shift is a wise one. Considering his career along with those of Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) and Phil Gramm (R-Texas), New York Times columnist Bill Keller said they were "three men whose departure will raise the median decency of the United States Senate" ("Mr. T., Mr. G. and Mr. H.," Jan. 12).
Even Helms' concessions come with a price. His support for foreign aid is contingent on killing AID and giving the money to faith-based and other private relief organizations ("Foreign aid hike pushed," USA Today, Feb. 19). According to Secretary of State Colin Powell, already a third of the $2 billion a year in federal anti-poverty aid sent abroad is delivered via private groups. AID's workforce was cut by 32 percent, and its missions closed in 36 countries, since 1993.
Moreover, Helms' change of heart on foreign aid and AIDS does not qualify him to be Saint Jesse. His view of the domestic crisis remains homophobic; he considers gays to have caused "the doubling and redoubling of AIDS cases in the United States" (Raleigh News & Observer, March 6). While his support for increasing foreign aid should be commended, his distinction between AIDS in homosexuals and AIDS in heterosexuals, with the former being divine punishment and the latter being an unfortunate tragedy, leaves much to be desired.
Here is compassionate conservatism: Help people, but only those who do what we do and like what we like, and only through private organizations, preferably religious ones.
Nonetheless, Helms' example could lead other departing senators to change their ways at the eleventh hour. Thurmond could bring the Equal Rights Amendment before Congress. Gramm could fight for impoverished families across the country instead of for military pork in Texas.
Cynical observers say that the need to please constituents and donors, in order to get reelected, entirely drives politicians' behavior. Now, after decades of pandering to the loudest and lowest common denominator, retiring senators finally can do what their consciences demand. Hopefully, that still small voice will have the chance to be heard.
(Pallavi Guniganti's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at pguniganti@cavalierdaily.com.)
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