ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 14, 1995 TAG: 9512140014
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-16 EDITION: METRO
AN UNFORTUNATE by-product of the Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate was obstructionist Jesse Helms' elevation to the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Among the Helms follies of '95: holding up U.S. ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
The international pact would ban the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons. It would thereby help protect American troops, and many other people, from the use of a particularly horrendous kind of weapon - not only by a battlefield enemy but also by terrorists and outlaw regimes looking for an equalizer against otherwise overwhelming force.
Enforcement of such prohibitions has been greatly aided in recent years by the development of increasingly sensitive technology to detect possible violations. Moreover, if enough nations ratify the convention for it to go into effect, the chemical industries of nonparticipating nations would be subject to trade penalties.
The convention was negotiated by the Reagan administration and signed by President Bush. Most defense experts support it. In the Senate, ratification is favored by a bipartisan majority, by a majority of Republicans and by a majority of the members of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Yet for all that, the convention remains unratified by the United States. Helms has kept ratification bottled up, and shows no sign of unplugging it for a committee vote, let alone consideration by the full Senate.
Every six years since he was first elected 23 years ago, North Carolina voters have given Helms, now 74, another Senate term in the Senate His victory margins are generally narrow, but his mastery of the attack ad and his prodigious ability to raise money via direct mail have done the job every time.
Helms' Senate seniority, however, should not and need not allow him to block anything and everything he doesn't like. Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole has the authority to bypass Helms. On a matter so clearly beneficial to American interests, the time has come for Dole to exercise that authority.
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