Key paragraph:
"As for the single issue that reportedly so vexes Helms Weld's support for
the medical use of marijuana Weld is not only right, he is humane as well.
Chairman Helms, the tobacco lobby's main squeeze, would let people smoke
anything unless, of course, it would alleviate their pain. Go figure."

Type: Editorial
Source: The Washington Post, Page A23

. . . Resistable Force

By Richard Cohen

Thursday, August 7, 1997; Page A23
The Washington Post

Jesse Helms is an odd chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Since taking over the committee, he has never made a major pronouncement on
foreign policy and has been out of the country just once a quickie trip to
the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. If travel does indeed
broaden, we can understand why Helms is so narrow. He seems afraid of
encountering a contrary thought.

The spotlight is once again on Helms, because he has chosen to block the
nomination of William Weld as ambassador to Mexico. In turn, Weld has chosen
to blast Helms and demand that the White House back him up. In an absolute
parody of Washingtonspeak, White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said this
week that President Clinton was, as usual, going to support his nominee
unless it meant taking a stand. His exact words are worth your time:

"We've made it quite clear we will go to the mat. But we, at the same time,
do not suggest that we would support or would encourage anything that
circumvents the authority of Chairman Helms."

If this were television, I would repeat that quote in slomo.

Of course, just about the only way Weld is going to go to Mexico City, other
than as a tourist, is by circumventing Chairman Helms. (Why does that sound
like Chairman Mao?) This is because Chairman Helms has vowed never but
never, never, never to hold a hearing on this nomination. There are
various parliamentary ways around this impasse, but they require (1)
determination and (2) guts. One of the rare Washington figures with that
combo is, as it turns out, Chairman Helms himself.

I confess to having a twinge of shameful admiration for Helms. He's an ornery
man, 'tis true, but he's one of the few people in Washington who is
untroubled by his national image. He cares only for the voters back home
the white, conservative voters, that is and not how he appears on the
"Today" show. It matters little to him if he is liked or respected. He'll
settle for feared and that, as the record shows, he is. Few will cross
him.

That's a pity, because the man is dead wrong on this issue. Nothing in the
Constitution gives him the right not to hold a hearing when the president
nominates an ambassador. The Senate may confirm or deny the nomination, but
to do nothing simply substitutes one man's whim for the constitutional
obligation of the entire Senate.

What's more, Weld is right right on the issues, that is. Unlike too many
people in his party, he is no gaybashing bigot, and that, in the GOP, makes
him a flaming Bolshevik. He also is prochoice, and that too is anathema to
conservatives.

As for the single issue that reportedly so vexes Helms Weld's support for
the medical use of marijuana Weld is not only right, he is humane as well.
Chairman Helms, the tobacco lobby's main squeeze, would let people smoke
anything unless, of course, it would alleviate their pain. Go figure.

In the face of this trifecta of prejudice, ignorance and moral certainty,
most of the Senate has simply rolled over. In some quarters, it is Weld
himself who is denounced: Doesn't this guy understand the rules? Doesn't he
know you never take on the chairman? What is he some sort of grandstander?
Well, yes to the last but so what? It's his way of turning a doomed
nomination into a lost cause. That, as it happens, is something.

The cause, both noble and mundane, is to air out the musty, fusty and
occasionally mean Republican Party and, if possible, make Weld ambassador to
Mexico. As it stands now, the GOP has become a redoubt of intolerance
against gays, against the poor, against immigrants and, of course, against
the government itself. In Helms's case, one has to add that he has been
against civil rights and, in his political campaigns, fair play itself. He's
a dirty fighter who, when the going gets tough, panders to white racism.

So we ought to all thank William Weld. He's an American aristocrat for sure,
rich and so easily bored he found being governor of Massachusetts a
soporific. "He's not one of us," Eliott Abrams, a former Reagan
administration official, told Newsweek. "Us" is a cultural conservative, what
too often turns out to be a boob.

But Weld has, in an entertaining way, illuminated Jesse Helms as a man
possessed of shabby, antique thoughts. Lacking the ability to persuade, he
can only obstruct. In the end, his strength amounts to that of your standard
offtheshelf bully the weakness of his opponents.

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company