Chris Smith: “Well, I think you just made an articulate defense of why a consistent, transparent human rights, pro-freedom…”

“Well, I think you just made an articulate defense of why a consistent, transparent human rights, pro-freedom, pro-democracy foreign policy is absolutely essential if we want a world that is free of tyranny. Pope John Paul II once said: If you want peace, work for justice. Then he said: If you want justice, work on behalf of the disenfranchised, unborn child, which I feel is a very good connection of human rights from womb to tomb. But you made an excellent point about Ronald Reagan. Yesterday, Natan Sharansky, the great dissident--and Frank Wolf and I actually got into the prison camp, Perm Camp 35, where he spent so many horrible days and nights in the ShiZO, which was the punishment cell. We were there in the late eighties right after he got out. And you remember, he didn't just walk in a straight line when the KGB said you walk right across. He did a zigzag, his ultimate final act of defiance to the KGB. But he said just what you brought out, Judge Gohmert, and that was that when Ronald Reagan talked about the Evil Empire, he said it again yesterday, they knew that we got it, that there was hope. And it gave him hope. It gave the other political dissidents hope. Jewish, Christian, whatever their denomination or religious belief, they said America understands the inherent failure of communism, the militant atheism which it represents, as Solzhenitsyn said it in his books, and he had hope.…”