William Helms: “Mr. President, the day and the time have arrived. The pending business... is the Foreign Affairs Reform and…”

“Mr. President, the day and the time have arrived. The pending business... is the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1997, legislation which was reported from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this past Thursday, June 12, by a vote of 14 to 4. This legislation provides sweeping and long overdue reforms in America's foreign affairs agencies. It also mandates tough reforms at the United Nations. As I have tried to emphasize from the beginning, it has been my hope that the effort to produce this legislation would be a bipartisan one, dedicated to reorganization and revitalization of our foreign policy institutions. That is what this legislation is, and that is what has brought this bill to its present pendency in the Senate. It has been bipartisanship in the Senate, the same kind of honest give and take that led to some of the truly great decisions by this Senate in years past and in past decades. The important point is that this time around there has been a remarkable degree of working together, of give and take, and a determination by almost everybody involved that this time a piece of legislation will be enacted by the Congress and signed into law by the President of the United States.”