William Helms: “earlier this morning I was thinking about 20 years ago when a delightful young lady Senator from Kansas served in this…”

“earlier this morning I was thinking about 20 years ago when a delightful young lady Senator from Kansas served in this body, Nancy Kassebaum. She was a lady in every respect, and I miss her to this good day. I was thinking about Nancy because today is International Women's Day. The radical feminists are at it again. They have chosen once again to press their case for Senate ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and that has the acronym of CEDAW. Let's examine this treaty which women organizations--including some of the more liberal women in Congress--are so eager to have approved by the Congress and reported out, first of all, by the Foreign Affairs Committee, on which I am chairman. They put out a press release yesterday that they were going to picket me. I guess they were going to scream and holler at me as they tried to do not long ago, which suits me all right because I have been screamed and hollered at before by the same crowd. ``This urgently needed'' treaty, as they describe it, has been collecting dust in the Senate archives for 20 years. It was submitted by President Carter to the Senate in 1980. In these years since President Carter sent it to the Senate, the Democratic Party controlled the Senate for 10 of those years and the Democrats never brought it up for a vote.”