Political Quotes

“Senator Jesse Helms wrote me a letter yesterday regarding the Helms-Frist amendment. In that letter he said: You and I know the stunning facts: Nearly one million children are infected by HIV each year from their mothers during labor, delivery, or breast feeding. Our amendment will prevent hundreds of thousands of innocent young people from being infected in this manner. I wish you and the rest of our colleagues all the best as you deliberate on this important matter. Again, that was Senator Helms in a letter to me yesterday that was entered into the Record earlier tonight. For my colleagues, our amendment very simply strikes, on page 55, lines 10 through 19, and replaces that section with $200 million, $100 million more than in the underlying bill, to add to the U.S. effort to combat the ravages of global HIV/AIDS. The amendment does three things: No. 1, it requires that the new funds be focused on reducing mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS, a problem we know how to respond to, thereby greatly reducing the ravages of HIV/AIDS in innocent newborns. No. 2, it grants flexible authority to the President in spending the money so as to optimize the impact of the AIDS-fighting efforts of our Government. No. 3, it requires that this money be leveraged through funds matched by sources other than the U.S. Government in order to maximize their impact.”