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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (7749)	12/17/2003 11:03:04 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

THE CONTENDERS : Defining Issues In Braun-Helms Fight, Senate Searched Soul By Helen Dewar Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, December 12, 2003; Page A08 Second in an occasional series At first, many senators failed to see the trouble ahead, figuring they were just doing a harmless favor for a colleague and one of his favorite groups. But, for then-Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (D-Ill.), renewal of a federal patent for the insignia of the United Daughters of the Confederacy -- which featured the first national flag of the Confederacy encased in a wreath -- was anything but a harmless exercise. The result was one of the Senate's most dramatic days in years, including a rare burst of soul-searching rhetoric about how black and white Americans view their history and an equally rare defeat for a powerful senior senator -- Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) -- at the hands of a freshman who had been sworn in only six months before. By day's end, the Senate voted 75 to 25 to reject the patent it had approved, 52 to 48, a few hours before. For Braun, now seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, it was a high point in a single Senate term that produced mixed results, including legislative achievements on education and pensions but also a series of ethics controversies that contributed to her defeat for reelection in 1998. "It was a hard-fought moment," one of few debates since struggles over civil rights in the 1960s during which issues of race and slavery were discussed so candidly on the Senate floor, she said in an interview last month with Washington Post editors and reporters. Elected in a 1992 upset, Braun was the first African American to serve in the Senate since the 1970s and the only woman of her ancestry ever to serve in the chamber. In her first few months in the Senate, she involved herself with fiscal and other issues that are usual fare for senators. She was not looking for a confrontation over race; instead it found her. Helms first tried to win approval of the Senate Judiciary Committee for extension of the group's design patent, a largely honorific protection that Congress routinely confers on a relatively small number of national groups. The patent had been extended without controversy in the past, but Braun and others banded together to kill the latest extension in committee. An angry Helms decided to take his fight to the floor, where he figured he might do better. Braun was attending a Judiciary Committee hearing the morning of July 22, 1993, when an aide brought word that Helms was trying to add the United Daughters of the Confederacy measure to a national service bill pending on the floor. She bounded back to the chamber, furious and ready for a fight. "Those of us whose ancestors fought on a different side in the Civil War, or who were held, frankly, as human chattel under the Confederate flag, are duty-bound to honor our ancestors as well by asking whether such recognition by the U.S. Senate is appropriate," she said on the floor. She recalled that Confederate symbols figured prominently in more recent resistance to civil rights in the South and added, "Now, in this time, in 1993, when we see the Confederate symbols hauled out, everybody knows what that means." Helms cautioned Braun not to pursue "an inflammatory political gambit" and said the group was a charitable one with no racial motivations. "These good ladies have a fine history, and they do not deserve to have been singled out for an undeserved rebuke," he said. The Senate agreed, or so it seemed, as a narrow majority refused to kill Helms's proposal, signaling its likely approval. A dozen Democrats, mostly from southern and border states, joined most Republicans in supporting Helms. But Braun continued to fight, cranking up her rhetoric and vowing a filibuster if necessary to block the Helms proposal. "If I have to stand here until this room freezes over . . . I am going to do so," she said. "Because I will tell you, this is something that has no place in our modern times. It has no place in this body. . . . It has no place in our society." Gradually other senators began to speak up in defense of her position, some with startling effect.