Opposition Sidetracks Helms Measure

The Senate twice approved a proposal by Sen. Jesse Helms (R.N.C.) that would put prayer back into public schools of America, but a wave of opposition has effectively sidetracked it, probably into oblivion for this session of Congress.

In a 51-40 vote, the Senate last night endorsed the Helms amendment that would deny the Supreme Court jurisdiction over state laws on voluntary school prayer. The vote affirmed the Senate’s action by a 47-37 vote last Thursday when the measure was added to the Administration-backed legislation to create a new U.S. department of education.

However, Majority Leader Robert Byrd (D.W.V.) and Sen. Abraham Ribicoff (D. Conn.) floor manager for the education bill, induced a switch of a dozen Senators who originally voted to support the Helms amendment to apply it to a judicial system legislation which is given minimum chances of adoption.

The judicial bill, voted by the Senate 53-40 is to go to the House where the Judiciary Committee led by Rep. Peter Rodino. (D.N.J.) is considered unlikely to approve it. The committee will receive the Senate bill after April 23 following the Congressional spring recess.

Following the Senate vote, Helms said the judicial bill “does not have a chance of survival” and charged that Rodino will submerge the bill “so deep that 14 bulldozers could not scratch the surface.”

Ribicoff told the Senate the “Helms amendment does not really belong in the legislation creating a department of education. That is a reorganization bill.” The amendment, he said, “logically belonged” in the judicial bill. “There is no question in my mind that if the Helms amendment were attached” to the education measure, “it would tend to kill it.”

Sen. Howard Baker (R.Tenn.), however, said “there is no more appropriate place to put statutory language dealing with the restoration of the state’s authority to judge the question of voluntary prayer in public schools than at the time we consider the creation of a new department of education.” He voted against shifting the amendment to the judicial bill.

Opposing the Helms amendment, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Edward Kennedy (D. Mass.) said its approval would mean that for the first time in 200 years Congress would “exclude from jurisdiction of federal courts” subjects involving “individual rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution.”

He said the amendment constituted an attack by Congress on a co-equal branch of the U.S. government and would suppress the federal court’s right to judge the constitutionality of U.S. laws and practices.

Sen, Charles Percy (R. III.) said that in the hour before the Senate vote he had met with 200 junior high school students from Illinois visiting the Capital and after a discussion on voluntary prayer in public schools, the students “voted overwhelmingly against it. I think there were less than a dozen in favor of school prayer.”