NEA Bill Runs Into Helms Obstacle on Path to Senate

The National Endowment for the Arts, which earlier this week had seemed near the end of its bumper car ride through Congress, crashed into new political obstacles Wednesday as the Senate was preparing to act on the arts agency’s 1991 appropriations bill.

The trouble came in Senate actions on separate reauthorization and appropriations bills. The appropriations measure is part of a larger $11.7-billion money bill.

Senate sources and arts endowment officials confirmed Wednesday that Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the NEA’s key nemesis in Congress, has effectively blocked the reauthorization bill, which would renew the NEA for another three years, by informally notifying his colleagues that he opposes letting it reach the Senate floor.

On Tuesday night, the Senate Appropriations Committee rejected terms of a compromise 1991 funding bill passed by the House that had largely spared the NEA from strict regulation of the content of art it supports.

In the Tuesday action, the appropriations panel voted to retain a controversial NEA anti-obscenity stricture that has sparked three lawsuits and rejection of more than $750,000 in grants by NEA recipients.

The endowment has been the target of conservative criticism for the last year for funding exhibitions that many consider pornographic or sacrilegious.

The House has passed two different NEA bills. The first measure, passed overwhelmingly last week, reauthorizes the NEA for three more years. The second measure, passed Monday, provides money to the agency for 1991. The House version of the money bill would give the NEA $180 million for next year, with content restrictions imposed only on work judged obscene by criminal courts.

The Senate version of the appropriations bill provides $170 million, $5 million less than the Administration’s initial budget request, and prohibits support of obscene artworks. “The committee abhors obscenity and will not tolerate it,” a committee report released Wednesday said. This bill may come up for debate on the Senate floor today.

The Senate Appropriations Committee endorsed the controversial NEA practice, initiated by endowment Chairman John E. Frohnmayer, requiring recipients of NEA grants to sign an acknowledgment of the anti-obscenity restrictions. The requirement has provoked outrage in the nation’s arts community and a growing number of lawsuits and grant rejections.

Arts critics have said that the restriction amounts to the equivalent of an anti-obscenity loyalty oath. “The committee,” Wednesday’s report said, “believes such requirements (as the oath) are necessary . . . to enforce the law.”

The Senate money bill prohibits funding works, “including, but not limited to, depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, sexual exploitation of children or individuals engaged in sex acts.”