Senate’s GOP Leader Vows to Bring Chemical Weapons Treaty to Vote

With Democrats predicting ratification, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) promised Thursday to break the legislative stranglehold on a treaty banning chemical weapons and bring it to the Senate floor later this month.

Under Lott’s plan, the vote would occur a few days before the April 29 deadline for the United States to join in administering the treaty.

Lott, however, gave no indication whether he intended to pry the treaty loose from a stubborn Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and his Foreign Relations Committee, where it has been tied up, or bypass Helms and the panel in a parliamentary maneuver.

Lott told reporters that he intends to bring the treaty to a vote during the week of April 21 and to permit four or five days of debate before a vote. The treaty, which requires a two-thirds vote of approval in the Senate for U.S. ratification, has already been approved by 70 nations and goes into effect April 29 with or without U.S. ratification.

If the Senate fails to ratify the treaty by the deadline, there will be no space on the treaty’s governing board and inspection teams for the United States, even if it does ratify the document later.

The treaty would ban the development, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons.

Trying to drum up public support for ratification, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told the American Society of Newspaper Editors on Thursday that the treaty “will enhance American leadership, protect American soldiers and make all of us safer.”

Albright said the treaty, signed by President George Bush in the last days of his administration in 1993, “has ‘made in America’ written all over it. . . . Administrations of both parties have pushed it.”

Predictions of ratification of the treaty came from Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“I think that there are enough votes, Republican and Democratic votes, to procedurally, as well as substantively, deal successfully with this treaty,” Daschle said.

Biden predicted two-thirds approval even if Lott, who has not announced his position, decides to vote against the treaty.