Alabama Congressman Spencer Bachus played a pivotal role in the Oct. 25 debt relief victory when Congress passed the foreign-operations spending bill that includes $435 million toward debt relief for the world’s poorest nations.
The spending bill cleared the House on a 307–101 vote. The Senate followed with a 65–27 vote. The bill now heads to President Clinton, who is expected to sign it into law.
The Jubilee 2000 campaign is religiously based and inspired by the Old Testament concept of “jubilee,” the idea that every 50 years debts should be forgiven and slaves set free.
Bread for the World, one of dozens of supporting organizations, said the real story behind the movement’s success “is the important role churches and individuals have played in bringing the debt-relief issue into the national arena.
The measure passed with broad bipartisan support. And that bipartisanship stemmed from the broad group of religious figures backing the initiative, including Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Jesse Jackson, Tony Campolo and others.
When the movement started, supporters had only one Democrat on board as a sponsor — Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. But momentum gained as people of faith across the country became active.
An early victory for the movement came when Bachus, an Alabama Republican, came on board after being approached by a group of Presbyterians in his district. Bachus, a Southern Baptist, was approached by Pat Pelham, a BFW member from Independent Presbyterian Church in Birmingham. Pelham and friends visited Bachus and told him that 30,000 children die every day from hunger and other preventable causes.
According to a column in Sojourners magazine written by Bread for the World’s David Beckmann, one member of Pelham’s group told Bachus, “If I had to choose between paying debt that I had inherited from my parents and buying food for my children, the choice would be clear.”
Against the recommendation of his staff, the meeting led Bachus to become an original sponsor of the measure and its most passionate congressional advocate.
When the House Banking Committee met to discuss the measure, Bachus said: “If we don’t write off some of this debt, poor people in these countries will be suffering for the rest of their lives. And we’ll be suffering a lot longer than that.”
Bachus’ comments led Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers to push for the initiative within the administration, and Clinton offered the proposal to leaders from the top industrialized nations of the world.
The White House recently called a bipartisan meeting to work on an agreement attended by Pat Robertson and other supporters. But standing in the way of the debt-relief package until recently was Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas.
Observers say Texas constituents got Gramm to support the initiative after Pat Robertson told “700 Club” viewers to call Gramm and Marv Knox, editor of the Texas Baptist Standard, wrote an editorial asking Texas Baptists to do the same.
Knox pointed out that under the debt-relief package “the poor countries must develop poverty-reduction strategies, economic reforms and procedures to ensure that the funds saved by this debt reduction will be channeled directly to reducing poverty.” (ABP)
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