Ted Kennedy Quotes

I believe that the most enduring legacy of the September 11 attacks is a new sense of community among all Americans. Four hundred years ago, the poet John Donne wrote that "No man is an island." Today, our country reaffirms the truth of those words. We understand that if one of us is hurting, all of us hurt. This renewed national spirit leads us to reaffirm the basic social bond that unites us all. Every American should have the opportunity to receive a quality education, a job that respects their dignity and protects their safety, and health care that does not condemn those whose health is impaired to a lifetime of poverty and lost opportunity

The impeachment process was never intended to become a weapon for a partisan majority in Congress to attack the President. To do so is a violation of the fundamental separation of powers doctrine at the heart of the Constitution. It is an invitation to future partisan majorities in future Congresses to use the impeachment power to undermine the President. It could weaken Republican and Democratic Presidents alike for years to come. This case is a constitutional travesty. We deplore the conduct of President Clinton that led to this yearlong distraction for the nation. But we should deplore even more the partisan attempt to abuse the Constitution by misusing the impeachment power.

The Constitution has guided our country well for two centuries. The decision we make now goes far beyond this President. As we decide whether President Clinton will be removed from office, the future of the Presidency and the well-being of our democracy itself are at stake. How will history remember this Congress? The Radical Republicans in the middle of the 19th century were condemned in the eyes of history for using impeachment as a partisan vendetta against President Andrew Johnson. And I believe the Radical Republicans at the end of the 20th century will be condemned even more severely by history for their partisan vendetta against President Clinton.

Other precedents also undermine the House Managers' insistence that the Senate is bound to remove President Clinton from office. The House Judiciary Committee refused on a bipartisan basis to impeach President Nixon for deliberately lying under oath to the Internal Revenue Service, although he under reported his taxable income by at least $796,000. During the 1974 Judiciary Committee debates, many Republican and Democratic members of the Committee agreed that tax fraud was not the kind of abuse of power that impeachment was designed to remedy. Finally, the House Managers argue that President Clinton must be removed to protect the rule of law and cleanse the office. It is not enough, they say, that he can be prosecuted once he leaves office. But protecting the rule of law under the Constitution is not the proper standard for removal of the President. Before impeaching and convicting the President, the Senate must find that he committed 'Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.' As Professor Laurence Tribe testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, '[i]f the proposition is that when the President is a law breaker, has committed any crime, then the rule of law and the take care clause requires that one impeach him, then we have rewritten the [impeachment] clause.'

The House Managers apparently made no attempt to obtain scholarly support for their opposition. It is a fair inference that they did not do so because they knew they could not obtain it. The House Managers argue that because the Senate convicted and removed three federal judges for making perjurious statements, we must now convict and remove the President. But, to determine whether or not President Clinton should be removed from office requires the Senate to do more than make simplistic analogies to federal judges. Removal of the President of the United States and removal of a federal judge are vastly different. The President is unique, and his role is in no way comparable to the role of the over 900 federal judges we have today. The impact on the country of removing one of 900 federal judges is infinitesimal, compared to the impact of removing the only President we have. And the people elect the President for a specific four year term, while federal judges are appointed for life, subject to good behavior. These distinctions are obvious, and they make all the difference.

The law professors wrote, "[i]t goes without saying that lying under oath is a very serious offense. But even if the House of Representatives had the constitutional authority to impeach for any instance of perjury or obstruction of justice, a responsible House would not exercise this awesome power on the facts alleged in this case." The historians wrote, "[t]he Framers explicitly reserved [impeachment] for high crimes and misdemeanors in the exercise of executive power. Impeachment for anything else would, according to James Madison, leave the President to serve 'during the pleasure of the Senate,' thereby mangling the system of checks and balances that is our chief safeguard against abuses of power . . . Although we do not condone President Clinton's private behavior or his subsequent attempts to deceive, the current charges against him depart from what the Framers saw as grounds for impeachment."

The distinguished historian, Professor Arthur Schlesinger, told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, the "[e]vidence seems to me conclusive that the Founding Fathers saw impeachment as a remedy for grave and momentous offenses against the Constitution; George Mason said, great crimes, great and dangerous offenses, attempts to subvert the Constitution." In addition to Professor Schlesinger, over 430 law professors and over 400 historians and constitutional scholars have stated emphatically that the allegations against President Clinton do not meet the standard set by the Constitution for impeachment. The scholarly support for the argument that the charges against President Clinton do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses--even if they are true--is overwhelming, and it cannot be ignored.

As Charles Black stated in his highly regarded work on impeachment, the two specific impeachable offenses--treason and bribery--can help identify both the 'ordinary crimes which ought also to be looked upon as impeachable offenses, and those serious misdeeds, not ordinary crimes, which ought to be looked on as impeachable offenses..." Using treason and bribery as "the miners' canaries," Professor Black states that "high crimes and misdemeanors, in the constitutional sense, ought to be held to be those offenses which are rather obviously wrong, whether or not 'criminal,' and which so seriously threaten the order of political society as to make pestilent and dangerous the continuance in power of their perpetrator."

The debate surrounding the Impeachment Clause was significant. By first expanding and then narrowing the clause, the Framers clearly intended that the President could be removed from office for 'crimes' beyond treason and bribery, but that he could not be removed for inefficient administration or administration inconsistent with the dominant view in Congress. Impeachment was not to be the illegitimate twin of the English vote of 'No Confidence' under a parliamentary system of government. The doctrine of separation of powers was paramount. The President was to serve at the pleasure of the people, not the pleasure of the Congress, and certainly not at the pleasure of a willful partisan majority in the House of Representatives.

Every four years, citizens of our country exercise one of the most important rights of our democracy--the right to vote for the President of the United States. This constitutional privilege is valued by all Americans and envied by millions around the world. It proves that the will of the majority will prevail, and that power will be transferred peacefully through the election process from one President to the next, time and again.

There was no better way to spend an evening than to hear my brother swapping Irish stories with Tip. Jack loved him, and so did all the Kennedys. I'm sure that in heaven now, Tip is leading them all in a glorious round of "I'll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time." It may be apple blossom time up there, but here on earth, a beautiful blossom is gone. Still, the Speaker will always be with us in our mind's eye, in the hearts of thousands of his friends, and the tens of millions more who never met him, but whose lives are better today and whose hopes are brighter because he was a Speaker who spoke so powerfully for them. In an era so much pretension and superficiality and polldriven decisions in public life, Tip O'Neill was the real thing, and we were fortunate to have him as our leader.

He never mortgaged his beliefs to the passing fashions of the time. He walked with Presidents and Kings, but his favorite stroll was always down the street in Cambridge to Barry's Corner. He became one of the most powerful men in the world--but he never forgot the worker in Somerville, the senior citizens in East Boston, the barker in North Cambridge, the young family starting out whose grandparents he knew. His Irish smile could light up a living room, the whole chamber of the House of Representatives, and the entire State of Massachusetts. The congressional district he served had also been President Kennedy's district when my brother was in the House--and my grandfather Honey Fitz' before that.

All of those Americans are better off today because of Tip O'Neill. When his political opponents tried to make him a symbol of the past, they succeeded only in turning him into an even greater national hero than before. He was the glue that held the Democratic Party together in the Reagan years, and no one could have done it better. He was also the only man we knew in Washington who was bigger than the budget deficit. One thing for sure about Tip O'Neill--when you saw him, no one ever said, "Where's the beef." And no one ever said that about his bedrock beliefs either. We loved to compare our diets and joke about them. People often tell me that I have to lose more weight if I want to stay in public life. It seems that they don't care about my vision of the country, as long as I can see my toes. I told that to Tip once, and he said "What are toes?"

And of course, all of us in Congress quickly learned to host fundraisers the way Tip O'Neill did it--a thousand dollars if you came, and two thousand dollars if you didn't. Tip was scrupulously neutral in the 1980 Democratic primaries between President Carter and myself. But he told me that every night, before he went to sleep, he was secretly getting down on his knees and praying that we would have another Irish President of the United States. The prayer was a little ambiguous--but Tip's friend Ronald Reagan was very grateful. There was never any secret about the genius of Tip O'Neill. In his years as Speaker of the House, the entire Nation came to know him and love him as we did in Massachusetts. He was a Speaker who was never afraid to speak out for the average man and woman--the worker trying to keep a job, the child going hungry in the night, the family struggling to make ends meet, the senior citizen trying to live in dignity in retirement.

There was the time, shortly after the Supreme Cour<nowiki/>t's decision in Roe versus Wade in 1973, when Cardinal Medeiros called Tip and asked to see him on a matter of great urgency. With some trepidation about the purpose of the visit, Tip agreed to see him right away. As it turned out, Cardinal Medeiros was extremely concerned about a powerful hurricane that had just devastated the Cape Verde Islands. He had a specific request for Tip--to see if $8 million in emergency relief could be included in the foreign aid appropriations bill. Tip, with that irrepressible twinkle in his eye, replied, "Your Eminence, I'll put $16 million in, if you won't mention Roe versus Wade." One of Tip's most famous stories concerned the gift by Henry Ford of $5,000 toward a new hospital in Ireland. Unfortunately, the local newspaper the next day reported that the gift was $50,000. The editor apologized profusely for the mistake, and said he'd run a correction right away, explaining that the gift was only $5,000. It took Henry Ford about 10 seconds to realize what was happening, and he said, "No, don't do that. I'll give you the $50,000, but on one condition--that you put a plaque over the entrance to the hospital with this inscription--'I came unto you, and you took me in.'"