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 Unit… - Ted Kennedy

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 power and potential of prescription drugs have revolutionized health care. We break the promise we made then if we leave senior citizens with a kind of half-Medicare that leaves them without medicines essential to health or even life itself. Some say that in light of the budget projections, this nation cannot afford prescription drug coverage. But just as a family budget is a statement of a family's priorities, a national budget is a statement of national priorities -- and our national priorities are profoundly wrong if we continue to force senior citizens to choose between their prescriptions and their food or their heat or a decent home. It is long past time to close the gap on prescription drugs -- to make Medicare whole again -- and 2002 can and must be the year when we do it. This effort -- and the plight of the elderly -- must not become the pretext for a partisan plan which disguises yet another attempt to privatize Medicare. Our seniors deserve better than that. So I am here today to say that we will not rest, we will not give up, we will not stop until our senior citizens have a genuine Medicare prescription drug benefit that works well for all of them. If we have the will, we can take three other steps -- this year -- to ease the growing national crisis over access to health care.

This truly is a homecoming for me. It was here, in this City of Angels, on a warm summer night forty years ago, that America first looked across the New Frontier. A New Frontier, as my brother said, where there were "unsolved problems ..., unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice; unanswered questions of poverty and surplus." We were given just a thousand days on that journey of hope. Yet the challenge of those days and the resonance of my brother's words are still with us. Because today, our generation faces its own new frontier. And we are called upon to address our unsolved problems; our unconquered prejudice; our unanswered questions. Will we dare to dream of a far horizon -- or will we look inward; look backward; lower our sights and narrow our vision? That is the choice we face in the election of 2000.