A continuing aspect is that people are very fair, and they’re rather empathetic and sympathetic about their neighbors. This is something that they un… - Ted Kennedy

From the windows of my office in Boston … I can see the Golden Stairs from Boston Harbor where all eight of my great-grandparents set foot on this great land for the first time. That immigrant spirit of limitless possibility animates America even today.

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.

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.'