Evan Bayh Quotes
It shouldn't take a constitutional crisis or an attack on the nation to create honest dialogue in the Senate.
Bayh, Evan. "Why I'm Leaving the Senate." The New York Times, The New York Times Company, 20 Feb. 2010.
Arguing that executive agreements were being used to circumvent the Senate right to ratify treaties:
In response to Administration tactics to delay a vote on the Church-Cooper proposal to limit American involvement in Cambodia after June 30, 1970, Senator Cotton asserted:
One of the reasons that judges and government officials have much difficulty in enforcing and interpreting laws is that the laws themselves are often very vague and/or ambiguous. Often this is the result of a political compromise or one part of a law being at odds with another written be a different legislators. Also, this is a way of Congress avoiding tough issues—every member can say what it is that he/she voted for and the vagueness allows their opponents to claim that it means just the opposite. The Executive and Judicial Branches then have to resolve the issue.
A senate visitor asked the chaplain if he prayed for the senators.
In 2012 the Republicans controlled the House but not the Senate or the White House. As the nation grows, the Congressionally voted budgets have implications and the budget ceiling has to be raised to balance the two. That had always been a bipartisan process over the life of the nation. However, the Republicans in the House decided that they would hold the debt ceiling legislation hostage to pressure the Senate and the White House to pass legislation that the majority of the Senate and the President thought was bad for the country. Krugman advised the President and the Senate to resist giving in to this blackmail even if the debt ceiling was hostage to their demands.
This was written during the George W. Bush Administration where the reaction to 9-11 was to curtail some civil rights and constitutional protections in favor of more national security. Bush was not the only President who eroded civil rights in a fear for National Security. FDR interned the Japanese Americans. Woodrow Wilson jailed pacifists who protested against the draft. John Adams passed the infamous Alien & Sedition Acts.
There was some political pressure in the North, to offer terms to the South where they could cease the rebellion and return to the Union and return to the status quo ante—before the rebellion.
The University of Alabama was one of the best college football teams and most people thought of Coach Bryant as singularly focused on football and nothing else. However, this quotation illustrates the degree of penetration and awareness that occurred when JFK was assassinated.
Birch Evans Bayh III is an American lawyer, lobbyist, and Democratic Party politician who served as a United States Senator from Indiana from 1999 to 2011 and the 46th Governor of Indiana from 1989 to 1997.
