Dale Bumpers Quotes
We are here today because the President suffered a terrible moral lapse of marital infidelity—not a breach of the public trust, not a crime against society. It is a sex scandal …. And when you hear people say, “This is not about sex”—it is about sex.
Dale Bumpers, U. S. Senator (Democrat, AR), Arkansas Governor, Defense of President William Clinton at his Senate impeachment trial, January 20, 1999
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Bumpers had just retired from the Senate and served as a member of the Clinton defense team. See {634594} for another of Bumpers' quotes during the impeachment.
President Clinton had engaged in sex with an intern in the Oval Office and lied about it in investigations. Clinton had been an embarrassment anathema to the Republicans by producing a remarkably strong economy without cutting taxes, reducing government deficits, cutting the size of government, winning the Serbian war without a single American soldier dying, and preempting many of their programs. So the Republicans who controlled both Houses of Congress decided to impeach Clinton for the lies. Wexler argued that there was no damage done to the nation and the sex and lying did not rise to the required level of an impeachable offense. On a party line vote, Clinton was impeached, but the Republicans could not even get the majority of the Senate which they controlled. Most senators agreed with Wexler. See {583801} for a later summary of the absurdity of impeaching Clinton who left office as one of the most popular presidents in modern times.
During the presidential primaries the candidate spent the night with a woman who was not his wife:
Later, DeLay was convicted and sentenced to jail for money laundering and illegally spending and raising campaign funds. He was also reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for unethical methods of fund raising for other earlier actions.
Commenting on a rumor that President Richard Nixon had been a womanizer while in office:
The Republican Controlled House of Representatives impeached Clinton without a single Democratic vote. The Senate rejected the House blatant political maneuver and while 2/3 of the Senate was required for conviction, the Impeachment forces could not even get a majority in the most farcical impeachment in American History.
Ms. Andrew Jackson’s divorce from her first husband was not done following all the legal requirements of the time. Technically, she was therefore a bigamist and an adulteress at the same time. While most Americans had no problem with this, there was then as there has been ever since a small, religiously driven, cultural conservative movement who objected to a President who was living with an adulteress in bigamy. Hammond was one of them. Just as Bill Clinton was very popular despite his sexual, moral transgressions, so was Jackson. However the conservatives of Washington DC made her life socially miserable.
- Born: August 12, 1925
- Died: January 1, 2016
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- Profession:
Dale Leon Bumpers was an American politician who served as the 38th Governor of Arkansas (1971–1975) and in the United States Senate (1975–1999). He was a member of the Democratic Party. Prior to his death, he was counsel at the Washington, D.C. office of law firm Arent Fox LLP, where his clients included Riceland Foods and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
