Eric Alterman: Think Again: Anniversaries: Remembering Ted Kennedy

[babylonsister]

Really good article about a man I miss a lot.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/09/ta090210.html


Think Again: Anniversaries: Remembering Ted Kennedy

SOURCE: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Sen. Ted Kennedy delivers remarks at the National Press Club in Washington on January 12, 2005. Kennedy died on August 25 last year.

By Eric Alterman | September 2, 2010

snip//

Kennedy would, over the course of the next half century, establish himself as among the most effective legislators in the history of the body, a man whose legacy would one day be ranked with those of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. As Newfield notes, from the time he delivered his maiden speech on the floor in support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Kennedy could claim to have played a pivotal role in:

* The Voting Rights Act of 1965
* The expansion of the voting franchise to 18-year-olds
* The $24 billion Kennedy-Hatch law of 1997, which provided health insurance to children with a new tax on tobacco
* Two increases in the minimum wage
* The Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, which made health insurance portable for workers
* The 1988 law that allocated $1.2 billion for AIDS testing, treatment, and research
* The 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act
* The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act
* The 1,200-page education reform act in 2001, which he negotiated directly with President George W. Bush and his staff

Kennedy also helped abolish the poll tax, liberalize immigration laws, fund cancer research, and create the Meals on Wheels program for shut-ins and the elderly. In 1985 Kennedy and Republican Lowell Weicker co-sponsored the legislation that imposed economic sanctions on the apartheid government of South Africa. The bill became law despite opposition from Bob Dole, a filibuster by Jesse Helms, and a veto by President Ronald Reagan. Only Kennedy could have mustered the votes to override by 78 to 21 a veto from Reagan at the height of his power.

And Kennedy ignited—and then led like a commando—the successful resistance to Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination by Reagan in 1987. Kennedy's passionate opposition from day one helped keep abortion legal in America. If confirmed, Bork would have provided the fifth vote to repeal Roe v. Wade. Instead, Reagan was forced to nominate Anthony Kennedy in Bork's place, and Justice Kennedy has supported the retention of legal abortion as settled precedent.

His final achievement—the one to which he dedicated more of himself than to any other—came after his death: the passage of Barack Obama’s health care reform plan in 2010. During the vote, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), who, at 92, had only a few more months to live, deviated from the protocol and shouted “This is for my friend Ted Kennedy.”

It behooves to remember how many moments of the deepest despair Ted Kennedy lived through, how many mistakes of his own he added to those obstacles life had dealt him, and how, despite his lack of apparent political promise at the time of his initial election to the Senate, how much he made of a life dedicated to an institution that appears designed to frustrate just such effort. Even accounting for all the privilege Kennedy enjoyed, and the sometimes infuriating manner in which he took advantage of it, I find that life inspiring, and hope that on this, the first anniversary of his death, you will, too—no matter who happens to be rallying this year on the steps of the Capitol.