Rule Of Law Quotes
This was America’s first Presidential impeachment which occurred just a few years after America’s greatest crisis—the Civil War. It was handled in an orderly, serious manner following the law throughout.
Jefferson had just won a bitter, partisan election, and this was his attempt to reach out to the Federalist minority whose newspapers had been predicting that a Jefferson victory would bring a tyranny of the majority.
At the time many of the powerful and influential upper class felt that some of the laws did not necessarily apply to them or their corporations. They bribed legislators to change laws when they were inconvenient to ignore. Roosevelt was the first President to take them on.
There were anti-Vietnam war protests going on throughout the country that year. In many of them, especially at universities, protesters took over buildings, and shut down operations. Most Republicans and many Democrats wanted the protests to end, mostly because they feared the spread of the anti-Vietnam war sentiment would catch on and become a position held by most Americans (which it did just as they feared,) They were restrained in what they could do legally by the 1st Amendment. However, there was much breaking of minor laws in many of the demonstrations and that was the focus of the effort to suppress the demonstrations. But in the tradition of civil disobedience, it was the lawbreaking that tended to get the press attention and coverage, so the leaders of the anti-war movement advocated even more lawbreaking, hence Dirksen’s statement to the convention.
Actually Adams had used the phrase in 1774 writing in the Massachusetts Gazette under the pseudonym Novanglus. See James Harrington related quotes for an earlier similar expression for which Adams is sometimes credited.
