Henry Hyde was a gentleman and a patriot. He caught the falling flag when the nation needed his help. Bless him.
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Posted on 11/29/2007 8:43:01 AM PST by JohnLongIsland
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Rep. Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican who steered the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton and championed government restrictions on the funding of abortions, died Thursday. He was 83.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Rest in peace Henry! Thanks for serving the country during the impeachment debacle. Pity the Senators didn’t do their jobs.
God Bless his soul. May the Lord welcome him with open arms.
So, I guess Alec Baldwin can put down the stones?
RIP
Well done, thou good and faithful servant.
RIP, Henry. You did us proud.
Thank you for all you did, sir. RIP
RIP Henry, I loved your speech on the Rule of Law, it really hit home with me.
RIP Henry Hyde!
A good soul who will be missed.
We have lost a real hero. May he have a rich reward. One of the highlights of my life was meeting this man, who seemed larger than life, at the Dinner for the House Managers. I will cherish the pictures of him that I had taken with him that night. I will also always remember the speech he made when he opened the impeachment trial. I have a copy of it somewhere. I am saddened by this news.
I can’t seem to find that speech anywhere online. Freepers? You are the best researchers on the planet (witness last night).
I'll never forget his answer to a reporter's question after the Senate refused to acquit Clinton (I paraphrase) . . .
"Well, the people chose Barabbas, too -- didn't they?"
Sorry for the dupe...
Can we reasonably expect a State Funeral without it turning into a circus??
He may have been a good conservative, and a good Congressman, but he was no better a man than Bill Clinton. We have to be consistent; that's what separates us from the unprincipled lefties. Clinton was a cheating snake and so was Hyde.
-ccm
Allow me to embellish the story with an excerpt from The Greatest Story Ever Told.
By the time Annas reached home, a crowd had gathered before his front door. Rough-looking men stood idly talking together, like laborers waiting for a foreman to come and give orders. Which, Annas reflected with satisfaction, was exactly what they were - laborers, hired mobmen, shouters, screamers, fist-shakers, noisy professional pickets who would rail against any person or any cause - for pay. Tonight Caiphas would be their foreman.Caiphas had worked swiftly. Not only had he assembled these hirelings to give tongue at the proper time, and sound as if they were the voice of all Judea, howling for blood, he had also assembled a troop of Temple guards, sentinels without weapons. These were men of the priestly classes, very important, too, and they let you know it by the way they swung their shoulders as they walked and the scornful way in which they looked past people in trouble. Their duties were to guard the Temple and maintain order; they had already been greatly reproached for not having prevented the disastrous scene in the Temple, when Jesus overturned the tables and whipped the money-changers.
... Presently they would be joined by Roman soldiers with armor and swords, who would give empire authority to the arrest.
I just found this, it’s not the speech I remember, but it’s an elegant reminder of Hyde’s sober assessment of his duty and a plea to the Senate to take Clinton’s perjuries seriously. Henry, RIP.
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/01/16/transcripts/hyde.html
God Bless him. One of the great ones.
May he rest in peace. He was a good Christian gentleman and a great American.
Did he lie under oath about it?
Be careful - you’re falling prey to the revisionism that’s gone on since Clinton left office. Clinton wasn’t impeached for having an affair - he was impeached for lying under oath in a SEXUAL HARASSMENT case. A sexual harasser = snake.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum, say nothing of the dead but what is good.
You have got to be kidding me. This is easily one of the most outrageous things I've seen posted in quite some time. I guess this means that you look up to bill klinton because your stupid, tasteless post proves that you'll never come within a million miles of measuring up to Henry Hyde. Shame on you!!
Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.
Anima eius, et animæ omnium fidelium defunctorum, per misericordiam Dei, requiescant in pace. Amen.
Rep. Hyde performed fine and noble service for this nation and for his constituents. May his family be comforted and the Lord welcoming him with open arms. RIP.
OK, so I’m not the only one that remembered that rude comment by Alec.
RIP, Congressman Hyde.
RIP....
My Encyclopedia Yearbook has him elected to the U.S. House as a Democrat in 1974, but as a Republican in 1976. Could the Times have gotten it wrong?
Henry Hyde helped pass the single most important pro-life legislation in history. It is named after him, and was passed in the 1970’s. It stops government from funding any elective abortions in the United States.
It is politically much more difficult to repeal something than it is to pass it, so we can safely say that the Hyde Amendment is probably the only reason why your tax money is not going to abort babies.
God bless Henry Hyde.
RIP
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In what was surely one of the most moving moments of the recent House debate on the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde spoke of the current dangers facing the nation, and his hope for the future.
“What we are telling you today,” said Chairman Hyde, “are not the ravings of some vast right-wing conspiracy, but a reaffirmation of a set of values that are tarnished and dim these days, but it is given to us to restore them so our Founding Fathers would be proud.” Deeply critical of the President’s conduct in allegedly lying to a grand jury and obstructing justice through other means, Hyde closed with a peroration directed not so much at his colleagues in Congress as to all of us.
“It’s your country,” said Hyde, “the President is our flag-bearer, out in front of our people. The flag is falling my friends — I ask you to catch the falling flag as we keep our appointment with history.”
Whatever one thinks of what should be done with President Clinton, Hyde’s notions that “the flag is falling” and that our founders’ “set of values…are tarnished and dim these days” must surely have resonance. With possibly deliberate irony, when Hyde asked us “to catch the falling flag as we keep our appointment with history,” he may have been referring as well to the effort to pass the Flag Protection Amendment, which will soon be reintroduced in Congress.
The Amendment is a small one, but there are those who are passionate about it, and those who believe that it represents an important restatement of our founders’ values. Its text simply provides that “Congress shall have the power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States,” but those eloquent 17 words would, at a stroke, return us to a more civilized state of constitutional law than we have had for some time.
When, in 1989, the Supreme Court reversed a century of jurisprudence and decided, by the slimmest of majorities, that desecrating the flag was simply political speech protected by the First Amendment, it ignored not only its own precedents, but also simple common sense.
Two of the Supreme Court’s greatest defenders of the First Amendment, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Associate Justice Hugo Black, for example, had no trouble distinguishing the intentionally outrageous and inflammatory act of flag desecration from the kind of speech Madison and Jefferson had in mind when the First Amendment was crafted. Neither do the 80 percent of the American public who favor the Flag Protection Amendment, or the 49 state legislatures that have petitioned Congress for its passage.
Sadly, many members of academic community and many editorial writers and commentators do not seem to have been able to make the distinction. Worried that any attempt to restrict expression — no matter how unseemly, insulting, or odious to those who sacrificed life or limb for their country or their families — would somehow result in a torrent of draconian legislation which would silence the press or public debate, the enemies of the Flag Protection Amendment have foolishly frustrated its passage. In the last Congress, the measure handily garnered the necessary two-thirds vote in the House of Representatives, but was never brought to the Senate floor because those who wished to see the measure defeated cravenly refused consent to allow a vote.
Those who are against the Flag Protection Amendment also seem to be against democracy, in that they seem wrongly to believe that the American people — who favor the amendment — shouldn’t be able to return us to the constitutional views of Earl Warren or Hugo Black.
In 1989, and again in 1990, the Supreme Court made a mistake when it declared that no statute could protect the flag from desecration. Over the more than two centuries of our constitutional experience, one tested and valued way for the American people to correct mistakes made by the court is through constitutional amendment, and this should be allowed to happen with the Flag Protection Amendment.
Those who would deny the will of the people to pass the Flag Protection Amendment not only fear and distrust their fellow citizens, but they also argue that the Amendment will be a dagger struck at the First Amendment and a trivialization of the Constitution. They never explain, of course, how something “trivial” could wreak such damage to freedom of speech, but they have a deeper inability to understand what the Flag Protection Amendment really represents.
The Flag Protection Amendment would not trivialize the Constitution. It would ennoble it further by providing a reaffirmation of the values of the framers Henry Hyde championed in his speech. The Flag Protection Amendment is a restatement of the most important rule of law in a constitutional republic — that there can be no liberty at all without some restraint; that liberty unchecked degenerates into license and erodes the foundation of all government.
The Flag Protection Amendment is a simple statement of the need for some civility, decorum, and honor in the life of our nation. It will erode no one’s freedom, but it will return to the American people their right to protect the unique and cherished symbol of their nationhood.
When Congress passes the amendment and it is ratified by the state legislators, we will have gone some distance toward responding to Henry Hyde’s plea to catch the falling flag and to restore the values of our framers.
— Author: Stephen B. Presser is the Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History at Northwestern University School of Law, a Professor of Business Law at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management of Northwestern University, and a Constitutional Issues Advisor to the Citizens’ Flag Alliance.
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RIP indeed. Hyde deserves to have his name engraved in history for having said what needed to be said about Clinton prior to his impeachment. I liked Hyde very much and regret his death.
A great man. May he rest in peace. He worked to save many babies who would otherwise have been aborted.
Slow night over at DU, so you had to post that trash here?
Prayers for Henry Hyde, and all concerned.
What a wonderful man!
I saw him speak (pro-life) in my area over 20 years ago.
I even got to talk with him, when he asked me where the elevator was. :)
He was such a gentleman.
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/LAW/10/01/scotus.clinton/
Hyde did his job; he fought the evil one. RIP!
R.I.P Henry...there aren’t too many politicians as completely honest and virtuous as he was. His passing, unfortunately, makes me ill since it reminds me of the morally bankrupt lowlifes we have today, with even a few in our own party. Perhaps his passing away can inspire some of his peers to live a righteous life and cause.
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