Political Quotes

“the debate has centered on the most important feature of this bill, in my judgment, and that is the habeas corpus provisions. It took us a generation to convince the people on the left that we ought to have a workable, reassurable, predictable death penalty that would inexorably exact the punishment that was intended. We worked fro 20 years in this Chamber to try to accomplish a death penalty, because 80 percent of the American people wanted to see it happen. Then when we see the World Trade Center tragedy and other terrorism that has wreaked havoc across our land, then we reinstate the notion that we need the death penalty to allow a jury to exercise that ultimate option. Now we have before us a habeas corpus procedure that forbade the final solution to the death penalty problem; namely, the execution of the killer. Here is a killer who viciously kills hundreds of people in one act, who can sit in a cell and file paper after paper, habeas corpus and other documents, to prevent the ultimate punishment that the jury prescribed for him. In this antiterrorism bill, there is a strong, strong chain of events that lead from the kinds of acts that we abhor, like Oklahoma City, like the World Trade Center and others too horrible to conceive, where a jury is entitled to impose the death penalty.”