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Ex-Arkansas governor, USA senator Dale Bumpers dies at age 90
Bumpers delivered an impassioned defense of Clinton in 1999. During the remarks, Bumpers called for the Senate to rise above politics and partisanship to defense the Constitution.
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In that closing argument, Bumpers also included several lighter observations – including one instance in which he paraphrased H.L. Mencken: “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about money, it’s about money.’ And when you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about sex, ‘ it’s about sex”.
In 1974, Bumpers was elected to the U.S. Senate, where during his four terms he worked to increase funding for improving childhood vaccines for diseases like measles, mumps, whooping cough and polio and developing new vaccines for diseases like bacterial meningitis. “As governor, Bumpers pressured legislators for an increase in the personal income tax in order to raise teachers” salaries and succeeded in securing free textbooks for high school students. He would later say he believed his best chance at winning the presidency had been in 1976, when Georgia Democrat Jimmy Carter won the White House. “He often listed that as among his proudest battles, he fought against many efforts to amend the Constitution”. He argued the move would restrict, not expand, religious freedom. The Senate, despite being controlled by Republicans, ultimately voted to acquit Clinton of the charges in February 1999.
“I first knew him as a political opponent and I must confess he beat me like a drum”.
In the Senate, Bumpers neither chaired a major committee nor acquired an instinct for legislative horse-trading.
His causes were not necessarily of a cosmic nature. “He has been called the last Southern liberal, and he is proud of it”.
After a late-night debate between then-Sen.
Bumpers, however, found it hard at times to abide by his own preaching. Rockefeller dismissed him as “a vaguely pleasant man who had one speech, a shoeshine and a smile”.
Bumpers, born on August 12, 1925, in Charleston, Arkansas, served in the Marine Corps during World War Two before becoming a successful small-town lawyer. He cited his father, a hardware store operator who loved politics and admired President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as a lifelong inspiration. After his parents were killed in a vehicle crash in 1949, he returned to Charleston, Ark., to run the family business. After the war, he graduated from the University of Arkansas and earned a law degree from Northwestern University.
Bumpers also was an attorney for the Charleston School Board in 1954 when the board voted to integrate, two months after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that outlawed segregated schools, It was the first district among the 11 former Confederate states to integrate.
U.S. President Bill Clinton and former Sen. The “thought of fulfilling a lifelong ambition and taking Faubus out at the same time was too powerful to resist”, Bumpers wrote in his book.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe told a local TV station: “Dale Bumpers gave me my start in public service and remained my dear friend and mentor throughout the decades”.
The refined, brainy Fulbright was influential in Washington, but in Arkansas, as the challenger’s polling showed, he was perceived as aloof and highly vulnerable.
Bumpers served two terms as governor. Our hearts go out to Betty, Brent, Bill, and Brooke, and all the Bumpers clan.
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Former Senate legislative aide T. Ark Monroe III, now a Little Rock lawyer, recalled driving the senator to a speaking engagement at a Baptist church in the farming community of England, Arkansas. “Betty and the family are in our prayers”, Huckabee added on Twitter.