Bill Clinton in Against the Tide, by Lincoln Chafee

On Homeland Security: 1990s terrorism commission concluded US would get hit big

[Condi Rice said about the Commission report], "That commission said we are going to get hit in the US and we are going to get hit big. That's number 1. And number 2, we have big systemic problems. The FBI doesn't work the way it should and it doesn't communicate with the intelligence." The thrust of Rice's answer was that the president had been in office only 233 days. It was another way of saying Bush's watch had not really started.

In her answers to the commission, Rice kept steering the testimony back to the previous administration. "I think the question, is why over all of these years did we not address the structural problems that were there, with the FBI, with the CIA."

On Tax Reform: 2000: Vetoed abolition of the Marriage Tax

Now that we no longer had to spend enormous sums to counterbalance the former Soviet Union, it was time to do constructive things with our hard-won surplus. Both parties overwhelmingly supported fixing the marriage penalty.

President Clinton also vetoed the Marriage Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2000, calling it "poorly targeted and one part of a costly and regressive tax plan that reverses the principle of fiscal responsibility that has contributed to the longest economic expansion in history." He was right, and most Republican senators agreed privately that he was right.