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 This could have been the U.S. Senate, were it not for one thing:
it went on to pass a massive immigration-reform bill this week.
"We compromised," said Tacora Mcneil Davis, a high school student
playing a Republican Senator in a mock legislative session at
Boston's Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate.
"We got everything we want, and we have the Democrats' support,"
said the 17-year-old. "It should pass."
Opened in March, the institute was imagined by the late Democrat,
who died in 2009, as a place that could rekindle lost respect for a
stalled Senate.
The institute is not the first named for a U.S. Senator: The
University of Louisville in Kentucky is home to the McConnell
Center, affiliated with U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
while the University of Connecticut hosts a Thomas J. Dodd Research
Center, named for the late Senator who also served as a prosecutor
in the Nuremberg trials after World War II.
 But unlike those highly academic institutions, the Kennedy Institute
also hosts the only full-scale replica of the U.S. Senate chamber,
where school groups might be awed not only by the grandeur of the
room, but by the potential of the people inside it to chart the
nation's future.
Kennedy, part of one of the nation's most storied political
dynasties, is widely remembered for approaching legislation with a
willingness to compromise despite his liberal passions.
"Senator Kennedy was clear that he didn't want it to be a monument
to himself but to the 2,000-plus people who have served in the U.S.
Senate since the beginning," said Jean McCormack, who serves as the
institute's president. "He felt there was something about the place,
coming to the place and being on the floor that calls to your better
self, so he wanted that to happen."
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The institute hosts tablet-assisted simulations for the public and
school groups to try out governing, assigning visitors political
parties, walking them through subcommittees, and dispatching them to
come up with a bill that satisfies not just their priorities, but
those of their colleagues.
Seated at their desks this week, the class of teen students from
Boston's City on a Hill Charter Public School looked little like the
institution that convenes in Washington, D.C. About two-thirds of
them were eligible for free lunch, and most of the class was
Hispanic or African-American.
They also went on to behave less like the gridlocked Senate of today
and more like the productive body envisioned by the institution on
the Boston waterfront. Across a narrow drive is the John F. Kennedy
Presidential Library, which holds the records of the late Senator's
brother, the 35th U.S. President who was slain in 1963.
The students' mock bill passed with bipartisan support (32-17),
though the compromise meant a bill that Matt Wilding, who produces
the institute’s education programs, described as the most
conservative the institute has seen in its three-month history.
Under it, the U.S. government would accelerate its efforts to deport
undocumented immigrants and deny them any path to citizenship.
(Editing by Scott Malone and David Gregorio)
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