Robert Byrd Never to Rise Again

Carolyn Kaster / AP

Senator Robert Byrd

We're not supposed to speak sick of the dead, so let'southward remember some good things about the late Senator Robert C. Byrd.

He was diligent, intelligent and resilient, a cocky-taught kid of the dirt-poor hollows of West Virginia who became the longest-serving Congressman in U.Due south. history. He was the undisputed master of Senate procedure, a legislative workhorse in a body increasingly dominated by party-line show horses. He was big enough to admit some of his mistakes, like his stint as an exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan, and he was never also erstwhile to change some of his ways, finally supporting efforts to accost climate change and permit gays in the military machine during his last year of life. He was a strident critic of the Iraq War when that was still a mettlesome thing to be. He cast his vote for health intendance reform past saying, "Mr. President, this is for my friend Ted Kennedy!" — a lovely gesture no matter what you think of the beak.

He also seemed extremely devoted to his married woman Erma.

O.K. At present tin we speak sick of the dead?

Sorry, but when Byrd lies in state in his dear Senate today, plenty of his colleagues will share over-the-top reminiscences about the elderberry statesman who quoted Cicero while defending their prerogatives and protecting their pork. He'll exist eulogized equally the soul of the Senate, the embodiment of the institution, the hero of the earth's greatest deliberative body and and then on. That's fair, I suppose, because the Senate sucks. And then did the politics of Robert C. Byrd, an imperious and egomaniacal reactionary, an anachronism in a three-piece suit.

I'm not simply talking most his segregationist politics — although that's a good identify to start. "Rather I should die a thousand times, and come across Onetime Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise over again, than to come across this beloved land of ours become degraded past race mongrels," Byrd wrote to Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi in 1944.

Note not but the racism, merely too the logorrheic flag-waving sycophancy; as Byrd admitted in his hilariously awful 2005 autobiography, Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields, he joined the Klan for suck-up careerist reasons. And while he sometimes tried to describe his foray into white supremacy equally a kind of youthful indiscretion, he was 46 years old when he filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was merely subsequently that racism became a liability for aggressive Democratic politicians, and it was simply later that Byrd became a civil-rights advocate of sorts.

I say "of sorts" because Byrd's 832-page practice in gasbaggery includes a creepy passage in which he describes white ethnics as "former minorities" who "sought no special status," implicitly contrasting them with mod minorities who "button and shove and demand something for cipher." When Byrd broke the Senate's longevity tape, I poked fun at that passage along with others that decried "multiculturalism" and compared cities to "the jungles of Africa." But if Byrd's memoirs suggested some lingering discomfort with diversity, they revealed a much more visceral distaste for modernity, a violent nostalgia for "the days of my boyhood," when America was great, kids had manners, the funny papers were funny and fifty-fifty Coca-Cola was "a more than zestful and invigorating drinkable."

Uh, yeah — it was made with cocaine dorsum and so.

Information technology was no accident that a traditionalist with such an instinctive aversion to change became such a passionate defender of the U.South. Senate, the most powerful and consistent obstacle to change in America. Byrd actually wrote a four-volume history of the establishment that gives 2 million W Virginians the aforementioned power as 38 million Californians. (He besides wrote a history of the Roman Senate; information technology was always easy to imagine him in a toga, practicing his windy speeches in front end of a mirror.) He saw the Senate as an elite gild of gentleman solons, putting the brakes on the populist whims of the House, just equally the Founding Fathers envisioned it. Merely today, the Senate puts the brakes on just well-nigh everything, cheers largely to the filibuster, the underground hold and other antimajoritarian prerogatives that were never envisioned by the Founding Fathers and that institute their staunchest advocate in Senator Byrd. It was plumbing fixtures that with unemployment sky-loftier, specially in West Virginia, Byrd's death scuttled a bill that would extend unemployment benefits; it at present has "only" 59 votes.

In recent years, Byrd complained that the Republican minority was using the filibuster every bit a partisan cudgel to produce gridlock; he argued that sixty votes should be required only in extraordinary circumstances. (Like the Civil Rights Act of 1964?) And it's true that Byrd was a dealmaker. Washington'southward hyper-partisanship is not his fault. Only really, the omnipresent threat of the filibuster as well as the undercover concord is the logical extension of Byrd'southward haughty crusade for senatorial prerogatives against presidential power. It has made every Senator a king, with the power to rescue or derail the President'due south plan — or at least secure some goodies for his vote.

This was the other great cause of Byrd's career: the earmark. He famously promised to exist West Virginia'southward billion-dollar manufacture, and he kept his word. That's why there'south the Robert C. Byrd Highway, Robert C. Byrd State highway, Robert C. Byrd Cancer Inquiry Center, Robert C. Byrd Rural Health Eye, Robert C. Byrd Federal Edifice, Robert C. Byrd Federal Courthouse, Robert C. Byrd Academic and Technology Center, Robert C. Byrd Hardwood Technologies Middle, Robert C. Byrd Found for Avant-garde Flexible Manufacturing and a few dozen other pork-barrel projects named for the one-time chairman of the Appropriations Commission. At the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies, academics can written report how he moved the Bureau of Public Debt to West Virginia — and made certain it remained relevant.

Meanwhile, West Virginia is even so America'south 2d poorest state. It should exist Vermont with warmer weather condition; instead, it'due south Mississippi without a river. Byrd helped plough it into a welfare land, dependent on ane man with a pompadour and a gavel.

Byrd's doorstop of a memoir seems to chronicle every one of his visits to West Virginia farm groups and Kiwanis clubs and universities that gave him awards afterwards enjoying his largesse. He proudly recounts all the "rousing" and "enthusiastic" responses to his speeches. ("I lifted the mood of the crowd to soaring heights.") Of course they were rousing. They liked his handouts! Byrd was never corrupt in the bribe-taking sense, merely there was something unsettling about the pleasure he took in being West Virginia's carbohydrate daddy. He never actually seemed to believe that whatever other children of the coalfields could succeed without his help. He believed he was the indispensable man.

The danger of the modernistic Senate is that its members really have become indispensable. After the worst financial meltdown since the Depression, Congress tin can't pass financial reforms unless they're acceptable to Scott Brownish. With unemployment raging, Congress can't pass a jobs bill until Ben Nelson is O.K. with it. When a single Senator objects to a nominee for the National Labor Relations Lath, the President tin't fill vacancies throughout the Executive Branch. Information technology'south difficult to get anything washed — except send pork dorsum home. The Senate is however functioning smoothly in that respect.

And as dysfunctional equally the mod Senate may exist, it's nevertheless an excellent identify to work if you lot like to feel of import. There happen to exist quite a few Senators like that. Today, they'll say a lot of prissy things about Byrd.

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Source: http://content.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,2001187,00.html

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