At 76, Sen. Robert C. Byrd is the longest-serving Democrat in the U.S. Senate, and a man who Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), with a combination of exasperation and appreciation, recently called “a master at the game” of parliamentary procedure in the upper chamber.
Byrd’s mastery of the Senate’s convoluted rule book makes him one of the most formidable members and, ironically, one of the liberal Democrats’ greatest hopes of blunting Republican victories.
In liberal activists’ eyes, Byrd, who served as minority leader under President Ronald Reagan, is no champion of progressive causes; he saves his staunchest convictions for matters of senatorial prerogative. But with the GOP in control of House and Senate, intent on pushing through a sweeping conservative agenda, Byrd’s protective hackles have gone up. His zest for defending the Senate against what he considers undue legislative haste may be all that stands between the Republicans and their victories.
In recent weeks, Byrd has drawn the ire of Republicans for invoking long-forgotten Senate rules to slow the GOP’s legislative gallop to a canter. He has demanded committee reports before allowing the Senate to proceed with votes. He has used a senator’s prerogative to ask for suspension of committee hearings while the Senate is debating. And he has threatened, both implicitly and explicitly, to wield that most potent senatorial debate stoppers–the filibuster.
“Byrd is like an alligator: He lies still, but everybody knows he’s there and knows that in one second, he can eat you alive,” said political scientist John J. Pitney Jr. of Claremont McKenna College. “That commands a lot of respect, because the Senate runs on the power of anticipated reactions . . . . He has enormous psychological power.”
In addition to Senate rules, Byrd is master of many other bodies of knowledge. He reads the ancient Greeks and Romans and is an avid student of their culture, lecturing the Senate regularly on its lessons for contemporary America. He is on intimate terms with the Bible. And he is a constitutional scholar who carries a dog-eared copy of the U.S. Constitution in his breast pocket, over his heart.
Byrd also has the power of a seat considered unassailable. He has represented West Virginia in the Senate since 1958 and in six reelections has never won less than 65% of the vote. That support is largely due to Byrd’s skill at bringing federal pork home to his hard-scrabble state. For years, as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Byrd succeeded in winning millions of dollars’ worth of road-building projects and even an FBI fingerprint lab. Byrd maintains a fierce conviction that the federal government can, and should, make a difference in Americans’ daily lives.
On Thursday, Byrd sat down for an hour of conversation in the elegant office of the president pro tem. One of his sartorial trademarks, a scarlet vest, peaked from beneath a sober gray suit as he sat against a wall covered with portraits of past presidents pro tem. His office also bears evidence of his Senate service under nine presidents. A framed 1994 letter from President Bill Clinton, addressed to “Mr. Chairman,” thanks the West Virginian for “being one of legendary guardians of that institution.” An earlier letter, from former President Richard M. Nixon, is addressed, “Dear Bobby,” and wishes Byrd “many happy returns on Election Days in the years ahead.”
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Question: You have been vilified by many Republicans as the man intent on blocking the will of the people as expressed on Nov. 8. Is that true? What are you trying to accomplish?
Answer: The Framers were wise in establishing a constitutional system with separation of powers and checks and balances. Within that check and balance, the United States Senate is the key balancing wheel. In the Senate, there’s unlimited debate . . . . The Senate is a deliberative body . . . . As a senator, I have the responsibility to try to be a good legislator. We have a responsibility to the American people to carefully examine, with our own eyes, the major bills before the Senate, the major issues.
There is something called a “contract with America.” I have not read it. I have not signed it. I had no part in formulating it. I’ve read about it. I’ve heard about it. Also, I’ve heard that the desire was, on the part of the new majority in both houses, to ram this thing through. To get it enacted quickly–someone said something about 100 days. That may come to pass, I don’t know.
But I was reelected in this last election also–for my seventh term. The people of West Virginia did not reelect me to roll over and play dead for the new majority in the Senate. They did not reelect me on the basis of my support of a so-called “contract with America” because that wasn’t discussed in my campaign.
The people of West Virginia expect me to do my best to uphold the Constitution and to carefully study legislation that comes before the Senate, to vote for it or against it based on the facts as I see them.
Q: Do you have any concerns with the GOP citing you as Exhibit A of Democratic obstructionism that the American public will be turned off, that they’ll retaliate further against Democrats?
A: I should think that whoever says that should remember the Republicans in the last Congress. They obstructed from the very beginning of that Congress, and all the way through that Congress. They followed what appeared to me to be a considered plan to obstruct. There was a pattern of consistent obstruction.
So it would little behoove them to charge me with obstructionism . . . .
What’s obstruction? It depends upon what one’s motive is and what he’s objecting to. A senator has a right to slow legislation. One purpose of the Senate was to slow legislation. The Senate was intended to cool off legislation–just as you might pour hot coffee from a cup, the House, into a saucer to cool it off. That’s our responsibility as senators.
Take the unfunded-mandates bill. There is justification for some legislation to deal with the subject matter; I think the federal government has pushed too much off on the states. But . . . what’s the hurry? There must be something about this legislation that won’t stand scrutiny. There must be something in this legislation that, if we took the time, we would find we might want to try to amend.
Q: You’ve called efforts to pass a constitutional amendment to balance the budget “like putting an ugly tattoo on the forehead of a beautiful child.” Why do you say that?
A: One has to be somewhat astonished to see a party here on the Hill, a political party which (in 1993) did not give one single vote to a bill that reduced deficits over the subsequent five years, and then turn around and advocate that the way to do this is to amend the Constitution.
We hear them say, “We must put this in the Constitution so that we’ll force discipline on ourselves.” The Constitution cannot give senators and House members courage to take difficult stands when the courage is lacking. No constitutional amendment can do that. No constitutional amendment can give senators spine or members of the House spine, political spine, if they don’t have it to start with.
A balanced-budget amendment is a way of delaying the inevitable, and doing it on somebody else’s watch. If we wait seven years, that’s three full congressional terms for members of the House of Representatives. They can serve three terms and still not have to bite that bullet.
Q: So many of the Republicans’ most cherished reforms–the balanced-budget amendment, the term-limits amendment, the line-item veto–seem to involve changing the Constitution. What do you make of the sudden zeal to amend this document?
A: I’ve wondered myself. This is government by slogans. What we’re doing is writing into the Constitution a slogan.
What we see happening here is a determined effort, I think, perhaps unknowingly on the part of some, to change our form of government. They want to change it permanently by inscribing into the organic law–the fundamental law of this country which trumps any other law in the land–a process which will reduce to the lowest common denominator the federal government . . . . That change will be destructive to the structure of our constitutional system.
What we see happening here in these various subject areas is a deliberate effort to alter this Constitution in a way that the Framers, I’m sure, never foresaw.
Q: As a student of the ancients, do you find an apt analogy of where our democracy is right now in history? Is there another time that is like this time?
A: Yes, the ancient Romans. They revered their gods. Instilled in the Roman was the discipline and the respect for authority that were taught in the home. The Roman family was the cornerstone of the Roman society and the Roman body politic. The discipline that was instilled in the home carried over in the average Roman into his everyday life and it carried over into the legions . . . .
There was a constitution . . . that had in it a separation of powers, checks and balances, with the Senate having complete control over the purse. And there was a sense of destiny instilled into the ancient Roman. He believed that the gods favored Rome, that the gods had in mind a providential destiny for his country.
. . . The Romans grew from a tiny village on the banks of the Tiber . . . to become the mightiest empire of the world in its day. You’ve seen in America that sense of manifest destiny. Our forebears crossed the Appalachians, the Mississippi, the Great Plains, the Rockies, went from sea to shining sea . . . .
We see all these parallels that we saw in ancient Rome, the same parallels in our own country. The Romans, like Americans in recent decades, lost their reverence for their gods, their veneration of their ancestors. The small farmers left the farms. The unemployed farmers migrated into the cities and added to the unemployed, to the mob. No longer did the legions have as their mainstay the rugged farmers that came from the Apennines.
And they lost their discipline and their armies began to fill up the legions with barbarians. And when the Senate lost its nerve, lost its vision, lost its way and ceded power to dictators, it lost its power of the purse. And when the Senate gave away its power over the purse, it gave away its power to check the executive.
The Senate became impotent, indolent, submissive–a Senate in name only. It gave away its power. And in 476, Romulus Augustulus was replaced by a German invader, and the western seat of the empire was gone forever.
We see the same thing in America. We see this falling away of discipline, of reverence for the deity, veneration of ancestors, respect for law, respect for authority, patriotism . . . . These things are gradually eroding . . . . The Senate is being asked to cede its power, to shift the power of the purse to a President via the line-item veto, or via the constitutional amendment on the balanced budget.
Q: Among politicians–Democrat and Republican–are there other Robert Byrds out there? In the Congress of the next decade or two, will voters look kindly on a politician of your historical passion, your pride in the prerogative of the institution?
A: I think it would be very, very difficult for someone to come up from having a job pumping gas at a gas station, being a produce salesman, a butcher, a welder. It would be very, very difficult for that person to become a United States senator. It was not easy for me, but it’s going to be more difficult in the future.
Additionally, I’m not so sure that a person like myself will want to come here. I’m not sure they will believe that they can come here. I’m not so sure that they’ll aspire to participate in the rough game of politics, (given) the negativism that is taking over here in the Senate.
This Senate is a changed Senate. It has lost its soul. It’s not the kind of Senate that it was when I came here, when Richard Russell, Lister Hill, John McClellan, Specard Holland, Stuart Symington, Everett Dirksen, Norris Cotton, George Aiken, John Pastori, William Fulbright. These were big men. They had institutional memory. They believed in and revered the institution, they revered the Constitution. We didn’t have the negativism, the bitter partisanship that we have seen rule in the Senate the last two years–and it’s getting worse.
This is not to say that many of the men and women in that Senate are not high-caliber people. They are. They’re very intelligent. They’re far better at doing the 30-second sound bites than I ever could do, or that the men who were senators when I was here would do.
Television wasn’t a factor in my early campaigns. But it is today. And there is this mad rush for money–the mad chase for money so that one who is not wealthy, like myself, can continue in public service in a constitutional body which one loves. The money chase that one has to engage in takes our time. And it’s demeaning.
So it isn’t that we don’t have bright people here. It isn’t that we don’t have people who love their country. They do. But they don’t have the time. They don’t have the institutional memory. All too many apparently take the position that the party is first, last and everything–the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end–more important than anything else. They seem to think, especially, that the Senate is a crucible for the shaping of the party’s fortunes . . . .
George Washington warned us in his farewell address against factions, against parties. He should be living today. My gosh, he would be so astonished, so depressed, so disappointed! That seems to be the only goal of some in this Senate: Party! It doesn’t make any difference how many political corpses you trample on or walk over to get your party on top. The object is to win the next election. The object is to be able to say . . . “Our party will be in control.”
When I came here, there was partisanship. Everett Dirksen was a partisan. Mike Mansfield was a partisan. But they were not bitter partisans. There was civility in the Senate.*