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Vote: | And the president is all wrong when he maintains that a nominee should have an up-or-down vote. The Constitution doesn't say that. The Constitution doesn't say that that nominee shall have any vote at all. There doesn't have to even be a vote. |
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Vote: | As I see it, Iraq is only one facet - albeit the bloodiest one - of a constellation of dangerous challenges facing the United States today. |
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Vote: | Congress is not an ATM. |
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Vote: | Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal. |
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Vote: | I won't mince words - I am profoundly worried that the President may have a hidden agenda for dealing with Iran and Syria, and I am equally worried that the Administration has no agenda to manage what appears to be a worsening nuclear crisis in North Korea. |
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Vote: | Is it any wonder, why the approval ratings of the Congress go up every time we go into recess? |
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Vote: | It [the Senate] handed everything to a president, by way of using the military forces of this country where he would, when he would, how he would, as long as it was connected with Iraq. And that's a blotch upon this country and the Senate. |
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Vote: | It is money, money, money! Not ideas, not principles, but money that reigns supreme in American politics. |
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Vote: | One's family is the most important thing in life. I look at it this way: One of these days I'll be over in a hospital somewhere with four walls around me. And the only people who'll be with me will be my family. |
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Vote: | Our ideals of freedom, set forth and realized in our Constitution, are our greatest export to the world. |
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Vote: | Some events define and shape history with the force of plate tectonics, moving the world onto a new path. On September 17, 1787, just such an event occurred when the Constitution of the United States was signed. |
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Vote: | That's what the Senate is about. It's the last bastion of minority rights, where a minority can be heard, where a minority can stand on its feet, one individual if necessary, and speak until he falls into the dust. |
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Vote: | The ongoing strife in Iraq, and the billions of dollars that the President is seeking to continue that war, give me little comfort that this Administration has learned from its mistakes in Iraq. |
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Vote: | This war is not necessary. We are truly sleepwalking through history. |
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Vote: | To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences. |
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Vote: | We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men. But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. |
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Biography
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Robert Carlyle Byrd (born November 20, 1917) is a West Virginia Democrat serving in the United States Senate. As of 2005, he is the longest-serving member of the U.S. Congress, having served in the United States House of Representatives from January 3, 1953, until he entered the Senate on January 3, 1959; current Dean of the House John Dingell has only served since December 1955. At 87, Byrd is the oldest member of Congress. Some like to call Byrd a "walking encyclopedia" on the history of both the American and Roman senates.
Byrd has held the office of president pro tempore of the Senate three times, most recently from 2001 to 2003. He has served as a member of the Appropriations Committee since the 1950s and is chairman of the committee when the Democratic party is in the Senate majority. Should he win re-election in 2006 and serve a full term, his term will expire in January 2013, when he will have been in Congress for 60 years and the Senate for 54 years. He already holds the record for the longest uninterrupted term of service in the history of the U.S. Senate.
Biography
Early life and political career
Byrd was born Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr. in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, in 1917. When he was one year old, his mother died in the 1918 Flu Pandemic. In accordance with his mother's wishes, his father dispersed the family children among relatives. His father was a member of the KKK. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8272822/page/2/) He was given to the custody of an aunt and an uncle, Vlurma and Titus Byrd, who renamed him Robert Byrd; they raised him in the coal-mining region of southern West Virginia. His parents inculcated Byrd in "the typical southern viewpoint of the time," Bryd has written. "Blacks were generally distrusted by many whites, and I suspect they were subliminally feared." (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/18/AR2005061801105_pf.html) Byrd graduated as valedictorian of his high school class and soon afterwards married Erma Ora, his wife today. It was twelve years before he could afford to go to college. He eventually attended Beckley College, Concord College, Morris Harvey College, and Marshall College, all in West Virginia. He worked as a gas-station attendant, grocery-store clerk, shipyard welder, and butcher before he won a seat in the state legislature in 1946. Byrd was a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates from 1947 to 1950. He was a member of the West Virginia Senate from 1951 to 1952. Since that first bid for office, Byrd has never lost an election. He graduated from American University's Washington College of Law in 1963. He has two daughters, Mona and Marjorie, as well as several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
The senator ended his speech in a provocative fashion by repeating a famous quote from the Nuremberg Diary by G. M. Gilbert. In the following passage, Gilbert is interviewing Nazi war criminal Herman Goering:
Byrd vigorously pursues a role of guardian of the Senate's powers and precedents, and has positioned himself as a leading historian of the institution and a master of its rules and procedures.
Byrd is currently called the "Father of the Senate" — the senator with the longest continuous service. As the longest-serving Democratic senator, he has held the office of president pro tempore of the Senate three times, most recently from 2001-2003. He has served as a member of the Appropriations Committee since the 1950s and is chairman of the committee when the Democratic party is in the Senate majority. In May 2001, West Virginia Governor Bob Wise and both Houses of the West Virginia Legislature named Byrd "West Virginian of the 20th Century," which Byrd considered the greatest honor of his career.
As the 109th Congress began, Byrd was beginning his sixth decade in the Capitol and his forty-seventh year as a senator. If he completes his eighth term, he will surpass Strom Thurmond as the longest-serving senator in U.S. history. If he wins reelection in 2006 he will be on course to surpass Arizona's Carl T. Hayden as the longest-serving member of Congress in the fall of 2009.
Byrd has a cameo role as a Confederate general in the Warner Brothers film Gods and Generals (2003).
In July 2004, Byrd released the book Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency about the Bush presidency and the war in Iraq.
Voting record
Though a former party leader, Byrd is one of the most independent members of the Democratic caucus. Byrd sees himself as placing the prerogatives of the Senate and the needs of West Virginia before the interests of the Democratic party. Among Byrd's conservative positions were opposing President Clinton's efforts in 1993 to allow gays to serve in the military, affirmative action, and abortion rights. Like most members of his caucus, however, Byrd opposes the tax cuts implemented by President George W. Bush and is expected to vote against Bush's forthcoming Social Security reform proposal.
"The Gang of 14"
On May 23, 2005, Byrd was one of fourteen moderate senators to forge a compromise on the Democrats' use of the judicial filibuster, thus blocking the Republican leadership's attempt to implement the "nuclear option". Under the agreement, the Democrats would retain the power to filibuster a Bush judicial nominee only in an "extraordinary circumstance", and the three most conservative Bush appellate court nominees (Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owen and William Pryor) would receive a vote by the full Senate.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Robert Byrd".
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