The snowy-haired senator from West Virginia insists on the slow, mellifluous cadences of the 19th Century, but when he thunders all take notice.
For more than three weeks, 77-year-old Robert Byrd has resisted the GOP’s balanced-budget amendment.
He may ultimately fail in preventing its passage. But in his many hours on the Senate floor, the venerable Democrat has marshaled every argument and probed every doubt. And in so doing he has perpetuated his image of a knight errant pledged to defend the castle at all costs.
Objecting to the amendment the other day, Byrd warned his colleagues against “grafting this pneumatic excrescence, this wart filled with wind onto our time-tested Constitution.”
They just don’t talk like that anymore.
While other politicians huff in weary platitudes and depend on polls and sound bites, Byrd recalls a time of reasoned persuasion. To make his case, he invokes Homeric insight, shares Shakespearean couplets and reads from the strong opinions of such Federalists as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.
Byrd is a reminder of times when gentlemen wore waistcoats and watch fobs. C-Span should put him on in black and white. Better yet, his speeches could be rerun on the Discovery Channel.
Congress’ role is to alert and inform as much as to legislate, Byrd said in an interview Thursday as he reflected on one of Woodrow Wilson’s admonitions. The balanced-budget amendment distresses him, he explained, because it threatens a pillar of the constitutional system. “And I am part of that institution and that history.”
Dressed in sober blue but without his paisley vest, Byrd said he believes the protracted debate has achieved its purpose of stiffening Democratic resistance and slowing down what he refers to disdainfully as this “so-called `Contract with America.’ “
Although his hands show the tremors of age, Byrd stands straight in the well of the Senate and speaks of his own contract with America, the Constitution. He keeps a dog-eared copy in his breast pocket in the same fashion, he relates, as Alexander the Great, who so idolized “The Iliad” that he kept a copy under his pillow.
When using mild language about the amendment, Byrd describes it as a “monstrosity,” as “this snake-oil amendment,” “this quack medicine” and “this pig in a giant poke.” One provision would “render nugatory” the voting power of all the smaller states, he believes.
With impeccable civility he shovels images as if each one might help bury this fiscal threat to the institution he loves: “It is an illusion without substance. It is cotton candy for the public mind. It is Tinkerbell on wings of gossamer. Disneyland has really come to Washington after all.”
But is his motivation pork or principle, critics ask. As chairman of the Appropriations Committee until this year, Byrd directed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal projects to his home state. He even acknowledges that some call him the “king of pork” and claim that is why he opposes the budget amendment.
“Fie on such little men who think in such little terms,” he declaimed.
As cantankerous as other senior senators such as Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, the difference with Byrd is that his arguments seem lofted on the passion of youth.
Byrd’s speeches are often prepared, but aides insist no one is sure what he will say until he utters the words. As staffer Ann Adler remarked, “He’s a master of off-the-cuff speakology.”
On the Senate floor Wednesday, Byrd complained that supporters of the amendment had a stock answer that fits all questions. “It is like a barber’s chair that fits all buttocks-the pin buttock, the quatch buttock, the brawn buttock or any buttock,” he said with a bow to Shakespeare’s “All’s Well That Ends Well.”
If he is the Democrats’ man for all seasons, to Republicans he is a genuine pain in the, well, you know.
His arcane knowledge of Senate rules and history alone makes him a formidable foe. He has spent 48 years in political life, moving from West Virginia politics to the U.S. House of Representatives for six years. In 1959 he became the 1,579th member sworn in to the Senate, joining others with such familiar names as Douglas, Humphrey, Johnson, Kennedy (John F.), Dirksen and Jackson.
“One by one the old landmarks of our political life have passed away,” Byrd said last week, lamenting the death of former Sen. William Fulbright. “One by one, the links which connect the glorious past with the present have been sundered.”
He has an avuncular demeanor on the floor, but is not crossed lightly. His chief debater on the amendment, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), says ruefully that he has had the experience of crossing the distinguished senator.
Sen. Robert Smith (R-N.H.) was respectful and compared Byrd to such orators as Clay, Webster and Calhoun. But he could not persuade Byrd the amendment was benign.
“Senator,” Byrd rejoined, “you cram these words into mine ears against the stomach of my sense.”
Byrd’s fondness for quoting Montesquieu and Oliver Wendell Holmes can be matched with language as abrupt and colloquial as mobster John Gotti’s.
In discussing the need to cut $1.5 trillion out of the budget in the next seven years, he posed the question: “Now, you may ask, what will get whacked? What will get whacked? What will get whacked?”
