I'm not from WV but Sen Byrd is hands down my favorite Senator.
"Why? Because they don't like the rules! They want to change the rules so they can pack the courts!"... I like this campaign theme 'change the rules when it suites them'
A Master of the Senate's Ways Is Still Parrying in His Twilight
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: April 3, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/politics/03byrd.html?
WASHINGTON, April 2 - After 46 years in the United States Senate - including a 12-year stint as Democratic leader - Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia sees himself as its protector and defender, a guardian of its history and traditions.
A co-author of a four-volume tome of Senate history, Mr. Byrd, 87, comes to work each day with a tiny leather-bound copy of the Constitution in his left breast pocket. "I've forgotten more about the rules and procedures," Mr. Byrd said in an interview this week, "than most senators will ever know."
Now Mr. Byrd's reputation as an authority on all things senatorial is under attack. Lawmakers return to Washington on Monday after a two-week recess, and the Senate is headed for a procedural showdown over a Republican-led drive to end the minority Democrats' use of the filibuster in blocking President Bush's judicial nominees.
Mr. Byrd, the senior senator from West Virginia, is front and center in that fight, carrying the banner for his party and at the same time drawing the ire of conservatives outraged by his vocal defense of the filibuster.
Republicans hope to end judicial filibusters by changing Senate rules to prevent them - a move so explosive it has been dubbed "the nuclear option." Mr. Byrd, invoking Senate tradition and his beloved Constitution, is railing against it, drawing charges of hypocrisy from Republicans who say that when he was leader, he initiated some artful rules changes of his own.
"Such a sweet old man," Senator Rick Santorum said sardonically in an interview. Mr. Santorum, the Pennsylvania Republican who ranks third in his party's leadership, went on: "Facts are facts, and the fact is Senator Byrd has singularly used this tactic more than any other leader in the United States Senate. To come in and feign outrage over a technique of which he was the master is even a little much for senators to swallow."
The fight has made Mr. Byrd, currently the longest-serving member of the Senate, an unlikely cult hero among liberals and an object of derision among conservatives in the twilight of his political career. He is up for re-election in 2006, and though he has not yet formally said whether he will run ("I'm inclined to," is as far as he will go), Republicans are already working to unseat him.
Christian conservatives and right-wing bloggers are unearthing his past as a one-time member of the Ku Klux Klan who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ("I've said time and time again that I was wrong about that and I apologize," Mr. Byrd said.) The National Republican Senatorial Committee is sending out a stream of "Byrd watching" news releases. "Robert Byrd Flies Off the Deep End," declared one. "Robert's Rules of Order: Do as I Say, Not as I Did," blared another. And Republicans are decrying a recent speech by Mr. Byrd, in which he invoked Hitler to assail the nuclear option.
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