Why Are Republicans "Being Careful" With Byrd?
This is just incomprehensible to me.
Republicans blasted [heh] Senator Robert Byrd on Wednesday for comparing GOP plans to use the so-called "nuclear option" in battles over judicial nominees to tactics employed by Adolf Hitler. Most critics, however, avoided mentioning Byrd's Ku Klux Klan past.
In other words, they didn't remotely "blast" him. I mean, come on, does the following comment from Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) sound like a "blasting"?
"Senator Byrd's inappropriate remarks comparing his Republican colleagues with Nazis are inexcusable."
Okay, Senator, I agree with that comment as far as it goes. But it doesn't go nearly far enough. Where's your outrage? Where's your righteous indignation? Where's your pride? And what are you going to do about it? To employ an expression that Senator Byrd doubtless knows and loves, why not call a spade a spade?
RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman's reaction was similarly flaccid:
[Byrd's] invocation of Hitler's Germany...is reprehensible and beyond the pale.
Yawn. Why don't you throw his Klan past back into his parchment-white face, Ken? Why don't you use this to bludgeon the Democrats who put him out there onto the PR defensive? God Almighty, don't any of you remember Trent Lott?
Jewish Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham Foxman used somewhat stronger language, but still didn't really retaliate, as opposed to just indulging in vigorous finger-wagging:
"It is hideous, outrageous and offensive for Senator Byrd to suggest that the Republican Party's tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party."
I won't chide Mr. Foxman, since I was surprised that the ADL threw its oar into this particular water. And besides, we've got the comments of Kevin Martin, a Washington-based independent consultant on black issues, to didn't pull any punches at all:
"Robert Byrd sought to use imagery of the holocaust, but was a member of a racist homegrown terrorist group in West Virginia," Martin told NewsMax.
"During WWII he supported what the Nazi’s had been doing to the Jews and used terror such as lynching to suppress the rights of all minorities here in America.”
Thank you, Mr. Martin. It's a crying shame you're not in the U.S. Senate.
I notice a few other things - that nobody has demanded an apology from "Sheets," and that he hasn't offered one. Not that I'm all that big on apologies, particularly public ones, which always strike me as being less than genuine almost by definition, but really, shouldn't we have gotten something better than a "clarification" that was little more than a reiteration?
Senator Robert Byrd's description of Adolf Hitler's rise to power was meant as a warning to heed the past and not as a comparison to Republicans, a spokesman for the West Virginia Democrat says....
"Terrible chapters of history ought never be repeated," said Tom Gavin, spokesman for Byrd. "All one needs to do is to look at history to see how dangerous it is to curb the rights of the minority."
This is real simple, Mr. Gavin: if your boss didn't intend to compare Republicans unfavorably to Nazis, he shouldn't have used Nazi Germany as his analogy. His ostensible point about "minority rights" (cough, gag, choke) - which is complete sophistry in any case - could have been made without resort to such poisonous, incendiary rhetoric.
Of course, it wouldn't have flown, because changing the filibuster rules - which Byrd himself did on several occasions when he was Majority Leader in the '70s - does not encroach upon "the rights of the minority" since there is no constitutionally enumerated right for the minority to filibuster judicial nominees. And while the Senate is meant to be more deliberative than the House, that doesn't mean that majority status can be completely drained of all practical effect just because the minority is a bunch of bitter-ender sore losers. The fact of the matter is that the Democrats lost the 2004 election, they're deep in the minority, and they don't have the numbers to defeat President Bush's nominees honestly. And they have no moral, and ought not have any legal, right to deny each a fair up-or-down floor vote. Period.
Byrd and his colleagues know all of this, and know that they don't have any compelling arguments to muster against it. Donk obstructionism isn't about "rights," it's about power. It's a political Samson complex. It is the real "nuclear" option.
This is why Republicans must change the rules - to restore order and fairness to the United States Senate and the judicial confirmation process.
And this is what people like "Sheets" Byrd fear so much that they have to draw parallels with one of the greatest evils of the last century.
This man should be censured immediately, and cashiered once and for all in 2006.
But don't count on it - after all, it wouldn't be the "careful" thing to do.
UPDATE: Tom Bevan over at realclearpolitics relays this delicious little morsel of research from reader Rick Walsh:
In 1975 the Senators changed the filibuster requirement from 67 votes to 60, after concluding that it only takes a simple majority of Senators to change the rules governing their proceedings. As Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) said at the time: "We cannot allow a minority" of the senators "to grab the Senate by the throat and hold it there."
Senators Leahy, Kennedy, Byrd, and Biden, all agreed. (emphasis added)
If I had copyrighted the expression "any port in a storm" as applied to these SOBs, I could have retired already.
Republicans blasted [heh] Senator Robert Byrd on Wednesday for comparing GOP plans to use the so-called "nuclear option" in battles over judicial nominees to tactics employed by Adolf Hitler. Most critics, however, avoided mentioning Byrd's Ku Klux Klan past.
In other words, they didn't remotely "blast" him. I mean, come on, does the following comment from Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) sound like a "blasting"?
"Senator Byrd's inappropriate remarks comparing his Republican colleagues with Nazis are inexcusable."
Okay, Senator, I agree with that comment as far as it goes. But it doesn't go nearly far enough. Where's your outrage? Where's your righteous indignation? Where's your pride? And what are you going to do about it? To employ an expression that Senator Byrd doubtless knows and loves, why not call a spade a spade?
RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman's reaction was similarly flaccid:
[Byrd's] invocation of Hitler's Germany...is reprehensible and beyond the pale.
Yawn. Why don't you throw his Klan past back into his parchment-white face, Ken? Why don't you use this to bludgeon the Democrats who put him out there onto the PR defensive? God Almighty, don't any of you remember Trent Lott?
Jewish Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham Foxman used somewhat stronger language, but still didn't really retaliate, as opposed to just indulging in vigorous finger-wagging:
"It is hideous, outrageous and offensive for Senator Byrd to suggest that the Republican Party's tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party."
I won't chide Mr. Foxman, since I was surprised that the ADL threw its oar into this particular water. And besides, we've got the comments of Kevin Martin, a Washington-based independent consultant on black issues, to didn't pull any punches at all:
"Robert Byrd sought to use imagery of the holocaust, but was a member of a racist homegrown terrorist group in West Virginia," Martin told NewsMax.
"During WWII he supported what the Nazi’s had been doing to the Jews and used terror such as lynching to suppress the rights of all minorities here in America.”
Thank you, Mr. Martin. It's a crying shame you're not in the U.S. Senate.
I notice a few other things - that nobody has demanded an apology from "Sheets," and that he hasn't offered one. Not that I'm all that big on apologies, particularly public ones, which always strike me as being less than genuine almost by definition, but really, shouldn't we have gotten something better than a "clarification" that was little more than a reiteration?
Senator Robert Byrd's description of Adolf Hitler's rise to power was meant as a warning to heed the past and not as a comparison to Republicans, a spokesman for the West Virginia Democrat says....
"Terrible chapters of history ought never be repeated," said Tom Gavin, spokesman for Byrd. "All one needs to do is to look at history to see how dangerous it is to curb the rights of the minority."
This is real simple, Mr. Gavin: if your boss didn't intend to compare Republicans unfavorably to Nazis, he shouldn't have used Nazi Germany as his analogy. His ostensible point about "minority rights" (cough, gag, choke) - which is complete sophistry in any case - could have been made without resort to such poisonous, incendiary rhetoric.
Of course, it wouldn't have flown, because changing the filibuster rules - which Byrd himself did on several occasions when he was Majority Leader in the '70s - does not encroach upon "the rights of the minority" since there is no constitutionally enumerated right for the minority to filibuster judicial nominees. And while the Senate is meant to be more deliberative than the House, that doesn't mean that majority status can be completely drained of all practical effect just because the minority is a bunch of bitter-ender sore losers. The fact of the matter is that the Democrats lost the 2004 election, they're deep in the minority, and they don't have the numbers to defeat President Bush's nominees honestly. And they have no moral, and ought not have any legal, right to deny each a fair up-or-down floor vote. Period.
Byrd and his colleagues know all of this, and know that they don't have any compelling arguments to muster against it. Donk obstructionism isn't about "rights," it's about power. It's a political Samson complex. It is the real "nuclear" option.
This is why Republicans must change the rules - to restore order and fairness to the United States Senate and the judicial confirmation process.
And this is what people like "Sheets" Byrd fear so much that they have to draw parallels with one of the greatest evils of the last century.
This man should be censured immediately, and cashiered once and for all in 2006.
But don't count on it - after all, it wouldn't be the "careful" thing to do.
UPDATE: Tom Bevan over at realclearpolitics relays this delicious little morsel of research from reader Rick Walsh:
In 1975 the Senators changed the filibuster requirement from 67 votes to 60, after concluding that it only takes a simple majority of Senators to change the rules governing their proceedings. As Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) said at the time: "We cannot allow a minority" of the senators "to grab the Senate by the throat and hold it there."
Senators Leahy, Kennedy, Byrd, and Biden, all agreed. (emphasis added)
If I had copyrighted the expression "any port in a storm" as applied to these SOBs, I could have retired already.
posted by JASmius at 10:46 AM
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