Robert Byrd, Senator for Spending
by Rob Schwarzwalder
June 28, 2010
The death of Senator Robert C. Byrd should give thoughtful Americans pause. Sen. Byrd was married for 69 years and was never tied to any moral or financial scandal. His personal life seems to have been exemplary, and in an age of tawdry political scandals this is not a small thing.
That he was briefly a member (a “Kleagle”) of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s became a rightful source of lifelong shame to him. The legacy of his racist past popped up from time to time, as when he used a coarse racial epithet in a 2004 interview with FOX News.
Today, though, the media are waxing rhapsodic about Sen. Byrd’s love of the Constitution. Many outlets are noting that he carried a small copy with him and that it was “well worn.” The Associated Press even writes that “Byrd’s lodestar was protecting the Constitution. He frequently pulled out a dog-eared copy of it from a pocket in one of his trademark three-piece suits.”
No one can dispute that Sen. Byrd frequently cited the Constitution and the prerogatives of the Senate. Yet, one might question whether or not the Constitution truly was his “lodestar.”
Sen. Byrd voted for some of the most anti-constitutional justices in Supreme Court history, men and women for whom the Constitution is legal putty to be reshaped in whatever form their ideological predispositions direct. He voted for an unconstitutional mandate upon all Americans that requires them to purchase health insurance. He supported Roe v. Wade and, perhaps most famously, welcomed his role as one of the Senates’ most vigorous pork-barrel spenders.
“I’m going to do everything I can for the people of West Virginia. That’s my duty! You can call it pork, if you want to, but that’s all right. I know what my duty is. My duty is to my people,” Sen. Byrd argued.
His people, indeed. In an embarrassing speech in 2002, he even called himself “Big Daddy” for his ability to funnel money to West Virginia projects.
Sen. Byrd called the Appropriations Committee, of which he was chair for many years, “the greatest committee.” In one sense, he was right – Appropriations has authority to spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually, which even in spendthrift DC is real power.
Sen. Byrd steered hundreds of millions to the Mountaineer State. Perhaps it is for that reason that Sen. Byrd’s name now graces nearly 40 locations in West Virginia.
Yet the Constitution nowhere gives Congress the authority to cull monies from the citizens of the various states and redistribute it as Senate power-brokers so desire. This is nothing more than legalized theft, and it is anti-constitutional.
Sen. Byrd, in all his writing and pondering about the U.S. Senate, its rules and its duties, should perhaps have taken counsel from the Senate’s first president, Thomas Jefferson: “To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”
Being a big spender of other people’s money is not the worst epitaph a statesman can have. Not the best, but not the worst.
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Comments
Byrd was a spender to be sure but both major parties put this country exactly where she is to day; bankrupt with our social security savings spent. Why this country won’t bring in a 3rd party to bring in fiscal sanity to this country amazes me. The lesser of 2 evils thinking has killed us and mortgaged our childrens future. The Dems are terrible but The GOP did no better in balancing the budget and safeguarding our SSI. Byrd is now gone; unfortunately all the rest of the crooks in BOTH parties need to go next.
By: John H. Guthrie | June 30, 2010 at 12:34 am
I’m a native West Virginian but no admirer of Byrd. Much of what what Byrd brought into WV was indeed pork. Yet much of it was also justifiable. As many Federal Agencies are locating facilities outside Washington D.C., much of what Byrd brought to WV would have gone somewhere else, such as the FBI National Fingerprinting facility. Despite the fact that pork is a major Federal problem, a good many projects, such as the finger printing facility are legitimate Federal projects. And since WV is made up of law abiding tax payers, it is only right that it should be the home of some of these projects. Concerning these legitimate projects, no taxpayer was robbed. These legitimate projects have positively transformed parts of WV, making them economically viable. As I said, I do not admire Byrd highly. Yet for all the bad pork has done and whatever our political party (I am a conservative Evangelical and a Republican) , we cannot lose track of the fact that not every project he brought to WV was wasteful spending. Nor was he really “the King of pork.” That honor goes to Trent Lott.