Robert C. Byrd died in night. The Internet is stuffing with discerning obituaries, including at the Charleston Gazette and Joe Holley's remembrance at The Post. I won't endeavour to partnership them.
Instead, I want to disparage about the Senate that Byrd leaves behind. Byrd was, famously, a maestro of the body's arcane rules. He wrote a four-volume ancient history of the institution. At a fresh tell off on the portrayal of the Senate, the tub-thumper said that there were only ever two population in the scope who knew what was thriving on: The parliamentarian and Robert Byrd. This was a capability born of necessity.
Byrd didn't have the back-slapping bonhomie that sped the arise of most of the body's famed members. "Dour and aloof," writes Holley, "a socially perilous gatecrasher in the clubby confines of the Senate, Mr. Byrd relied not on psyche but on dogged notoriety to name to follow on Capitol Hill." That notice to factor sooner got him elected party whip, and then maturity leader. Sen. Howard Baker, who led the Republicans when Byrd led the Democrats, once told me that he lop a deal with Byrd on his chief prime in office.
If you never use the rules to also out of the blue me, he told Byrd, I'll never use them to set you. Byrd mentation it over till the afternoon. Then he agreed. The deal held.
That was the temperament of the Senate in Byrd's day: It was glutinous with rules that could be Euphemistic pre-owned to couple the institution in knots, but those rules were governed by norms that were worn to preserve the institution functioning. It was this institution that led Byrd to inscribe a letter opposing filibuster melioration earlier this year. "If the Senate rules are being abused," he , "it does not ineluctably follow that the revelation is to change the rules. Senators are required to exercise their best judgment when invoking their correct to extended debate." In other words, the Senate needed to reestablish its norms, not shift its rules.
But the post is too far gone for all that. The Senate is now a stead of blanket holds and plan filibusters and anonymous impediment and party-line votes. The whosis about norms is that once broken, they're approximately tiresome forever. Republicans aver the story of Trent Lott and Orrin Hatch explaining to their colleagues that legal filibusters merely weren't done, only to consort with Democrats filibuster Miguel Estrada.
Now Republicans filibuster discriminatory nominees constantly. Conversely, Democrats carry weight the feature of George W. Bush using the budget amity transform to pass tax cuts -- the basic time the mechanicalism had ever been used to increase the deficit. That hand them cold to Republican cries that the procedure was limited in design and couldn't be reach-me-down to finish health-care reform.
In Byrd's day, the Senate had rules, but it functioned because of norms. Today, however, the norms have subdued down and it's stopped functioning -- or at least functioning well -- because of rules. Eventually, vary to the norms will direction to mutate in the rules. But we're in the decrease stretch when the Senate hasn't caught up to its own Aristotelianism entelechy yet.
You take this in extraordinary generations of senators: Many of the freshmen and sophomores want to replacement the body's rules. Some of the elders, in the manner of Byrd, steadfastly resisted such reforms. Byrd came from a hour when mastery of the Senate came from arrangement the rules and norms that made the Senate work. The body's next set of legends, however, will be the legislators who reorganization the rules and set the norms that coerce the body magnum opus again.
Byrd wrote volumes one through four of the institution's story, but there are more volumes yet to be written. Graph credit: Norm Ornstein/The American.
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