There are plenty of eulogies for Sen. Robert Byrd, the 92-year-old West Virginian who died early this morning. There is plenty of speculation about what will happen with his Senate seat, including the prospect that the state’s governor, Joe Manchin III, will appoint himself. And there are plenty of explanations on how Byrd was a master of the Senate’s arcane rules. And how his death will affect the financial-reform bill that was waiting for his vote now that it has emerged from the conference committee to reconcile the two versions. There is also an elegant explanation from my colleague Adam at his new blog about how Byrd, in some ways, embodies the history of the century: a former Klansman who helped support the election of the country’s first black president.
But Byrd was also immensely powerful and used his spot on the Appropriation Committee to flood his state with federal money. He did it, according to The New York Times obit, to battle the state’s grinding poverty. While federal money is surely the only way to address the kinds of infrastructure needs the state had and continues to struggle with, it’s also true that that money likely won him loyalty from its beneficiaries, explaining his record 51-year career in the Senate.
This is one of the internal contradictions of the Senate: a body of equals meant to give each state equal representation but that so heavily favors seniority, personal power, and charisma. While individuals love when their representatives and senators bring money home to spend on local projects, they also criticize “pork” in the abstract and hate it when others do it. The Senate is also a body in which members continue to work well past the ages that most Americans retire, and one in which the course of the country can hinge almost entirely on the ill health or death of a member. So there are a number of ways in which Byrd, who was a champion of the Senate and its singular role, embodied all of its pros and problems as well.
— Monica Potts
