Byrd vs. Bush

Sen. Robert Byrd blasts fellow senators for believing "the garbage that was being spewed out by the administration" on Iraq, and thanks the airline passengers who "died to save this Capitol, my life and my staff."

By Mary Jacoby

Jul 24, 2004 | When Sen. Robert Byrd entered Congress, Harry Truman was ending his presidency and America was grappling with the Cold War. Over the next 52 years, the West Virginia Democrat would participate in the great national security debates of the 20th century, from the Vietnam War to the Cuban missile crisis to the Persian Gulf War. And yet Byrd, a former Senate majority leader, says no president has troubled him as much as President Bush has in his march to invade Iraq.

A prominent critic of the Iraq war, Byrd was one of 21 Democratic senators who voted against the October 2002 resolution that authorized the use force to topple Saddam Hussein. But his critique of the White House goes beyond national security to what he considers Bush's contempt for the constitutional balance of powers and his administration's excessive devotion to secrecy. Of the 11 presidents he has served with, Byrd gives Bush the lowest grade -- lower, even, than for President Nixon, who resigned under the threat of impeachment. His dismay with Bush, whom he disdains as a "child of wealth and privilege" who "did not pay his dues" and is thus ill-prepared to lead the world's most powerful country, prompted Byrd to write a new book: "Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency."

Commanding on the Senate floor, in person Byrd is soft-spoken and charming, almost cuddly, one-on-one. And while he calls Bush arrogant, he can sometimes be equally imperious, especially when dealing with high officials of the executive branch. As a young reporter for the congressional newspaper Roll Call, I interviewed Byrd in 1993 in his grand office suite off the Senate floor. (He then chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee.) An aide interrupted to say that Vice President Al Gore was calling. Byrd waved off the aide and continued his leisurely interview with me about the multivolume history of the Senate he had recently published. After bidding me a gracious goodbye, he took the vice president's call.

An amateur scholar of the ancient Roman Senate and its influence on the framers of the Constitution, Byrd has always been fiercely protective of Congress' constitutional role as a coequal branch of government. In 1993, he delivered a compelling but somewhat eccentric series of 14 speeches linking the fall of the Roman Empire to a then current debate over the "line-item veto," a deficit-fighting tool that was intended to allow presidents to strike individual "pork-barrel" projects from congressionally written spending bills. Byrd argued that such power would allow the executive to blackmail Congress. Although he was unable to block the politically popular line-item-veto law, the courts would later declare it an unconstitutional breach of the separation of powers.

A child of the Depression who grew up in West Virginia's hardscrabble coal-mining country, Byrd's belief in the power of government to improve lives has put him at odds with the modern Republican Party. But while he opposed President Reagan's 1981 tax-cutting package, he says that, unlike Bush, Reagan won fair and square because he allowed full debate, hearings and amendments. Bush, by contrast, rammed through his 2001 tax cuts by having Republican congressional leaders manipulate legislative rules and stiff-arm lawmakers who wanted to offer amendments. The result, Byrd says in his book, is that Bush pushed through a tax bill with disastrous fiscal consequences for the country -- acting as if he'd been elected with a resounding mandate instead of by an evenly and acrimoniously divided public.

At 87, Byrd is still vigorous, proudly noting that he has attended more than 17,000 roll call votes in his career, though he uses a cane and seems increasingly frail. He discussed his new book with Salon in his Capitol office on Wednesday.

In your book, you write that Bush doesn't have the character to run the country, or at least that's the impression I drew. Can you explain?

I'm thinking about the word "character." I would not use that word; it can mean different things. I would say that he wasn't prepared to be president. I would say that he has hurt this country's image, or our character -- I will use the word in this context -- as a nation. Are we honest? Do we use information from the government to the people in a way that twists it differently from reality? He has hurt this nation's character.

I know that he is appealing to various religious groups. That's all right. But the character of this country is not what it was when this administration came to office. Why do I say that? It has misused information. It has acted secretively, time and time again. The White House has tried to operate, and has operated, in a very secretive way. That hurts the character of the country. And this administration, it seems to me, tries to intimidate anybody who criticizes it. I have particularly taken notice of the Senate: It is cowed.

How effective do you believe the Senate Democratic leadership has been in confronting the Bush administration?

It has tried. But I don't think that we can be in session three days a week and be very effective in confronting the administration, as we can be and as we ought to be in this branch of government. We don't ask enough questions. We didn't in the run-up to the war. The Senate was silent. And having come to the Senate when I did, and having seen and heard and worked with the type of senators who were here, when I compare that in my own mind with our virtual cowardice about the war, the buildup to it, I'm very disappointed. I'm chagrined.

Next Page: "When it came to the run-up to the war ... the silence [in Congress] was deadening"

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