Admittedly, I’m not posting this just so I can say “zombie klansman“.
Ever since Jan. 3, 1953, Robert Carlyle Byrd has represented West Virginia in Congress, first in the House, then in the Senate. If you’re counting, that’s 56 years, 10 months and 16 days.
Today he became the longest-serving member of Congress, eclipsing Carl Hayden, who represented Arizona from 1912, when the state joined the Union, until he retired in 1968.
Byrd represents so much of what’s wrong with lazy voters, the media and the Senate that it’s difficult to know where to begin.
A lifelong Democrat who filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights bill, Byrd has since recanted his stance against equal rights for African Americans and called his membership as a young man in the Ku Klux Klan “the greatest mistake I ever made.”
A little history lesson here, kids. Barry Goldwater opposed that same legislation in 1964 because he thought it was a poorly written bill. He was then labeled as anti-minority and racist for the remainder of his life by many respectable voices on the left.
In reality, Goldwater desegregated his family-owned department stores in Arizona many years before the law told him he had to, but why look at that? One quickie mea culpa from Klansman Bob, however, and he’s gotten a free pass for, well, everything.
Just imagine how often “Ku Klux Klan” and “Byrd” would be mentioned in the same article if he was a Republican. Yes, it was mentioned in this piece but that’s hard to avoid when discussing his entire history in the Senate. If he was a Republican, we’d still be seeing editorial cartoons of him wearing a hood.
This kind of job security for a legislator is poison to a representative republic. The less an elected official worries about his or her job, the more likely his or her constituents will be ignored. The United States needs an active, somewhat (I’m dreaming, I know) electorate that will make its representatives feel twitchy about future employment.
The current health care reform debate is a perfect example of what happens when the representatives no longer feel a need to represent. The majority of Americans don’t believe it’s the government’s responsibility to provide health care yet our elected officials keep plowing ahead with it, flipping us off in the rear view mirror.
This is most definitely not a partisan issue. Given the overwhelming ability of time in Washington to corrupt, I would shudder to think of either party being in power for too long without any turnover.
The bastards work for us and are in desperate need of being reminded of that. If the scenery on Capitol Hill changed more frequently I might even stop calling them bastards.
Dreaming again…
