Robert Byrd, a Life in the Senate

At midnight, the venerable senator Robert Byrd, who was already a legend (and a real character), made history. With 20,774 days of service (or 56 years and 320 days), on Wednesday, November 17, the Democrat beat the record length of service in Congress. Since 2006, he already held the record of time spent in the Senate (a little ahead of Ted Kennedy, who has since left us). He has now been crowned senior member of both the Senate and the House. A “monumental” achievement, as he put it.

In an arena where protocol is highly revered, where elected officials speak to each other in the third person (“I thank the distinguished Senator of West Virginia for his kind words to me,”) this event will be celebrated on Wednesday with great pomp: a speech from the majority leader, Harry Reid, “the esteemed Senator of Nevada”; many kind words and the vote on a resolution honoring the 1576th senator since the founding of the republic, a man who witnessed the century and its somber times.

A member of the Ku Klux Klan at 24, Robert Byrd became a member of the House in 1952 and of the Senate seven years later. He was opposed to integration in the 1960s, only to become a hero of the anti-war left in 2003, after his fiery speech against the “imperial powers” of George W. Bush. A tribute is also planned near his home in West Virginia, a state of “blue collar people,” coal mines and enclosed valleys. In 2007, when the senator passed the 18,000 votes mark, Virginia awarded him the medal of “man of the century.”

This time, the faithful were supposed to gather in the rotunda of the Charleston Capitol, where there is already a statue of the senator. Robert Byrd likes to remind people that a half century ago, West Virginia only counted 6 km of highways. Today, the state counts more than 50,000 km. West Virginians are eternally grateful to their congressman. They drive over the Robert C. Byrd expressway, the Robert C. Byrd highway, the Robert C. Byrd boulevard…

Close to 92 years old, Robert Byrd is the author of “A History of the Senate” in four volumes, and the hero – albeit not always willing – of a collection of YouTube videos. A fiddle player, he was seen shedding a tear during a session at the mention of his Shih Tzu dog, who accompanies him in the corridors of the House of Representatives. His wife used to call him “Problem,” he explained but he prefers the name “Baby.”

On that particular day, he had taken care to wear a tie decorated with dogs’ heads. He had come to speak against Chinese toxic components that threaten the safety of baby food. No one can testify better than Robert Byrd in this club of notables that is the United States Senate, “the most noble instrument of deliberation in the world,” as the senators like to call it, but which, after one year, has yet to pass a reform of the health system or a law on climate change (to the Europeans’ undisguised irritation). U.S. senators go at their own pace. They possess powers unlike any in other democracies. Each one of them can single-handedly block a nomination for months (generally to express their irritation over a completely different matter).

An adopted child, Robert Byrd studied law while in Congress. He likes to recite Walt Whitman or Shakespeare during hearings, but during the deliberations of the appropriations commission, he doesn’t beat around the bush. He manages to obtain one subvention after the other for his state, or “pork,” the slang term used to describe it. Last year, he managed to bring 60 subventions to his state, for a total of $123 million. As mentioned by one of his former colleagues, Robert Byrd is the “main economic development agent of West Virginia.” Proof can be found in the Robert C. Byrd dam, the Robert C. Byrd Center for biotechnologies, the bridge, the vocational high school… “Some have given me the nickname of “the king of pork.” “That really doesn’t bother me,” he confided a few years ago. The senator fights ferociously for the rights of his constituents and for those of the coal industry. Along with Mitch McConnell, the republican leader and elected official from another mining state, he prevented for a long time the closing of Congress’ electric plant, which still runs on coal.

In his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Barack Obama describes the old senator (who backed him during the primaries, while the local democrats, suspicious of him, clearly preferred Hillary). His life, writes Obama, has been “the battle between opposite tendencies,” “darkness and light.” According to him, Robert Byrd’s career is emblematic of the way the Senate functions, the mirror of “big compromise” on which the American democracy is founded: the great “bargaining” between the north and the south, between the rights of the states and the rights of minorities.

It is a place of procrastination, but also “an instrument to protect the rich against the masses and to assure slave owners that no one would interfere with their ‘particular institution’.” The U.S. senate has remained the place for compromise. The problem, for the rest of the world, is that it often acts as if it has all the time in the world.