Robert Byrd

Robert Carlyle Byrd (1917–2010) was the longest-serving US Senator in the Senate, having joined the Senate on the very same day that Alaska was admitted to the Union. A Dixiecrat, Byrd was elected as a New Dealer.[1] He was the only person to vote against both Supreme Court Justices Thurgood Marshall[2] and Clarence Thomas.[3] He was also a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, though he had since rebuked them. He was best known now for the massive amounts of pork he brought to West Virginia and for his attempts to get his colleagues to read what they vote on.

A guide to
U.S. Politics
Hail to the Chief?
Persons of interest
v - t - e
This page contains too many unsourced statements and needs to be improved.

Robert Byrd could use some help. Please research the article's assertions. Whatever is credible should be sourced, and what is not should be removed.

“”The drive for same-sex marriage is, in effect, an effort to make a sneak attack on society by encoding this aberrant behavior in legal form before society itself has decided it should be legal. [...] Let us defend the oldest institution, the institution of marriage between male and female as set forth in the Holy Bible.
— Robert Byrd in 1996

Also, despite his racist past (and the opinions of his constituents), he endorsed Barack Obama for President of the US, over Hillary Clinton. In 2003 he became well known for being one of the few members of Congress who gave speech after speech on the floor denouncing Bush's drive to invade Iraq, at a time when few were willing to dissent. However, this is countered by his role in cluttering up the formerly quiet and out of the way state of West Virginia with military and federal law enforcement pork-barrel projects that may well have played a role in changing the political makeup of the state from blue to red, because of the type of people those projects inevitably attracted.

His history as a Klansman is often invoked by right-wingers and wingnuts to insist that LIBRULS R TEH REAL RACISTS. They often overlook the fact that he denounced and regretted his time with the Klan. Some also share a fake picture on the internet of Byrd supposedly wearing a KKK outfit despite the fact that the head is merely photoshopped from his Senate portrait, as he quit the Klan decades ago.

References
  1. Longley, Robert (October 30, 2019). Senator Robert Byrd and the Ku Klux Klan. ThoughtCo.com. Retrieved March 2, 2021.
  2. CONFIRMATION OF NOMINATION OF THURGOOD MARSHALL, THE FIRST NEGRO APPOINTED TO THE SUPREME COURT.. GovTrack. Retireved March 3, 2021.
  3. THE THOMAS CONFIRMATION; How the Senators Voted on Thomas. Associated Press via The New York Times. Retrieved March 3, 2021.
This politics-related article is a stub.
You can help RationalWiki by expanding it.
This article is issued from Rationalwiki. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.