Robert Byrd

Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.

That’s what the Senate is about. It’s the last bastion of minority rights, where a minority can be heard, where a minority can stand on its feet, one individual if necessary, and speak until he falls into the dust.

One’s family is the most important thing in life. I look at it this way: One of these days I’ll be over in a hospital somewhere with four walls around me. And the only people who’ll be with me will be my family.

It is the Constitution of the United States that has been undermined, undercut, and is under attack. It is the American people’s liberties that is in jeopardy. That is why I wrote ‘Losing America.’

Mission accomplished? The mission in Iraq, as laid out by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, has failed.

This war is not necessary. We are truly sleepwalking through history.

We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men. But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends.

It is money, money, money! Not ideas, not principles, but money that reigns supreme in American politics.

I have never seen such extreme partisanship, such bitter partisanship, and such forgetfulness of the fate of our fathers and of the Constitution.

Our ideals of freedom, set forth and realized in our Constitution, are our greatest export to the world.

Is it any wonder, why the approval ratings of the Congress go up every time we go into recess?

The ongoing strife in Iraq, and the billions of dollars that the President is seeking to continue that war, give me little comfort that this Administration has learned from its mistakes in Iraq.

To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences.

And the president is all wrong when he maintains that a nominee should have an up-or-down vote. The Constitution doesn’t say that. The Constitution doesn’t say that that nominee shall have any vote at all. There doesn’t have to even be a vote.

To the American people I say, awaken to what is happening. It is the duty of each citizen to be vigilant, to protect liberty, to speak out, left and right and disagree lest be trampled underfoot by misguided zealotry and extreme partisanship.

It was the separation of powers upon which the framers placed their hopes for the preservation of the people’s liberties. Despite this heritage, the congress has been in too many cases more than willing to walk away from its constitutional powers.

The money the president wants to borrow for Iraq will come directly out of the American taxpayer wallets in the form of Medicare and Social Security receipts. That’s your money.

Congress is not an ATM.

I have been in Congress for more than a half century. I have lived through times of fear and times of hope. Of despair and of achievement. I have seen our government at its best, but today I fear that we see our government at its worst.