Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to take a few moments today about one of the best teachers I have ever known: Senator Robert C. Byrd. The man we lost this week is known for many things: as the longest serving member of Congress in the Nation's history; as an accomplished legislator; as an author and historian; as a self-made man who reached exalted heights, yet never forgot the coal miners and the families of the mountain home community from which he came. I think of him as a teacher, one who began teaching me from the moment I came to the U.S. Senate, and one whose lessons I sought right up to the time he was taken from us this week. Serving as a new Senator in the majority means, among other things, hours spent in this Chamber, presiding over the Senate. I was fortunate that for many of my early years here, I spent much of that time in the Presiding Officer's chair listening to Senator Byrd speak on the history of this body, its traditions and practices, and its historic debt to another great body that played a major role in mankind's march toward democratic government, the Roman senate. I was learning from him two decades later, when Senator Byrd led a small group of us who filed a lawsuit and later a legal brief challenging a law we believed to be unconstitutional: the law granting the President the so-called line-item veto. He, like I and many others, saw this law as bending the Constitution in ways that usurped Congress's constitutional authority and responsibility.…”