Robert C. Byrd

Mr. President, the success or failure of the INF Treaty is in its most important respects future oriented. How will NATO behave? How will the Warsaw Pact countries behave?

As I have said before and I say again, democracy can not be given over to an aristocracy of money. The power of money to corrupt and eat away at the integrity of the Government is powerfully clear.

Looming over all of our efforts must be our collective awareness that a policy of borrowing and debt has mortgaged our future and that of our children.

The American people already know that the time for self-deception is over. America's future cannot be defined by some outdated ideological past. America must begin to get ready for its future.

Partisanship will surely be an element in our debates. But we must not allow partisanship to overwhelm us.

Our representative democracy cannot and must not be lost to an aristocracy of the money baron.

I believe the Congress, the great legislative body of the people, has kept faith with the basic aspirations of our constituents; namely, to secure America's interests in the world, to protect our citizens from the unexpected and the…

The very worst thing we can do is to be panicked into doing nothing.

Above all, Mr. President we must lead and we must show we can lead, we must demonstrate America can lead.

We are not electing a Democratic Court. We are not electing a Republican Court.

The President has a right to nominate a conservative judge. No Senator denies the President the right to nominate a conservative.

A policy of confrontation will only breed further controversy. Let us all lower our voices.

It is time to start the healing. I urge the President to back away from a policy of defiance. And I urge we all back away from a policy of recrimination and retaliation.

By inaction we cannot escape responsibility for what happens in the Persian Gulf.

The world is not wanting assurances by way of platitudes and words. It needs leadership, and this country is being looked to for that leadership.

It is time the administration sought compromise, not confrontation; real policies, not partisan politics.

I can remember, as a boy, hearing the soothing assurances that "Prosperity is just around the corner" -but it never came. It never made that corner.

It seems to me that we have a crisis facing the country. We need to be getting on with the reconciliation legislation. We need to be getting on with dealing with the budget deficits and the trade deficits.

We are not electing a Republican Court. We are not electing a Democratic Court. We are filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court of the United States.

The sooner we get on with the Bork nomination and vote on it, the better. The die is cast on that nomination, and there is no point in dragging it out.

If Senators wish to say that I cast an unwise vote, fine. I can be wrong. I have been wrong many times.

I might think that the vote of others was not wise because they did not agree with me, but I understand that every Senator here is bound to his own conscience, to his own god, and tries to represent his own constituents the best he knows…

I hope we will be careful not to say anything that would impugn the patriotism or the honesty of any Senator in this body.

The Democratic party, the party founded by Thomas Jefferson, a true renaissance man, will not serve itself well if we forget his breadth of vision.

Mr. President, we are rapidly becoming and we have already become, in spirit and in fact, more than a neutral in the gulf war. We are tilting toward one of the belligerents.