Sen. Robert Byrd (D) Elected 1958, 8th term up 2006
Born:	Nov. 20, 1917, North Wilkesboro, NC
Home:	Sophia
Education:	American U., J.D. 1963
Religion:	Baptist
Marital Status:	married (Erma)
Elected  Office:	WV House of Delegates, 1946-50; WV Senate, 1950-52; U.S. House of Reps., 1952-58; U.S. Senate Majority Whip, 1971-76, Majority Ldr., 1977-80, 1987-88, Minority Ldr., 1981-86.
DC Office	311 HSOB20510, 202-224-3954; Fax: 202-228-0002; Web site: byrd.senate.gov
State Offices	Charleston, 304-342-5855.
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Update: November 30, 2005
On October 3, 2005, Rep. Shelley Moore Capito announced she would not challenge Senator Robert Byrd in 2006.

Robert Byrd, the senior member of the United States Senate, may come closer to the kind of senator the Founding Fathers had in mind than any other. He comes from the humblest of beginnings, and when first elected to the Senate, as part of the large and talented Democratic class of 1958, he was scarcely noticed. Now he is the last member of that class still in the Senate, and an authentic power whether in majority or minority. He set the record for Senate votes at 12,134 in April 1990 and cast his 17,000th vote in March 2004. His erstwhile rival Edward Kennedy noted, "Every time Bob casts a vote, he sets a new record. It is not fair, though, that he counts the votes he cast in the Roman Senate too, but we love him anyway and we never stop learning from him." But Byrd is also capable of having a little fun. He played a Confederate general in the film Gods and Generals, shot in 2001, but eschewed a career in show business. "I haven't hired an agent and don't expect to be changing my day job any time soon."

Robert Byrd comes from a background as grindingly poor as that of any American politician. "I lived in a house without electricity," he lectured one Bush administration witness. "No running water, no telephone, little wooden outhouse." Son of a coal miner in southern West Virginia, he was a welder in wartime shipyards and a meat cutter in a coal company town when he won his seat in the House of Delegates in 1946; he campaigned in every hollow in the county, playing his fiddle and even going to the length of joining the Ku Klux Klan (which he quickly quit and has for many years regretted joining). He worked hard in the legislature, and won a U.S. House seat when the incumbent retired in 1952; he made such a name for himself in West Virginia that by 1958, when he was 40, he was elected to the Senate--even though the United Mine Workers initially opposed him and the coal companies never supported him.

In the Senate, he became a supporter of Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson and in return got a seat on Appropriations his first year. He backed Hubert Humphrey against John Kennedy in the 1960 West Virginia presidential primary not because he shared Humphrey's liberal politics--his voting record then was as conservative as any Southerner's and he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964--but because Johnson wanted to stop Kennedy. In his early years he took care to master the Senate's arcane rules; as he said in 2002, "Nobody has ever used the rules of the Senate more than I have." In the 1960s, Byrd's career took what in retrospect was a helpful detour. He became assistant majority whip, an unimportant position in 1965; in 1971, when Edward Kennedy neglected his duties as whip after Chappaquiddick, Byrd quietly lined up support and, with Richard Russell's deathbed vote, ousted Kennedy. There Byrd performed ably, managing Senate business and accommodating colleagues' needs, and when Majority Leader Mike Mansfield retired in 1976, Byrd easily won the job. All the while Byrd was working hard to keep in touch with West Virginians, to the point that he won 78% of the vote in 1970, becoming the first West Virginian in history to carry all 55 counties.

Byrd did not like being majority leader. Contrary to most people's assumptions, the post carries little power, because Senate rules requiring unanimous consent or supermajorities allow minorities and even individual senators to block action. Byrd was aware that his power came from meeting other senators' needs and did not have a national issues agenda of his own, though his voting record became notably less conservative. In 1987, with Democrats back in the majority after six years out of power, Byrd established some legislative priorities and then announced he would leave the post after the 1988 election.

In 1989, Byrd got the position he had been aiming for all along--chairman of the Appropriations Committee. He has been chairman or ranking minority member ever since. ''I want to be West Virginia's billion dollar industry,'' he announced in 1990, and he has succeeded handsomely. An FBI office went to Clarksburg, Treasury and IRS offices to Parkersburg, a Fish and Wildlife Training Center to Harper's Ferry, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms office to Martinsburg, a NASA Research center to Wheeling. The December 2000 final appropriations included more than $1 billion of spending in West Virginia. Some of it represents the ordinary operations of government, but much of it is Byrd's work. Since 1990, he has attached more than $270 million to appropriations bills for the construction of one interstate highway alone. He boasts that when he was in the state House of Delegates in 1947, West Virginia had just four miles of divided, four-lane highway. Today, there are 1,087 miles. Byrd has worked hard to find funds for the depleted United Mine Workers health care program for retired miners and their widows. He has supported the state's coal mining industry, seeking funds for miners displaced by the Clean Air Act in 1990, co-sponsoring the 1997 resolution opposing the Kyoto Protocol so long as it excluded developing countries like China, and opposing EPA's 1999 proposed air quality standards. When a federal judge ruled in October 1999 that mountaintop mining violated federal environmental laws, Byrd tried to pass an appropriations rider reversing the decision; he was angry when the Clinton administration, at first agreeable, decided to oppose such a rider with a veto. The issue helped George W. Bush carry West Virginia in 2000; in April 2001, a federal appeals court reversed the decision and ruled that state laws governed mountaintop mining.

It should be added that Byrd's positions are not just parochial but are the product of serious study of the Constitution and of history. He always carries a copy of the Constitution in his left breast pocket. With the assistance of Senate historian Richard Baker, he wrote The Senate 1789-1989, a two-volume history, plus two volumes of classic speeches and statistics; based on impressive research, gracefully written, full of arresting anecdotes and sound insights, it surpasses any previous work on the subject. Byrd earned his law degree while in the Senate and had his diploma presented to him by President Kennedy at the 1963 American University commencement where Kennedy delivered his most important foreign policy speech. In 1994, he was awarded his B.A. summa cum laude by Marshall University, which he had attended for one semester 43 years before and could not afford to continue, and where he earned A's in all eight courses he took. Byrd has been educating himself as well, systematically reading the classics, and takes to quoting Shakespeare, Thucydides or Cato the Younger in debates on the balanced budget amendment and the line-item veto.

If Byrd is determined to uphold the prerogatives of the Senate, he is determined also to uphold the prerogatives of the Appropriations Committee. He sees the Senate as part of a separate and equal branch of government, and he believes strongly in the prerogatives of appropriators. The Appropriations Committee operates mostly on a bipartisan basis and appropriators have worked together for years and cooperate across party lines against institutional adversaries like OMB and the authorizing and Budget committees. Byrd has served on Appropriations with his predecessor and successor as chairman, Ted Stevens, since 1973. When the Republican takeover of the Senate in 2003 cost Byrd his position as President Pro Tempore and his first-floor office suite, his colleagues elected him President Pro Tempore Emeritus and appropriated money for a new office.

His relations with the previous five or six administrations have been strained. George W. Bush went out of his way to shake Byrd's hand at his first speech to a joint session of Congress; Byrd had not attended State of the Union addresses since 1994 out of distaste for Bill Clinton: "His lifestyle and mine were so different I didn't care about coming to hear him." But Byrd opposed Bush's tax cut as "sheer madness," arguing that it was based on inevitably untrustworthy economic forecasts and complaining that it would cut off funds for appropriators.

Byrd's insistence on maintaining what he regards as the Senate's constitutional prerogatives and his distaste for Bush administration policies led him to embark on two crusades in 2002 which may have helped lead to the Democrats' loss of their Senate majority in November. One was his opposition to the bill setting up the Department of Homeland Security. He insisted that the biggest reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the Department of Defense required more scrutiny, and he opposed giving the president authority to shift money between agencies without regard for congressional appropriators. His persistent speeches meant that the Senate, unlike the House, couldn't vote on it before the August recess or the September 11 anniversary that many senators had as a goal. In September, Byrd spoke frequently and at great length on the issue. He never used the word filibuster, but this was one in effect. It also gave government unions time to unite Democrats against the provisions for flexibility insisted on by Bush--a stand that hurt Democratic senators gravely in Georgia and Missouri on Election Day. In September, Byrd sought to require the president to get approval of the new department in three stages over the next year; that lost 70-28. After the election, Democrats realized it was in their political interest to pass the bill, and a motion to limit debate passed 65-29.

The other crusade was against military action in Iraq. In September, he accused Bush of political motivation, saying out loud what some other Democrats believed but were too politick to say. "All of a sudden the president was dropping in the polls, and the domestic situation was such that the administration was appearing to be much like the emperor who had no clothes. All of a sudden, bam! All of this war talk--the war fervor, the drums of war, the bugles of war, the clouds of war, this war hysteria--has blown in like a hurricane. And what has that done to the president's polls? Seventy percent." In October, he threatened to delay action on the Iraq war resolution by insisting on votes on individual clauses; he was foiled when Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman and Daschle made a change in wording that made his motion out of order. His attempt to filibuster lost 75-25, and the Senate passed the resolution 77-23. Byrd did not give up. In January 2003 he and Edward Kennedy sought to require Bush to get congressional approval again. In June 2003 he called Bush's landing on the carrier "flamboyant showmanship." In July 2004 he said Bush was "dangerous, reckless and arrogant." In September 2004 he drew on his knowledge of history and said, "The Roman Senate lost its nerve, lost its way and succumbed. That's what we are seeing here in our own country. Our own Senate lost its way when it voted for the Iraq resolution."

Byrd's umbrage at the Bush administration is clear. "I've never seen an administration so discourteous, so arrogant toward the legislative branch, as this one is. I've been here 51 years, so why shouldn't I speak out?" He opposed the Bush energy bill, even though it included money for clean coal research and utilization, and he referred during the first Bush term to "gargantuan tax cuts that are backloaded and will come due between 2007 and 2011 when Mr. Bush will be back on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, off the political stage." He fumed when a trade amendment he placed in a 2000 agricultural appropriation was found by the WTO to be in violation of international trade rules. Of the promoters of the Family Marriage Amendment, he said, "The people who put this out [are] taking West Virginians to be gullible, ignorant fools." Byrd attended the Democratic National Convention in 2004, his first since 1988, and plugged his just-published book Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency.

In November 2000, Byrd was re-elected by a 78%-20% margin, his largest percentage margin ever, carrying all 55 counties for the third time. At a spirited rally at the end of the campaign he said, "West Virginia has always had four friends. God Almighty, Sears Roebuck, Carter's Liver Pills and Robert C. Byrd." He is the second senator to have been elected to eight six-year terms (the other was Strom Thurmond of South Carolina); he has served longer than any other senator but Thurmond and stands to beat his record in June 2006, on his 17,326th day in the Senate. He will turn 89 two weeks after the 2006 election, and some Republicans hope he will not run and that West Virginia, solidly for George W. Bush in 2004 despite Byrd's efforts, will elect a Republican senator for the first time since 1956. Yet even if Byrd does run, his reelection is unlikely to be as easy as in 2000 In spring 2005, national Republicans were hoping popular 2d District Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito would challenge Byrd.

Committees

• Appropriations (RMM): Defense; Energy & Water; Homeland Security (RMM); Interior & Related Agencies; Military Construction & Veterans Affairs; Transportation, Treasury, the Judiciary, HUD & Related Agencies.
• Armed Services: Emerging Threats & Capabilities; Readiness & Management Support; Strategic Forces.
• Budget.
• Rules & Administration.

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2004	90	56	100	100	42	21	38	8	8	20	--
2003	95	--	100	68	--	19	29	30	--	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2003 LIB	--	2003 CONS		2004 LIB	--	2004 CONS
Economic	74%	--	25%		93%	--	0%
Social	79%	--	15%		67%	--	31%
Foreign	69%	--	30%		61%	--	36%
For National Journal's complete 2004 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 108th Congress (More Info)
1. Ban Drilling in ANWR Y 2. Approve Bush Tax Cuts N 3. Medicare/Rx Bill N 4. Bar Overtime Pay Regs. Y 5. Energy Bill N 6. Support Roe v. Wade Y		7. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion Y  8. Assault Weapons Ban Y  9. Ban Same-Sex Marriage Y 10. Ban Bunker-Buster Bomb Y 11. Fund Iraq War N 12. Restrict Missile Defense Y

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2000 general	Robert Byrd (D)	469,215	78%	$1,045,993
	David T. Gallaher (R)	121,635	20%
	Other	12,627	2%
2000 primary	Robert Byrd (D)	unopposed
1994 general	Robert Byrd (D)	290,495	69%	$1,550,354
	Stan Klos (R)	130,441	31%	$267,165
Prior winning percentages: 1988 (65%); 1982 (69%); 1976 (100%); 1970 (78%); 1964 (68%); 1958 (59%); 1956 House (57%); 1954 House (63%); 1952 House (56%)