Senator Byrd's Comments on Filibusters & Nazi Germany: Full Transcript

Byrd Compares Proposal to Nazi Germany
WTRF-TV
3/2/2005

Below is an excerpt from the text of Byrd's speech, as recorded in the Congressional Record.

Byrd's Speech

Many times in our history we have taken up arms to protect a minority against the tyrannical majority in other lands. 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. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler's dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that "Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact." And he succeeded.

Hitler's originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. 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 is what the nuclear option seeks to do to rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate.

Without the filibuster or the threat of extended debate, there exists no leverage with which to bargain for the offering of an amendment. All force to effect compromise between the parties will be lost. Demands for hearings will languish. The President can simply rule. The President of the United States can simply rule by Executive order, if his party controls both Houses of Congress and majority rule reigns supreme. In such a world, the minority will be crushed, the power of dissenting views will be diminished, and freedom of speech will be attenuated. The uniquely American concept of the independent individual asserting his or her own views, proclaiming personal dignity through the courage of free speech will forever have been blighted. This is a question of freedom of speech. That is what we are talking about -- freedom of speech. And the American spirit, that stubborn, feisty, contrarian, and glorious urge to loudly disagree, and proclaim, despite all opposition, what is honest, what is true, will be sorely manacled.

Generations of men and women have lived, fought, and died for the right to map their own destiny, think their own thoughts, speak their own minds. If we start here, in this Senate, to chip away at that essential mark of freedom -- here of all places, in a body designed to guarantee the power of even a single individual through the device of extended debate -- we are on the road to refuting the principles upon which that Constitution rests.


http://www.wtrf.com/story.cfm?func=viewstory&storyid=1237

HIS TEL: 202 224 3954

THANKS sENATOR BYRD FOR YOUR SPEECH SUPPORTING THE FILIBUSTER AS A WAY TO HAVE CITIZENS PROTECTED

FIND YOUR SENATOR: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Democrats United Against 'Nuclear' Option
Associated Press
March 02, 2005

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans are game to see several of President Bush's judicial nominees confirmed for the bench but Democrats oppose many of them. On Tuesday, Sen. Robert Byrd (search) compared Republican tactics on nominees to Adolph Hitler's use of power in Nazi Germany.

"To basically trample and trench on those longstanding historic rules, I think, would disrupt the Senate in a way that would make it extremely difficult for it to function in any meaningful way for the rest of the session," said Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.

Republicans suffered one defeat on Tuesday when newly elected Colorado Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar asked the president to withdraw the judicial nominees he has submitted to the Senate. Salazar said the president's renominations will lead to "animosity and divisiveness."

Republicans had hoped to peel Salazar away from the Democrats' filibuster coalition. Byrd's harsh attacks also seemed to spook GOP leaders who suggested that he would not have come out swinging like that if he did not have virtually every Democrat behind him.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,149147,00.html

Byrd spokesman defends senator's Hitler remarks
Thursday, March 3, 2005
WASHINGTON (AP)

Sen. Robert Byrd's description of Adolf Hitler's rise to power was meant as a warning to heed the past and not as a comparison to Republicans, a spokesman for the West Virginia Democrat says.

Two Jewish groups and two GOP politicians chastised the senator on Wednesday, including one who recalled Byrd's Ku Klux Klan membership as a young man. Byrd's comments, which he made Tuesday in the Senate, came during his speech criticizing a Republican plan to block Democrats from filibustering President Bush's judicial nominees.

"Terrible chapters of history ought never be repeated," said Tom Gavin, spokesman for Byrd. "All one needs to do is to look at history to see how dangerous it is to curb the rights of the minority."

Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the Senate's No. 3 Republican, called for Byrd to retract his comments, saying they "lessen the credibility of the senator and the decorum of the Senate."

Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the remarks "poisonous rhetoric" that are "reprehensible and beyond the pale."

http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/03/03/byrd.hitlerremark.ap/index.html

Remember during campaign 2004 how former senator and astronaut John Glenn called their thinking NAZI, too.

John Glenn: GOP Using Hitler Tactics - The Big Lie

Put this man in front of cameras for a TV ad. Earlier this week I said it was time to change the agenda away from Vietnam and focus on the Bush record, and use John Glenn in ads to set the Swift Boat Veterans' lies aside. Well, he's not making TV ads yet, but he's swinging for the fences:

Former Sen. John Glenn of Ohio, campaigning with Kerry in the town about 25 miles east of Columbus, urged voters "to separate out fact from fiction." He accused Republicans of making false claims against Kerry and engaging in the kind of propaganda once employed by the Third Reich in Nazi Germany.

"That makes this a very, very tough fight because too often, too often in this country, if you hear something repeated, it's the old Hitler business," Glenn said. "If you hear something repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated, you start to believe it."

Note that Glenn never accused Bush/Cheney of rounding up minorities or having schemes of world domination, only that their repetition of lies mirrored the propaganda techniques of the Nazis. I personally don't think that all comparisons to the Third Reich should be verboten: some are legitimate, and I think this is in that group. Now let's put him in front of a camera for television commercials. Who wants to be the first to question John Glenn's patriotism? Huh? Who?

SOURCE:

http://www.samueljohnson.com/blog/archives/0409a.html

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The reich-wing took Glenn's comments out of context, then, like they are doing with Byrd's.

Wonder what they'll say when LOTS of American start GOOGLING Prescott Bush + Adolf Hitler?

I'm going to send Byrd a letter thanking him for standing up and telling the truth.