Haaretz
Adar1 22, 5765
WASHINGTON - A pair of
Jewish groups accused the longest-serving senator of making an outrageous
and reprehensible comparison between Adolf Hitler's Nazis and a plan by
the Senate's majority party to change a venerable Senate
practice to
quash opposition.
Sen. Robert Byrd's spokesman, Tom Gavin, denied
that the senator had compared Republicans to Hitler. He said the reference
to Nazis in a Senate speech on Tuesday was meant to underscore that the
past should not be ignored.
"Terrible chapters of history ought
never be repeated," Gavin said. "All one needs to do is to look at history
to see how dangerous it is to curb the rights of the
minority."
Byrd, a member of the minority Democrats, was speaking
in opposition to threats by the Republican majority leader to force
through a rule banning use of the filibuster, a parliamentary ploy by
which the minority can stall legislation, against President George W.
Bush's nominations to federal court judgeships.
Abraham H. Foxman,
national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Wednesday that
Byrd's remarks showed "a profound lack of understanding as to who Hitler
was," and the senator should apologize to the American people.
"It
is hideous, outrageous and offensive for Senator Byrd to suggest that the
Republican Party's tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolf Hitler
and the Nazi Party," Foxman said.
In his comments Tuesday, Byrd
defended the right that senators have to use filibusters, procedural
delays of unlimited debate that can kill an item unless 60 of the 100
senators vote to move ahead.
Byrd cited Hitler's rise to power in
the 1930s by, in part, pushing legislation through the German parliament
that seemed to legitimize his ascension.
"We, unlike Nazi Germany
or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of
men," Byrd said. "But witness how men with motives and a majority can
manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends."
Byrd then quoted
historian Alan Bullock, saying Hitler "turned the law inside out and made
illegality legal."
Byrd added, "That is what the nuclear option
seeks to do."
The nuclear option is the Democrats' nickname for the
proposal to end filibusters of judicial nominations.
The back and
forth was the latest twist in the battle over Senate Republican efforts to
free 10 Bush-nominated judges that the chamber's minority Democrats have
blocked. The Senate has confirmed 204 others.
The first criticism
of Byrd came Wednesday when Matt Brooks, executive director of the
Republican Jewish Coalition, issued a written statement.
"With his
knowledge of history and his own personal background as a KKK member, he
should be ashamed for implying that his political opponents are using Nazi
tactics," Brooks said.
Byrd joined the Ku Klux Klan, a white
supremacist organization, as a young man and has repeatedly apologized for
it. Now 87 and the Senate's longest-serving member with 47 years' service,
he prides himself on his knowledge of history and makes historical
references frequently during debates.
Brooks also attacked as
"disgusting" Byrd's remark that "some in the Senate are ready to callously
incinerate" senators' rights to filibuster. The comment
came amid
several references by Byrd to the "nuclear option."
"There is no
excuse for raising the specter of the Holocaust crematoria in a discussion
of the Senate filibuster," Brooks said. "That kind of political
heavy-handedness is inappropriate and reprehensible."
Byrd is a
long-standing defender of the chamber's rules and traditions, many of
which help the Senate's minority party.