Congress Becoming A Tower Of Babble
Before the echoes get away from us completely, we would do well to hearken for a moment to the wise words Sen. Robert Byrd offered his colleagues - and, by extension, all other political players - just before Congress took off last month for its year-end recess.
Byrd rose in the Senate to express, he said, his concern about “the growing incivility” in that chamber.
When the West Virginia Democrat rises in the Senate, you know you are in for a show. The senator is plainly in love with the sound of his own voice, but he is as plainly in love with the language, too - and if sometimes too ardently, well, suitors may be excused at least the minor transgressions of their ardor.
Thus, in addition to Byrd’s meat-and-potatoes plea for maintaining standards of decent political discourse, we were offered such disapproving garnishes as “maledicent language,” “sour inflammatory rhetoric, which exhales itself fuliginously” and “mindless gabble and rhetorical putridities.”
And Byrd, as is his wont in such flights, invoked a host of ancient worthies to corroborate his witness: Solomon, John of the Gospels, anonymous proverbists, “the Spartan Leonidas,” Nathan Hale and Stonewall Jackson.
The proximate cause of Byrd’s ire and admonition was a debate in which one Republican senator had accused President Clinton of habitually breaking his word and being unprincipled and another had kissed the president off as “this guy” and had called him, in effect, a congenital liar.
In a national atmosphere daily poisoned by radio talk-show hustlers paid as if slander, invective and ridicule were piecework, such missteps are barely measurable.
Indeed, such missteps in the U.S. Senate are small compared with the fulminatory House, historically rowdier and currently envenomed by the jeers and catcalls of freshmen Republican radicals - and a few Democratic respondents - who, in other chambers, would be ignored as noisy backbenchers of no consequence.
But in the Senate, the terms “gentlemanly” and “ladylike” are not ironies. Byrd, though welcoming partisanship, pleaded only for decorum in its pursuit.
“It is one thing to criticize the policies of the president and his administration,” Byrd said. “But it is quite another to engage in personal attacks that hold the president up to … scorn. … Anyone who thinks of himself as a gentleman ought to be above such contumely.”
Senators “bandying about such words as ‘liar’ or ‘lie,”’ Byrd said, lower themselves “to the status of a street brawler.”
Byrd’s advice had mixed results. Not surprisingly, Connie Mack, R-Fla., apologized for his excesses. Also not surprisingly, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, an eager trigger man in the new drive-by politics of the Republican right, pointedly would not.
It would be an empty piety to wish that, beyond the Senate, the political tribes would gather at Byrd’s remonstrance in a common ritual of politesse. ‘Ninety-four was nasty, and there is no reason not to suppose ‘96 will be nastier.
The descent into political distemper will not end because Robert Byrd wishes it would. It will end only when the rest of us stop rewarding it with adulation and power.
xxxx