Rejoice, friends. Harry Reid is finally signaling that former KKK member and notorious pork barrel politician Robert Byrd will soon be put out to pasture.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is quietly preparing to ease 90-year-old Sen. Robert C. Byrd from his perch as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Democratic insiders tell Politico.
Reid has not yet discussed his plans with Byrd. But in a recent closed-door meeting with his advisers in Las Vegas and a private conversation with Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), Reid has laid out a scenario that would have Inouye — the committee’s second-ranking Democrat — taking over Byrd’s chairmanship by the time the 111th Congress convenes in January. [Politico]
There’s no way that old coot should be third in line to the presidency.
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Isn’t it Nancy Pelosi that is third in line for the presidency? That is why she got the big airplane and extra security.
David Addington will tell you that the succession lies only in the Executive Branch. In his view, should something happen to the President and the Vice President, Condi Rice would become President, followed by the rest of the Cabinet members in succession. No Nancy Pelosi, no Robert Byrd.
Crazy, but it’s true.
And if Harry Reid is playing musical chairs with committee chairmanships, I sure hope RGJoe is the one left standing, with no chair at all.
I don’t get this. Byrd has actually been a pretty good vote in the Senate. He came out for Obama before the WV primary. He voted against the Iraq War. If Reid is trying to pull stunts like this now, he better take away HoJo’s committee chair. HoJo deserves this kind of treatment a lot more than Byrd.
Al Haig would heartily support that interpretation of succession!
Not to mention Inouye is rather shaky on his party affiliation as well. Methinks some incumbent protection is going on.
It used to be that way for some period of time, per this wiki.
But replacing Byrd with Toobz Ted’s BFF is not what I would call an improvement.
In the 90s, when the GOP took the Senate, they did something similar with Strom Thurmond. He was (would have been) chair of Armed Services. However, he was too far gone at that point to handle something so high profile. Byrd doesn’t not have Thurmond’s mental acuity problems, but he is not healthy and not reliably present.
The Appropriations committee is responsible for Every.Single.Penny of the U.S. govt. budget. Many Senators consider it the most powerful and/or the most desirable committee assignment to have for the obvious reason. It needs a strong and “present” chairperson – particularly if the Dems are running the budget show rather than reacting to the socially promoted denizen of 1600 Penn. as they’ve been doing for the past 7 years.
This age and health related (if true) and I suspect the Dems may be pulling a move similar to the one the GOP did to Thurmond when they leapfrogged John Warner over him in with the Armed Services committee.
If the president bites the dust, the VP is first in the line of succession, then Speaker of the House, the President Pro Tem of the Senate (Byrd, shudder).
As dakine pointed out above, Inouye is a total toad who BFF is Stevens.
I wish we had some way of booting him out in 2010, but I’m not hopeful. And rotten governor [who’s current campaigning for Palin] Linda Lingle is lusting after that seat.
While I agree that Byrd isn’t doing anyone any favors at this point, We do need someone better than Inouye to take over. While Byrd isn’t a Feingold or Wellstone, he’s better than a fair number of Dems(like the Nelsons, Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln.