By Ray Smock
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I highly recommend a recent podcast interview from Electric Politics with one of the nation’s leading experts on Congress and the Presidency, Dr. Louis Fisher, who discusses the current budget and national debt crisis. The Byrd Center also has an oral history interview of Fisher on our website that was conducted by the Senate Historian Emeritus, Dr. Richard A. Baker, a member of the Byrd Center’s board of trustees. Fisher’s own website contains an excellent variety of his writings on the Constitution, Congress, and the Presidency. If you are looking for good solid information on Constitutional issues, relations between Congress and the Presidency, war powers, the duties of Congress and the President related to the budget and other issues from one of the top professionals in the nation, you should know about Lou Fisher, his books, articles, congressional testimony, and interviews.

By Ray Smock

In Chris Matthews new book Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked, the author describes the battle between the Speaker and President Reagan over funding for the Contras, the Nicaraguan rebel forces, fighting the Sandinista government of that country.  In 1986 the President was trying to get $100 million out of Congress for direct military aid to the Contras. Speaker O’Neill and the Democratic-controlled House were opposed to the funds and feared that the President was eager to launch a war in Nicaragua. In March the House rejected the military aid package, but this did not stop the President from continuing his efforts on behalf of the Contras.
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As Matthews tells the story, in June of 1986, Don Regan, President Reagan’s chief of staff, called Speaker O’Neill to request that the President be allowed to make an appearance before the House of Representatives, to make his case for the Contras. O’Neil refused, telling Regan that he was not opposed to informal discussions with House members, but that any formal appearance by the President had to be during a joint meeting of the House and Senate, as protocol demanded.

An essential part of any archive’s mission is to field research queries from patrons. Most of the requests about the Byrd Center’s collections have come via email. In turn, I’ve been able to field many of these requests with some degree of success relatively quickly (usually the patron is asking about a particular document rather than a larger topic that would require many documents and more research time). I’m then able to send the researcher an electronic file which not only saves them a trip (especially if they’re from say, California), but it also drives our digitization efforts (as we now have that paper file as a PDF).
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Sometimes we don’t have what the researcher is seeking, so we try and point them to other resources that may bear more fruit for their search.

Other times, we strike gold–the “magic bullet” of documents that are rumored to exist, but rarely seen.

It was my good fortune during the nearly twelve years that I served as Historian of the House of Representatives to meet a lot of very interesting people and outstanding public servants from both political parties. One of those outstanding individuals, Speaker Tom Foley, died this past week and my thoughts turned back to his Speakership.

I had no idea when I was hired in 1983 that I would be witnessing the end of a political era in the House and that the end of that era would also be the end of my career in the House. In the watershed congressional elections of 1994 the Democrats lost control of the House for the first time in forty years. My tenure there coincided with the Speakerships of Tip O’Neill of Massachusetts, Jim Wright of Texas, and Tom Foley of Washington. My office fell under the direct administrative control of the Speaker, even though I was not part of the political aspects of the Speaker’s duties.
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Tom Foley not only lost the Speakership in 1994 when Republicans gained control of the chamber and elected Newt Gingrich as Speaker, he also lost his election as a member of Congress from the state of Washington that year. The tide was turning against incumbents. The public was fed up with scandals that had wracked the House.  Newt Gingrich had gone from an obscure back bencher to a prominent critic of everything that was wrong with the House and his message resonated with enough voters to usher in the “Gingrich Revolution.”  It was a time of bitter partisanship. Politics was rapidly coarsening. It was not just a matter of defeating an opponent; the goal was to destroy the opponent.

By Ray Smock

 Background
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There have been 17 so-called shutdowns of the government since 1976 according to the Washington Post in a piece by Dylan Matthews that was updated September 25, 2013. The current crisis is the 18th.  But not all shutdowns were created equal. Most were limited to a few days and did not involve shutting down all departments of government. The severity of the crisis depended on the scope of the shutdown as well as its duration. In some instances it is more useful to call them “spending gaps,” rather than shutdowns.

By Casey Dehaven

On October 8, 2013, NPR aired a story entitled “Enter The Quiet Zone: Where Cell Service, Wi-Fi Are Banned.” This news item described two scientific installations in West Virginia: the Green Bank Telescope and the Sugar Grove research facility. Senator Byrd was instrumental in securing funding for these two sites, and we wanted to highlight his role in advancing the cause of science in his home state.

In November 1988 in the foothills of Pocahontas County, West Virginia, the gusset plate, an integral piece of a structure’s anatomy, came loose and reduced the original Green Bank Telescope to a pile of rubble. Less than a year later, Senator Robert C. Byrd pushed a $75 million Emergency Supplemental Appropriation through Congress in order to secure federal funding to rebuild a more advanced model of the Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia.
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Construction of the telescope began in the summer of 1993; with Senator Byrd observing in one of his many Byrd’s Eye View columns that the “official operation of the new, technologically advanced National Radio Telescope is anticipated to begin in 1995.” He mentioned that one of his main reasons for funding this project was to ensure that the state of West Virginia was kept in the “front ranks” of radio telescope technology as a “brilliant star” for a scientific future.

By Ray Smock

The Byrd Center for Legislative Studies will be exploring the current government shutdown and also looking into history for what happened in the last major shutdown, the one in 1995-96 that kept much of the government closed for 21 days.

There are some interesting parallels but the two situations are also quite different in nature. The media, especially the Internet, is filled with much good information, but also a lot of speculation and downright misinformation and propaganda. Both political parties and a lot of special interests are spinning this serious challenge to our Constitution for their own benefit. We will try to use a critical eye on all sides of the issue, drawing from the Byrd Center archives and other sources to try to shed more light than fog on the problem confronting us all.

If you have not looked at my Constitution Day address, you may want to start there because the shutdown was looming as I prepared this speech. I firmly believe in the important Constitutional role of Congress in our government. And, as Senator Byrd’s career attests, Congress works best when it follows its own rules, conducts business in regular order, and passes appropriations bills to keep the government operating. Any other considerations pale in importance to this fundamental job.
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I did an interview on the first day of the shutdown with Cecelia Mason of WV Public Radio, which was aired this morning.

By Marc Levitt
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Several of Senator Byrd’s constituents sent him works of art during his long tenure as a senator. These gifts were quite diverse in their materials, including a fiddler carved from coal and a miner’s head fashioned from an apple (and properly preserved).

This is but one example of a warm relationship the senator had with his constituents, all of whom Byrd held in high esteem: “[the people of West Virginia] treat everyone as family. We show people respect, treating them as we ourselves would want to be treated.” The art that was sent to Senator Byrd can certainly be said to display such a mindset.

Source:
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Byrd’s Eye View, Honoring the Spirit of West Virginia, June 14, 2007.