I disagree with Senator Robert Byrd on many things, but today I think it’s worthy we honor his record of service in the United States Congress on behalf of the people of West Virginia. Today, Byrd becomes the longest serving member of Congress ever. The article below is from Politico.

Byrd to Capture Longevity Record
By: Jonathan Allen

When the clock strikes midnight tonight, Sen. Robert Byrd will become the longest-serving member of Congress ever — a capstone on a remarkable career in which the adopted son of a coal miner propelled himself from poverty to the pinnacle of legislative power, where he could, did and still does send billions of federal dollars back across the Blue Ridge to help build his home state of West Virginia.

Byrd’s stat sheet speaks for itself:

• Served 20,774 days — or 56 years and 10½ months — in Congress
• Attended 18,582 Senate roll call votes
• Elected to Senate nine times
• Served under 11 presidents
• Held five jobs in Democratic leadership
• At age 91, sits third in line to the presidency

Democratic Leader Senator Byrd in 1980

Now frail, white-maned and bereft of his primary power base, Byrd, who turns 92 on Friday, is a walking testament to the mortality that is inevitably revealed as longevity records pile up. In recent years, he has lost his beloved wife, Erma Ora Byrd; his close friend Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts; and the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee, a post he coveted since his earliest days in Congress but gave up under pressure earlier this year.

But in a well-staffed institution that still pays tremendous deference to seniority, the oft-hospitalized Byrd remains what he has always been: an economic driver for West Virginia.

“He’s still bringing home the bacon,” said former Rep. Ken Hechler, a fellow West Virginia Democrat who served in the House from 1959 through 1977. “I would say he’s West Virginia’s No. 1 economic development officer.”

Last year, Byrd nabbed 60 projects totaling $123 million by himself and nearly $30 million more in conjunction with other lawmakers, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.

In a statement marking what he called a “longevity milestone,” Byrd said the “quality and dedication of service” has been more important to him.

“I have strived to provide the people of West Virginia the best representation possible each of the 20,774 days which I have served in the Congress of the United States,” he said, thanking West Virginians for their support and adding that he looks forward to serving them “for the next 56 years and 320 days.”

President Reagan and Senator Robert Byrd - 1980

Byrd’s deftness at transactional politics doesn’t always sit well with his colleagues — Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) once joked to aide Stuart Weisberg that Byrd might vote to go to war in Nicaragua in exchange for the right to pick low-level judges — but it has helped him win power for himself and more money for West Virginia.

“West Virginia has had this great man at our helm. And for that, we are truly blessed,” said Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who rejected entreaties to run a liberal primary against Byrd during the civil rights era.

Decades later, Byrd has become a hero on the left. A man once despised by liberals for race-baiting and backing Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War endorsed an African-American for president in 2008 and argued eloquently against the Iraq war on the Senate floor.

“He’s a man who has an absolute reverence for the institution and for the Constitution, and I would be hard-pressed to name someone who has grown more in office than he did,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey (D-Wis.).

“I’ve always found him to be a very sweet man and a person who was very considerate of other people. He also did not mind letting his temper show when he thought something justified it, and it usually did. I didn’t see him get angry at people. I saw him get angry when he thought the institution or the party was falling short in its obligations to something. That’s when he would get angry.”

Byrd first came to Congress in 1953 as a member of the House, where he served for six years. He moved to the Senate in 1959, where he gravitated toward the conservative camp, mimicking his political idol, Johnson, who obsequiously courted the favor of Southern power brokers when he first arrived in the Senate. Byrd even had Johnson escort him into the chamber for his first swearing-in ceremony.

He became a vocal and virulent segregationist in the Senate, playing to the conservative constituents in the Southern part of his state and his institutional constituents who hailed from the Deep South. He launched a 14-hour, 13-minute filibuster on June 9, 1964, that did not end until the next morning. At one point during the night, he engaged in a colloquy with Sen. Strom Thurmond (D-S.C.), whose Senate service record Byrd would break 40 years later, about whether the new civil rights law would violate a white woman’s 13th Amendment right not to be enslaved.

“Does the senator from West Virginia feel that when a woman of one race is required to give a massage to a woman of another race against her wishes, it is involuntary servitude?” Thurmond asked.

“The senator from West Virginia feels that unless the action is entered into voluntarily, even though the individual is being compensated for the personal services in the form of labor, it still constitutes involuntary servitude,” Byrd replied.

A former Ku Klux Klan organizer, Byrd once called Martin Luther King Jr. a “self-seeking rabble-rouser,” and he used his gavel as chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on the District of Columbia to press for welfare investigation in the majority-black city.

Over the years — and as he rose in the Democratic leadership — Byrd would moderate his public stance on racial issues, casting votes in favor of extending civil- and voting-rights protections. In 2008, he endorsed Obama over primary rival Hillary Clinton, saying, “Barack Obama is a noble-hearted patriot and humble Christian, and he has my full faith and support.”

“Sen. Byrd’s life — like most of ours — has been the struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light,” Obama wrote in “The Audacity of Hope.” “And in that sense, I realized that he really was a proper emblem for the Senate, whose rules and design reflect the grand compromise of America’s founding: the bargain between Northern states and Southern states, the Senate’s role as a guardian against the passions of the moment, a defender of minority rights and state sovereignty but also a tool to protect the wealthy from the rabble and assure slaveholders of noninterference with their peculiar institution.”

Byrd’s colleagues noticed his work ethic long before he became the congressional ironman. He grew up watching laborers clash with coal companies’ hired strikebreakers, worked as a butcher and earned a law degree — over a 10-year period — while serving in Congress.

“I liked Bob Byrd because he was a fellow whose career was about as admirable as anyone I ever knew. He was an adopted child, adopted by a coal miner family, never had anything given to him in his life that was worth very much,” former Sen. George Mathers told the Senate Historical Office in explaining why he helped Byrd round up the votes for his first leadership job — conference secretary — in 1966. “If ever there was a fellow who had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, by just hard work and personal sacrifice, it was Bob Byrd.”

His attention to his colleagues’ every need included sending birthday cards, and his colleagues rewarded his industriousness by promoting him through the ranks.

In that way, he earned every job he ever held — including the Democratic whip post he wrested from Kennedy in a stealth 1971 campaign that pitted Kennedy’sR celebrity and liberal credentials against Byrd’s careful cultivation of his colleagues and superior vote-counting skills.

The victory positioned Byrd to become majority leader in 1977. The West Virginian — like most Democratic members of Congress — had an uneasy relationship with President Jimmy Carter, who had little use for, or ability to use, lawmakers. He would spend a dozen years as his party’s floor leader — split evenly between the majority and the minority — before moving aside to become Appropriations chairman and president pro tempore in 1989.

Byrd, who once told a local reporter that his greatest ambition was to chair the spending panel, had been assigned to the committee by Johnson 30 years earlier, when its chairman was Sen. Carl Hayden (D-Ariz.), whose longevity record Byrd ties Tuesday.