Byrd Compares Proposal to Nazi Germany [View All]

[seemslikeadream]

Posted 3/2/2005 09:04 AM

Sen. Robert C. Byrd
Republicans sharply criticize the West Virginia senator's comments on rules that could make it easier to approve judicial nominees.
Conservatives are attacking Sen. Robert C. Byrd for a speech he made on the Senate floor Tuesday.

Byrd criticized Republican proposals that would limit debate in the Senate on judicial nominees. In the speech, Byrd made references to Nazi Germany and fascism.

In a news release, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman criticized the West Virginia Democrat, saying:

"Senator Byrd's invocation of Hitler's Germany in discussing the duty of U.S. Senators to advise and provide consent on judicial nominees is reprehensible and beyond the pale. While members of the Senate are free to agree and disagree on the issues, this poisonous rhetoric only serves to illustrate the desperation and weakness of Senator Byrd's position."

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from Byrd's speech


But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler's dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that "Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact." And he succeeded.


Hitler's originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.

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