The Week

We had hoped to comment on President Clinton’s State of the Union address, but as this issue went to press he was still speaking.

The bad news in the Senate is that one man can gum up the Republican agenda. The good news is that the man is Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Byrd’s week-long stall of the bill curtailing unfunded mandates was a nice summation of the state of his party: reduced to delaying for delay’s sake legislation supported by all but ten Democratic senators and by a wide swath of Democratic state and local officeholders. At least last year Republicans were obstructing legislation they actually opposed. Meanwhile, Senator Byrd’s prominence keeps an old face on a party that desperately needs fresh ones; at one point during floor maneuverings on the bill, the seven-term troglodyte treated new Minority Leader Tom Daschle like a page, eliciting clucks of sympathy for the outgunned South Dakota Democrat even from Republican bystanders. In the Senate, we have seen the Democratic future; it looks a lot like the Democratic past.

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We had hoped to comment on President Clinton’s State of the Union address, but as this issue went to press he was still speaking.

The bad news in the Senate is that one man can gum up the Republican agenda. The good news is that the man is Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Byrd’s week-long stall of the bill curtailing unfunded mandates was a nice summation of the state of his party: reduced to delaying for delay’s sake legislation supported by all but ten Democratic senators and by a wide swath of Democratic state and local officeholders. At least last year Republicans were obstructing legislation they actually opposed. Meanwhile, Senator Byrd’s prominence keeps an old face on a party that desperately needs fresh ones; at one point during floor maneuverings on the bill, the seven-term troglodyte treated new Minority Leader Tom Daschle like a page, eliciting clucks of sympathy for the outgunned South Dakota Democrat even from Republican bystanders. In the Senate, we have seen the Democratic future; it looks a lot like the Democratic past.