Pork barrel politics

Robert Byrd's Baffling Career: From Segregationist to Senate Sage

"He's a real reactionary. The Democrats made him their whip and he was in the Ku Klux Klan when he was young." The speaker was Richard Nixon in 1971, according to H.R. Haldeman's White House diary, as he toyed with appointing West Virginia's Robert Byrd to the Supreme Court after Senate liberals had rejected his first two picks. At that point in time (or any point in time), it was a ludicrous notion because the self-made Byrd had attended law school while serving in the Senate and had never practiced. And even a president who had exploited the white backlash against the civil rights movement ...

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