W.Va. will suffer with Byrd stepping down from chairmanship. Everyone wanted to paint a happy face on it and
the official announcement came in the form of a statement from U.S. Sen. Robert
C. Byrd that he was stepping aside as the chairman of the powerful Senate
Appropriations Committee.
Beckley Register Herald: EDITORIAL- Tuesday, November 11th, 2008-- W.Va. will suffer with Byrd stepping down from chairmanship.
Everyone wanted to paint a happy face on it and the official announcement came in the form of a statement from U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd that he was stepping aside as the chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee.
For months, though, it has been no secret that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has been pushing for the venerable Byrd’s removal. Well, he finally got it last week.
There is no question that Byrd, who will be 91 next week, has been struggling for quite some time with his health and something would have to be done. We still believe Byrd should have been able to remain as chairman and the vice chairman could have been looked to for taking the lead on most of the day-to-day committee business.
Reid simply wasn’t going to have it.
During the past decade or so Byrd has seen to it that West Virginia finally started to get its fair share of federal dollars, estimated at $2 billion plus, after being put at the bottom of the list for many, many years. Call it pork if you like, but if Byrd hadn’t brought it home it would have gone somewhere else.
Now, what’s done is done and we have no strong link to federal appropriations on the Senate side.
It’s good that our other senator, Jay Rockefeller, is chairman of the Intelligence Committee. However, when it comes to obtaining needed dollars for projects in the Mountain State, the hoops that have to be stepped through just increased tenfold with Byrd stepping down from the chairmanship.
And as for Reid, West Virginians should be plenty worried about how he operates and what his agenda really is. Reid is strongly opposed to coal in general and his stance on a multitude of issues dealing with coal makes us shiver to think what he and House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi will do next to undermine it.
Hopefully President-elect Barack Obama will indeed bring Reid and Pelosi closer to the middle and get them to work cooperatively to promote and use clean coal technology, rather than trying to doom the industry, which is clearly what their stance has been to date.
Our eyes are wide open to it and we’ll be watching closely.