This week has brought back some memories of my first times watching the Senate in person as an adult in the mid-1990s.
1/
1/
Robert Byrd comparing the Senate to Nebuchadnezzar dethroned, “bereft of reason and eating grass like an ox” during debate over the line item veto.
2/
2/
Strom Thurmond’s voice, so raspy and anchored with accent and age, that it took a few extra beats to figure out what he was saying — and him falling asleep at his desk during the Clinton impeachment (late ‘90s)
3/
3/
Ted Kennedy booming across the Senate floor as though he was unaware that there was no one else in the chamber to hear him and that there was a microphone attached to his jacket to bring his words to viewers at home. 5/x
Bob Dole, in his winter as majority leader and spring as presidential candidate, around whom all the activity revolved, and his Kansas colleague, Nancy Kassebaum, who was at the time a rare Republican woman in the Senate pushing HIPAA through the Senate. 5/
Daniel Patrick Moynihan bursting through the back doors of the chamber, limbs waving, to register a vote and then retreat, just as quickly and noisily, whence he came. 6/
And Al D’Amato, who brought a certain je ne sais quoi to the chamber, talking about the most parochial of issues with outsized words in a pugnacious tone — all of it brought to the nation via a nasal Long Island brogue infused with Brooklynese. 7/7
