Is it really too much to impose a $19 billion dollar fee on the banks whose recklessness required that Congress come up with a new set of rules to regulate Wall Street in the first place? This is the face of the current GOP. Republicans won’t just endlessly blather about how deficits are evil, while refusing to accept that some new taxes will have to be part of any kind of budget-balancing solution, but, in the case of Brown, they’ll even vote for legislation that has costs embedded in it and then threaten to renege on their vote when a way to pay for those costs is found.

How serious is Brown? We don’t know. But there’s no getting away from the fact that on Monday, West Virginia’s Robert Byrd died. That, in itself, should not change the calculus of bank reform in the long run; West Virginia’s Democratic governor, Joe Manchin, will appoint a safe Democratic vote to replace Byrd. But in the short term, the prognosis is unclear, and could get very murky if one of the other three Republicans who voted for the Senate bill — Charles Grassley, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins — also starts to get cold feet. The two Democrats who refused to sign off on bank reform, Maria Cantwell and Russ Feingold, haven’t made any sounds that Harry Reid might find encouraging.

The Republicans will filibuster approving the conference report; there isn’t any doubt about that. Can Manchin get someone appointed to replace Byrd before the July 4 Congressional recess, while Harry Reid keeps Grassley, Snowe, and Collins in place? Or will the entire thing fall apart, just a nanometer from the finish line?

UPDATE: And the hits keep coming: TalkingPointsMemo reports that Maine’s Susan Collins is also now officially undecided.

I also remember that even then — even though Robert Carlyle Byrd wasn’t yet a decade into his Senate service — dad spoke of Byrd not familiarly, as he did most of the state’s pols, but quietly and reverentially. Dad knew Byrd, certainly. But there were no stories about him, no anecdotes of taking him to shake hands outside a local mine at a change of shift, no tales of seeing Byrd knock back a bourbon in the bar of long-gone Daniel Boone Hotel down in Charleston and craning forward as he delivered the inside dope on what those crazy people in Washington were really up to.

Well, Byrd was from the southern part of the state, down below Beckley. We were northerners, almost Pittsburghers. In those days especially, you could have built a wall across the state more or less along U.S. Route 50 — above it north, below it Dixie. And the roads were such back then that Beckley was far, far away; it was probably faster to get to Philadelphia. So there was certainly that.

But I would wager that even well-placed lawyers from Byrd’s part of the state spoke of him quietly and reverentially, and I bet they discovered, when they thought about it, a surprising dearth of anecdotes. He just wasn’t that kind of pol. “Pol” isn’t even the right word. He did enough flesh-pressing to get by. He’d learned the fiddle as a young man, and that certainly paid dividends on the hustings. But a lot of the time, he was probably at home reading Polybius.

Now Byrd is gone, at age 92, having served a record-setting 51 years in the United States Senate. The career is astonishing mostly for all the history he witnessed and shaped, all the eras he outlasted.

He came to a deeply reactionary Senate, dominated by the Southern barons, in which, alas, he felt all too at home. But it was a changing Senate, too: His class, that of 1958, was notable for the many liberals it elected, men like Ed Muskie, Phil Hart, Gene McCarthy. By 1963, the Southerners were being challenged. Byrd was, famously, on the wrong side of history then. He opposed the 1964 civil rights bill and spoke against it for 14 hours. He was, frankly, terrible on the question, and although his also-famous membership in the Ku Klux Klan many years before was brief, it stuck with him, and it deserved to stick with him. It took him too long to change his racial views, which always seemed to me more reflective of his part of the state than mine, although maybe I’m being naive there.

But as the Southern-baron era faded and the Senate entered its era of liberal activity, Byrd eventually joined and embraced it. By the 1970s, after he’d defeated Teddy Kennedy in a whip election, he’d become more or less a moderate-to-sometimes-liberal Democrat. In 1977, now majority leader, he hit what many regard — well, okay, what my father always regarded — as the high point of his career, when he defended handing over the Panama Canal Zone to Panamanian authority and rounding up the votes in the Senate for it.

If you weren’t around then or were too young: It was a ferocious battle marked by the kind of nativism and xenophobia with which we are alas still quite familiar. It’s almost impossible to imagine that 68 senators would have the guts to vote that way today. Byrd was instrumental in making it happen.

In the third era Byrd lived through, the era of partisanship and polarization and lobbying and money, Byrd again played an important role, and one history will largely applaud, as guardian of senatorial power. That posture wasn’t always good for the republic: As I noted on my Guardian blog, he was an ardent defender of the filibuster.  But he opposed giving Bill Clinton the line-item veto on separation-of-powers grounds, and he opposed giving George W. Bush his war on largely the same grounds. He said in February 2003: “On this February day, as this nation stands at the brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors of war. Yet, this chamber is, for the most part, silent — ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate, paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events.” He was also unusually prescient in warning that the war wasn’t going to be quite as easy as most were advertising.

That position cost him some points back home, in a state whose politics became increasingly conservative during Byrd’s tenure. While West Virginia was never Massachusetts, it was always heavily union and, in my youth, surprising in certain ways (one of the most liberal state supreme courts in the country, for example). Over the decades, the massive decline in union membership — barely around 15,000 UMW members in the state today — and the little-discussed incursion by the Southern Baptist Convention into the state — a handful of churches when I was little, more than 300 last time I checked — changed the state into pretty fertile Limbaugh territory.

There was talk among the state’s Republicans in 2003 and 2004 of taking Byrd out in 2006. The Republicans found a rich conservative, John Raese, a native of Morgantown, to run against him. (My dad represented the striking Newspaper Guild workers against Raese’s newspaper-owning family in 1972). But Byrd crushed him by two-to-one. West Virginians were going to let the old man run out the clock. All that infamous pork helped, of course. You can’t throw a rock in the state without hitting something named for Byrd, and no, no one feels the remotest shame about it.

But I don’t think it was only the pork. West Virginians knew they had someone of stature representing them, and a small, poor state doesn’t produce many of those. There are the university’s basketball and football teams, and Byrd and Jay Rockefeller. Mary Lou Retton maybe, although that’s getting to be an old one, and she hasn’t lived in the state in ages. In stature terms, that’s about it. West Virginians don’t take that cavalierly.

A man his age has lived a more than full life, but if there is a sad thing about his passing now, it is that he was just starting to use that stature to do something he’d never done: challenge the coal industry. Like most West Virginia politicians, he was predictably in coal’s corner. When federal judge Chuck Haden handed down a pro-environmental decision about mountaintop-removal mining in 1999, Byrd actually went to the length of trying to get Haden’s decision overturned in Congress.

Then, out of nowhere, last December he started attacking the coal industry, saying: “Change has been a constant throughout the history of our coal industry. West Virginians can choose to anticipate change and adapt to it, or resist and be overrun by it. The time has arrived for the people of the Mountain State to think long and hard about which course they want to choose.” He meant, without saying it, the rape of the mountains that was no longer ignorable. He also went after Massey Energy more recently, after the hideous deaths of the 29 miners in that April explosion in his home county. Most surprisingly, he recently voted against the Lisa Murkowski resolution to strip the EPA of authority to define and regulate greenhouse gases. Rockefeller voted for big coal. Byrd bucked it. I don’t think he ever would have done that five or 10 years ago. It would have been fascinating to see what he would have said about coal and Massey and Don Blankenship over the next few years.

Byrd is not easy to categorize or eulogize. He was not avowedly liberal or conservative, and as such doesn’t suit this partisan era. As a man who taught himself law, read ancient classics, used a few too many five-dollar words and was never any good at all on television, he was also out of place in our age. But he spanned ages, embodying the good and the bad of America over those decades, and standing consistently in what Arthur Schlesinger called the time of “the imperial presidency” against presidential power. Many of the tributes that are pouring in today from his colleagues are coming from people who haven’t the slightest idea what his career was actually about, or who do but who simply put partisan gain ahead of constitutional belief. The Senate will always need a Byrd. I’m not sure who the next one will be, but I am sure it will miss this one.

2002 speech, Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

2003 speech:

Byrd, a Democrat, was the longest-serving senator in history, holding his seat for more than 50 years. He was the Senate’s majority leader for six of those years and was third in the line of succession to the presidency, behind House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a fellow West Virginian in the Senate, said it was his “greatest privilege” to serve with Byrd.

“I looked up to him, I fought next to him, and I am deeply saddened that he is gone,” Rockefeller said.

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said Byrd “combined a devotion to the U.S. Constitution with a deep learning of history to defend the interests of his state and the traditions of the Senate.”

“We will remember him for his fighter’s spirit, his abiding faith, and for the many times he recalled the Senate to its purposes,” McConnell said.

West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, will appoint Byrd’s replacement. For a vacancy that occurs more than two years and six months before the expiration of a senator’s term — Byrd’s term was to end in January of 2013 — the appointee serves until an election is held to fill the rest of the term.

Byrd’s death followed less than a year after the passing of venerable Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a nationally recognizable figure who had been a most vociferous spokesman for liberal causes for years.

In comportment and style, Byrd often seemed a Senate throwback to a courtlier 19th century. He could recite poetry, quote the Bible, discuss the Constitutional Convention and detail the Peloponnesian Wars — and frequently did in Senate debates.

Yet there was nothing particularly courtly about Byrd’s pursuit or exercise of power.

Byrd was a master of the Senate’s bewildering rules and longtime chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which controls a third of the $3 trillion federal budget. He was willing to use both to reward friends and punish those he viewed as having slighted him.

“Bob is a living encyclopedia, and legislative graveyards are filled with the bones of those who underestimated him,” former House Speaker Jim Wright, D-Texas, once said in remarks Byrd later displayed in his office.

In 1971, Byrd ousted Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator, as the Democrats’ second in command. He was elected majority leader in 1976 and held the post until Democrats lost control of the Senate four years later. He remained his party’s leader through six years in the minority, then spent another two years as majority leader.

“I have tangled with him. He usually wins,” former Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., once recalled.

DeConcini supported Byrd’s bid for majority leader. “He reciprocated by helping me get on the Appropriations Committee,” DeConcini said. Years later, DeConcini said, he displeased Byrd on another issue. “I didn’t get on the Intelligence Committee when I thought I was up to get on it.”

Byrd stepped aside as majority leader in 1989 when Democrats sought a more contemporary television spokesman. “I ran the Senate like a stern parent,” Byrd wrote in his memoir, “Child of the Appalachian Coalfields.” His consolation price was the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee, with control over almost limitless federal spending.

Within two years, he surpassed his announced five-year goal of making sure more than $1 billion in federal funds was sent back to West Virginia, money used to build highways, bridges, buildings and other facilities, some named after him.

In 2006 and with 64 percent of the vote, Byrd won an unprecedented ninth term in the Senate just months after surpassing South Carolinian Strom Thurmond’s record as its longest-serving member. His more than 18,500 roll call votes were another record.

But Byrd also seemed to slow after the death of Erma, his wife of almost 69 years, in 2006. Frail and at times wistful, he used two canes to walk haltingly and needed help from aides to make his way about the Senate. He often hesitated at unscripted moments. By 2009, aides were bringing him to and from the Senate floor in a wheelchair.

Though his hands trembled in later years, Byrd only recently lost his grip on power. Last November he surrendered his chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee.

Byrd’s lodestar was protecting the Constitution. He frequently pulled out a dog-eared copy of it from a pocket in one of his trademark three-piece suits. He also defended the Senate in its age-old rivalry with the executive branch, no matter which party held the White House.

Unlike other prominent Senate Democrats such as 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry of Massachusetts, who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, Byrd stood firm in opposition — and felt gratified when public opinion swung behind him.

“The people are becoming more and more aware that we were hoodwinked, that the leaders of this country misrepresented or exaggerated the necessity for invading Iraq,” Byrd said.

He cited Iraq when he endorsed then-Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination in May 2008, calling Obama “a shining young statesman, who possesses the personal temperament and courage necessary to extricate our country from this costly misadventure.”

Byrd’s accomplishments followed a childhood of poverty in West Virginia, and his success on the national stage came despite a complicated history on racial matters. As a young man, we was a member of the Ku Klux Klan for a brief period, and he joined Southern Democrats in an unsuccessful filibuster against the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.

He later apologized for both actions, saying intolerance has no place in America. While supporting later civil rights bills, he opposed busing to integrate schools.

Byrd briefly sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976 and later told associates he had once been approached by President Richard M. Nixon, a Republican, about accepting an appointment to the Supreme Court.

But he was a creature — and defender — of Congress across a career that began in 1952 with his election to the House. He served three terms there before winning his Senate seat in 1958, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House.

He clashed with presidents in both parties and was implacably against proposed balanced budget amendments to the Constitution.

“He is a fierce defender of the Senate and its prerogatives in ways that I think the founding fathers really intended the Senate to be,” said one-time rival Kennedy.

In a measure of his tenacity, Byrd took a decade of night courses to earn a law degree in 1963, and completed his long-delayed bachelor’s degree at West Virginia’s Marshall University in 1994 with correspondence classes.

Byrd was a near-deity in economically struggling West Virginia, to which he delivered countless federally financed projects. Entire government bureaus opened there, including the FBI’s repository for computerized fingerprint records. Even the Coast Guard had a facility in the landlocked state. Critics portrayed him as the personification of Congress’ thirst for wasteful “pork” spending projects.

Robert Carlyle Byrd was born Nov. 20, 1917, in North Wilkesboro, N.C., as Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr., the youngest of five children.

Before he was 1, his mother died and his father sent him to live with an aunt and uncle, Vlurma and Titus Byrd, who renamed him and moved to the coal-mining town of Stotesbury, W.Va. He didn’t learn his original name until he was 16 and his real birthday until he was 54.

Byrd’s foster father was a miner who frequently changed jobs, and Byrd recalled that the family’s house was “without electricity, … no running water, no telephone, a little wooden outhouse.”

He graduated from high school but could not afford college. Married in 1936 to high school sweetheart Erma Ora James — with whom he had two daughters — he pumped gas, cut meat and during World War II was a shipyard welder.

Returning to meat cutting in West Virginia, he became popular for his fundamentalist Bible lectures. A grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan suggested he run for office.

He won his first race — for the state’s House of Delegates — in 1946, distinguishing himself from 12 rivals by singing and fiddling mountain tunes. His fiddle became a fixture; he later played it on the television show “Hee Haw” and recorded an album. He abandoned it only after a grandson’s traumatic death in 1982 and when his shaky hands left him unable to play.

At his 90th birthday party in 2007, however, Byrd joined bluegrass band Lonesome Highway in singing a few tunes and topped off the night with a rendition of “Old Joe Clark.”

After six years in the West Virginia legislature, Byrd was elected to the U.S. House in 1952 in a race in which his brief Klan membership became an issue. He said he joined because of its anti-communism.

Byrd entered Congress as one of its most conservative Democrats. He was an early supporter of the Vietnam War, and his 14-hour, 13-minute filibuster against the 1964 civil rights bill remains one of the longest ever. His views gradually moderated, particularly on economic issues, but he always sided with his state’s coal interests in confrontations with environmentalists.

His love of Senate traditions inspired him to write a four-volume history of the chamber. It also led him to oppose laptops on the Senate floor and to object when a blind aide tried bringing her seeing-eye dog into the chamber. In 2004, Byrd got Congress to require schools and colleges to teach about the Constitution every Sept. 17, the day the document was adopted in 1787.