Robert Byrd had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. That’s all you need to know to realize just how long he was in the Senate – he was first elected at a time when such a revelation was the farthest thing from electoral poison.
Byrd was also the institutional memory of the Senate, the man who knew everything there was to know about how the upper chamber worked. There was a story in DC, probably apocryphal, that Newt Gingrich had a dry run for pushing the Contract With America through the Senate, and had a whole team of researchers to play the part of Robert Byrd – and was dismayed at how simple it would be for one man to tie the chamber in knots.
With the passing of Byrd, the Senate takes one step farther away from the “Folkways of the US Senate” days and one step closer to being the House of Representatives – only with longer tenure and a worse grip on math.