In a speech delivered on the Senate floor Tuesday, Byrd complained:

"Many times in our history we have taken up arms to protect a minority against the tyrannical majority in other lands. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men.

"But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law."

Byrd continued:

"Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that 'Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact.' And he succeeded.

"Hitler’s originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the state: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal."

At that point the former Klansman drew a direct parallel between Republican plans and Hitler's tactics, saying:

"And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate. ..."

Moments later, Byrd invoked the imagery of the Holocaust, saying that the Senate's GOP leadership would "callously incinerate" the rights of the Democratic minority:

"For the temporary gain of a handful of 'out of the mainstream' judges, some in the Senate are ready to callously incinerate each senator’s right of extended debate," the former Klansman complained. "Note that I said each senator. For the damage will devastate not just the minority party."

Editor's note: