I was shocked by your report of Sen. Barbara Mikulski's effusive praise for the late senator and one-time Klansman Robert Byrd. It demonstrated her detachment from a vast segment of Marylanders and her supreme confidence in easy re-election.

Senator Mikulski represents Maryland, the native soil of Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall; the home of America's most venerable and venerated African-American newspaper; the cradle of a civil rights movement that got its sea legs in Baltimore and changed our nation. Thus, Senator Mikulski's anointment of Senator Byrd as one of her mentors is devastating when one recalls that a Byrd role model was none other than the apostle of race hate himself, Sen. Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi. What bloody cowardice, what dripping hubris, when in his infamous 1944 letter to Bilbo, Senator Byrd insulted black Americans fighting in Europe and Asia while sitting out the war himself. And this creature was Senator Mikulski's mentor!

Many try to excuse Senator Byrd's Klan membership — and Klan leadership. They call him "reformed" and in the worst cases, even try to make him into some kind of hero of interracial harmony. Would such mercy be shown for a "reformed" camp guard from Treblinka? Was the African-American Holocaust in America an evil of lesser order? Did Senator Byrd not play his part in it? Forgiveness? No, I won't forgive or forget — even if Senator Mikulski does.

The unrestrained and embarrassing praise for Senator Byrd coming from many legislators beyond Senator Mikulski demonstrates Congress's wider dysfunctionality, isolation from the electorate and lack of accountability. Congress snored through the economic and financial devastation of our nation, and every incumbent has unclean hands. Until this week, the senior member of our nation's Senate was a man who also held a leadership position in the Ku Klux Klan. Senator Byrd understandably revered the Senate and Senate rules. He perceived that their "minority protections" were written to empower an outnumbered post-Reconstruction Confederacy determined to accomplish by genteel Senate process what it could not accomplish by armed rebellion: perpetuation of white supremacy.

In November, voters have another opportunity to end this bizarre parody of democracy. Congress is out of touch and out of date. Senator Mikulski has been part of it for 35 years, and 35 years is long enough. Her shocking farewell to the late West Virginia Klansman confirms it.

Richard J. Douglas, College Park