Byrd to run for record ninth term in U.S. Senate

“He has every intention to seek re-election,” Byrd spokesman Tom Gavin confirmed Thursday. “But I’m going to let the senator make his own announcement.”

In an e-mail to supporters of the 87-year-old Democrat’s re-election, Friends of Robert C. Byrd Chairman Ned Rose said Byrd will make his announcement on Wednesday at the state Capitol.

“As he prepares to announce his plans of the 2006 campaign, I hope that you will stand with him as he has always stood for West Virginia and for our country,” Rose said in the e-mail.

At least three Republicans have announced plans to seek the nomination for Byrd’s seat. But Republican U.S. Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, considered to be the GOP’s best chance against Byrd, has not said whether she will challenge Byrd or seek a fourth term in the House.

The announcement will not affect Capito’s decision to run and she has not set a timetable for making a decision, spokesman R.C. Hammond said Thursday.

Byrd’s decision comes on the heels of bipartisan accolades he received for spearheading the successful effort to get the Base Realignment and Closure Commission to reject a Pentagon plan to strip planes from the West Virginia Air National Guard’s 130th Airlift Wing.

Despite not having made his official announcement, Byrd has already become the subject of attack ads and the senator has hit back with a television spot of his own.

A Republican ad cites Byrd’s votes against a 2003 military appropriation measure and President Bush’s proposed tax cuts to allege he “voted against body armor in the war on terror” and “votes for higher taxes for the middle class.” It also contends that Byrd has changed his stances on such issues since first joining Congress in the 1950s.

Byrd’s ad brands the claims made by the National Republican Senatorial Committee “false and misleading.”

The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org has found both ads contain “shopworn distortions.”