RIP Harry Reid
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Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who rose from a hardscrabble Nevada childhood to become a powerful Democratic force in Congress during the Obama presidency, died Tuesday. He was 82.
Mr. Reid died after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer, his wife, Landra Reid, said in a statement.
“We are so proud of the legacy he leaves behind both on the national stage and his beloved Nevada,” she said.
As the Senate’s top Democrat, Mr. Reid successfully blocked President George W. Bush from privatizing Social Security, and later helped enact the 2010 health-insurance law known as the Affordable Care Act. He also led a push to change the Senate’s procedures to confirm executive-branch nominees and most judges with a simple majority, a momentous move that permanently altered the chamber’s character.
President Biden, who served with Mr. Reid in the Senate and worked with him as vice president, praised Mr. Reid as “a dear friend and a giant of our history.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who succeeded Mr. Reid as the party’s leader, called Mr. Reid one of his dearest friends. “He’s gone but will walk by the sides of many of us in the Senate every day,” he said.
Through the way Mr. Reid wielded power on the Senate floor—including by exercising near total command over which measures received votes and which didn’t—he “took control far beyond where even [onetime Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson] had been able to push it, and it changed the institution,” according to “Kill Switch,” a 2021 book written by Mr. Reid’s former deputy chief of staff, Adam Jentleson.
Mr. Reid’s tactics infuriated Republicans, and some Democrats too. Mr. Reid’s Republican counterpart, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), said in 2013 that if Mr. Reid went nuclear—shorthand for eliminating the Senate’s 60-vote requirement for presidential nominees and allowing most confirmations to proceed with a simple majority—he would “be remembered as the worst leader here ever.”
Mr. Reid pushed ahead with the change, insisting that he needed to respond to Mr. McConnell’s constant obstruction. By 2017, Mr. McConnell responded by driving through the elimination of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, resulting in the court’s current 6-3 conservative majority. In his retirement, Mr. Reid concluded that the legislative filibuster should be abolished as well.
Yeah, and the part where he lied about Romney not paying taxes. That was another high point in his career.
