Former Senator Harry Reid Dies at 82

Senator Reid Portrait sitting,for hands S221

Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has passed away at the age of 82 after a life that spanned from Searchlight, Nevada to becoming one of the most powerful politicians in Washington, D.C.

Washington Post:

Mr. Reid’s legislative achievements tended to be overshadowed by the partisan rancor that increasingly gripped Congress during his time as majority leader. But despite the acrimony and gridlock, Post congressional reporter Paul Kane wrote in 2015, “His legacy will be defined just as much by his deft parliamentary maneuvers to push forward sweeping laws that might not have passed under different leadership.”

A trial lawyer, lieutenant governor and two-term member of the U.S. House before winning his Senate seat in 1986, he was certainly a competitor. But the trim, slightly stooped Mr. Reid was low-key in demeanor, and he professed a desire for bipartisan collaboration.

He liked to refer to his days in the ring, where he fought more than a dozen amateur middleweight matches while in college. “I know how to dance. I know how to fight,” he said when he was elected Democratic leader in 2004. “I’d rather dance than fight.”

But there was more Rocky Marciano than Fred Astaire in his political methods. As majority leader, he kept an increasingly tight rein on Senate proceedings, and his tactics drew angry criticism from Republicans that he abused his authority and smothered the rights of the minority.

One complaint was that instead of allowing Senate committees to write legislation, Mr. Reid too often oversaw the drafting process in his office and brought a measure to the floor as a take-it-or-leave-it package, using a parliamentary maneuver to prevent unwanted amendments.

He defended his tightly controlled approach as necessary to counter what he described as Republicans’ “mindless, knee-jerk obstruction” of the Obama agenda. His tactics also enabled Democrats to avoid casting votes on controversial measures that could be troublesome at election time.

“I was never running to be popular with Republicans,” he told reporters at the end of his Senate tenure. “I’ve had a job to do with President Obama. I’ve done the best that I can.”

In a letter Obama wrote to Reid before his death and released Tuesday evening, the former president said: “I wouldn’t have been president had it not been for your encouragement and support, and I wouldn’t have got most of what I got done without your skill and determination.”

Former Senate historian Donald Ritchie said Mr. Reid exercised as much influence as he could under Senate rules, a strategy aided by an increasing concentration of power in the majority leader’s office that began in the 1990s.

Mr. Reid meets with staff on Capitol Hill in 2005. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Mr. Reid’s most controversial — and arguably most consequential — move came in 2013, after Republicans filibustered a series of Obama nominees. Under his guidance, Democrats pushed through a rules change lowering the threshold for confirmation (except for Supreme Court nominees) from 60 votes to a simple majority. Republicans railed against what Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) called a “complete and total power grab,” but Mr. Reid insisted that GOP intransigence left no other option.

Whatever the merits, Mr. Reid’s use of the “nuclear option” shifted power from the minority to the majority — and four years later allowed the Trump administration to move contested Cabinet and judicial picks through the GOP-controlled Senate. While Mr. Reid exempted Supreme Court nominees from the lowered threshold, the Republican majority, citing his rule change as precedent, extended the simple-majority requirement to the high court, leaving Democrats powerless to block the nominations of Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. “God bless Harry M. Reid,” the late conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, a Gorsuch supporter, wrote in 2017.

Adding Mr. Reid’s two stints as minority leader (2005 through 2006 and 2015 through 2016) to his eight years as majority leader, he led Senate Democrats for a dozen years. Some members of his party bristled at his strict management style. But he got high marks for keeping his fractious caucus united, and his hold on the leadership of the Democratic caucus was never seriously challenged.

To outsiders, he may not have been an obvious choice for the position. He lacked the smooth manner that plays well on Sunday TV talk shows, and although he moved leftward during his leadership years, he stood to the right of many in his party, especially on social issues. He opposed the 1994 assault weapons ban, favored outlawing so-called partial-birth abortions and voted to authorize the 1991 and 2003 U.S. wars against Iraq.