He whispered to Barack Obama that he could become president. He transformed the US Senate from a smoking parlor à la the Dutch Senate into a political arena. And he unwittingly paved the way for controversial Trump candidates on the highest court. Harry Reid, Democratic Party Senate leader from 2007 to 2015, passed away on Tuesday at the age of 82 in his home state of Nevada.
Reid grew up there in the 1940s in a house without running water, with an alcoholic father and in constant poverty. He trained in boxing in high school. He took that skill with him into his political career “to fight fiercely against anyone who harmed the poor and the middle class,” his student and current Senate leader Chuck Schumer wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
SenSchumer Chuck Schumer Harry Reid was one of the most amazing individuals I’ve ever met He never forgot where he came from and used those boxing instincts to fearlessly fight those who were hurting the poor & the middle class He’s gone but will walk by the sides of many of us in the Senate every day https://t.co/8T9PiD7vY4
In 1986, Reid became a senator for Nevada and from 1999 the leader of the Democratic squad in the Senate. When his party won the Senate majority in the 2006 elections, Reid energetically forged his position as controller of his faction and controller of the Senate agenda. Under his leadership, the vote fell steadily and drastically, from 218 in 2007 to 67 in 2013, according to his then collaborator Adam Jentleson in the book. Kill Switch – subtitle: ‘How American Democracy Was Crippled’.
Obama presidency
In 2006, Reid had an inexperienced Illinois senator summoned to his room. In the book Race of a Lifetime describes how Barack Obama and his right-hand man looked at each other in shock: “What have we screwed up?” Inside the room, according to the book, Reid told Obama: “You won’t get much further here. I know you don’t care much about what you’re doing here.” After twenty minutes, Obama came back to his own room and asked his right-hand man, What did Reid want from you? “Harry wants me to be president,” Obama said. The authors also note that Reid also thought Obama could make it with his “light skin” and “no black accent unless he wants to put it on.”
When Obama did indeed become president, Reid was indispensable to the success of the presidential agenda. With an initially comfortable majority, strict party discipline and his knowledge of the rules of the Senate, he at least managed to get the Obamacare health insurance system very unpopular with Republicans through the Senate. Reid was unabashedly proud of that. These eight years will go down in the annals as the Obama-Reid years got The New York Times him on Tuesday.
The flip side of all political arm-wrestling was that the traditionally more dated, less partisan atmosphere vanished from this chamber of Congress. Since then, the Senate has been almost as polarized as the House of Representatives. In 2014 compared The New York Times Reid with Republican Newt Gingrich, who fought fiercely as Speaker of the House in the 1990s to paralyze Bill Clinton’s presidency.
The nuclear option
One of Reid’s means of getting his way against the wishes of Republicans was the so-called “nuclear option.” President Obama struggled to get his top-ranking candidates nominated because nominations required a 60-40 Senate majority—thanks to a process known as filibuster. Reid repealed that rule in 2013 for all positions except Supreme Court Justice. The Republicans were furious and their leader, Mitch McConnell, warned Reid: “You’re going to regret this. And sooner than you think.”
When Republican President Trump was allowed to nominate a judge to the highest court in 2017, McConnell fulfilled his threat. He also broadened the “nuclear option” for these appointments, allowing Trump to appoint an unprecedented three conservative justices to the Supreme Court.
Once McConnell became Senate leader in 2015, it showed how closely he had looked at Reid’s leadership. He took a stranglehold on the agenda and refused to put bills to the vote. In 2019, only 107 laws were voted on in the Senate. Republican senators very rarely pass a Democratic bill. The polarization in the Senate is proving to be a tough legacy from Harry Reid.
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