Ex-Senate chief Reid dies at 82
Nevadan a force in health care law, finance regulation
Harry Reid, the Democrat who rose from childhood poverty in the rural Nevada desert to the heights of power in Washington, where he steered the Affordable Care Act to passage as Senate majority leader, died Tuesday in Henderson, Nev. He was 82.
Reid had been treated for pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed in
2018, but lived to see the Las Vegas airport renamed for him this month.
Even by the standards of the political profession, where against-the-odds biographies are common and modest roots an asset, what Reid overcame was extraordinary. He was raised in almost Dickensian circumstances in tiny Searchlight, Nev. His home had no indoor plumbing, his father was an alcoholic miner who eventually committed suicide, and his mother helped the family survive by taking in laundry from local brothels.
After two decades of campaigns in Nevada marked by success, setback and recovery, Reid was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1986. He became the chamber’s Democratic leader after the 2004 election.
But it was not until his colleague Barack Obama was elected president four years later that Reid was able to meld his deep knowledge of congressional rules, his facility with horse-trading and his cussed determination to unify his 60-seat majority and pass landmark legislation.
Pushing through a sweeping economic stimulus after a major recession, a new set of rules governing Wall Street and the most significant expansion of health care coverage since the Great Society of the 1960s — all with scant Republican support — Reid became, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the indispensable lawmakers of the Obama era.
“The records will be written about the eight years of Obama and Reid,” Reid boasted shortly after he announced in 2015 that he would not seek reelection the next year.
DIFFERENT TIMES
The three-decade Senate tenure of this soft-spoken yet ferociously combative Nevadan, a middleweight boxer in his youth, also traced the chamber’s evolution from a collegial and consensus-oriented institution to the partisan and fractured body it has become. Republicans placed some of the blame for that on Reid, pointing to his 2013 decision to upend Senate rules by doing away with the filibuster on most nominations by a president.
Reid, though, reflected the broader leftward shift of his party and his state. First elected to the House in 1982, he arrived in the capital as a moderate western Democrat: opposed to abortion rights, largely supportive of gun rights and uneasy about immigration.
But as Nevada grew from an overwhelmingly rural, white redoubt of ranches and mines to a polyglot gambling mecca in which 70% of voters live in the Las Vegas area, Reid adapted as a matter of necessity. He won his final reelection in 2010, a dismal year for Democrats nationally, thanks in part to an outpouring of support from his state’s rapidly growing Hispanic and Asian communities.
But after Democrats lost the Senate majority in 2014, Reid decided not to run for a sixth term. He said he did not want to be one of those senators who served well into old age.
While he was willing to adjust with the times politically, he remained a stylistic throwback. A Mormon who neither drank nor smoked, he also shunned his state’s principal industry, claiming with his characteristic bluntness that “the only people who make money from gambling are the joints and government.”
Reid ran Nevada’s Democratic Party in the manner of an old-style political boss, arranging his own succession and even remaining in charge through the 2018 midterm elections. He also used his clout to elevate his state’s role in the presidential nominating process, and in 2016 he quietly helped Hillary Clinton salvage her nomination there.
After the 1980 census, Nevada had a large enough population to merit a second House seat, representing the Las Vegas area. Reid won the new district, but after two terms a Senate seat opened up thanks to the retirement of Paul Laxalt, whom Reid had lost to in the 1974 Senate race by fewer than 700 votes.
Reid benefited from running in a good Democratic year in 1986, and he handily defeated the incumbent’s hand-picked successor. After another agonizingly close race in 1998 — he won by fewer than 500 votes after a recount — Reid was elected minority whip.
After Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, was defeated in 2004, Reid effectively secured the commitments he needed to take over the caucus by the next day.
Democrats took back control of the Senate in 2006 and Reid became majority leader. He played a key role in passing the bank bailout after the stock market collapsed in the fall of 2008. Later that year, when Obama was elected, Democrats made even more gains, giving Reid a filibuster-proof majority.
Reid’s hard-nosed tactics handed Democrats a series of major achievements, but he was vulnerable to defeat entering what would be his final reelection campaign in 2010. His allies undermined a potentially strong candidate and helped lift a far-right conservative. He won the general election comfortably.