Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced Friday morning he would not seek re-election in 2016, thus ending a long congressional career of liberal fiscal positions.
Reid voted to raise the debt ceiling 32 times while serving in Congress for the past 32 years. Ten of those votes came during Reid’s eight year tenure as Senate Majority Leader. In 1983, when he first voted for a debt ceiling increase, the debt limit was $400 billion, or $1.1 trillion in today’s dollars. Today, the debt limit has exploded to 16 times higher to $18.1 trillion.
Only twice has Reid voted against a debt ceiling hike, once each in 2003 and in 2006. In 2011, he said he was “embarrassed” about his past opposition to raising the debt ceiling, calling it a political maneuver. “The one time I tried to make a political issue of it, I wish I hadn’t,” Reid said.
Reid is still set to spend the next 21 months in the Senate, and he’ll likely get at least one more chance to vote for a debt ceiling increase this fall, when the government’s borrowing ability will cease. It’s unclear how far in the future the debt ceiling will be set. Multiple times in the past the debt ceiling has had to be raised three times in the same calendar year.
Five of Reid’s votes for raising the debt ceiling were on voice votes without roll call records in 1983, 1989, and 1990, so if he did oppose it he failed to register an objection. However, his all but clean streak of voting for debt ceiling increases until President George W. Bush’s tenure gives little reason to think he would have voiced opposition at those times.
Under Reid’s leadership, the Senate failed to pass budgets for fiscal 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2015 — or half of his tenure as Senate Majority Leader. Of the budgets he did pass, none balanced. The first budget resolution since Republicans took back control of the Senate, passed early Friday, would balance in ten years.
During President George W. Bush’s first term, Reid voted against income tax cuts, changes that encouraged retirement savings, and cuts in the death tax. One bright spot might be his support for welfare reform in 1996. Reid also voted in favor of the last gas tax increase in 1993.
