He once called President George W. Bush a “liar” and a “loser.” He suggested in public, based on rather obviously false rumors, that Mitt Romney paid no federal income taxes. He repeatedly used the Senate floor and the constitutional legislative immunity it confers to carry on a personal vendetta with incessant accusations of nefarious activities by Republican donors Charles and David Koch.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, whose boxing career ended decades ago, could not blame punch-drunkenness for his low conduct, nor for the demotion from majority leader that he earned from voters last November for misruling the upper chamber in such a public way.
The Nevada Democrat is now going to hang up his gloves, and will retire rather than seek re-election in 2016. In 2008, 2010 and 2012, he showed that his political machine could dominate Nevada. Based on the results of the 2014 election in Nevada, in which it sat idle and Democratic turnout went off a cliff, it is an open question whether his state party will survive his departure.
Reid had once been Nevada’s top gambling regulator, depicted and partially fictionalized by Dick Smothers in the 1995 movie, Casino. He was a state legislator, lieutenant governor and congressman before he entered the Senate in 1986.
By the time he had reached the Senate, Reid was already a parliamentary and procedural master. He knew how to dominate the chamber from either the majority or the minority to suit his ends. His greatest feat, perhaps, was a triumph of dilatory legislative procedure over science. During the last decade, Reid worked with anyone who would help to block the Bush administration from moving the nation’s nuclear waste from dozens of population centers and relocate it the desolate Yucca Mountain area in his state, which had been thoroughly studied and deemed safe. Thanks to his perseverance, millions of Americans are a bit less safe.
Reid relished his role as a political fighter, but his reverence for Senate traditions depended on whether they suited his ends at the time. He invoked them with solemn sanctimony when he was in the minority, but backtracked on his every supposed conviction once he had taken majority control.
He has no immutable reverence for the institution itself, and violated Senate rules to eliminate filibusters to ram through executive branch and judicial nominations. Although the change he made was not terribly objectionable in and of itself, the process by which it was achieved was lawless. It will surely be cited in the future as justification for further self-serving rule-changes. Perhaps Reid has unwittingly paved the way for an eventual up-or-down vote on Yucca Mountain; that would be poetic justice.
It is said that leading the Senate is as difficult as herding cats. But as majority leader, Reid managed that task with great success, ruling as autocratically as possible. He made a habit of “filling the tree” with bills — a procedural measure by which he could use his privilege as leader to preempt all other senators from filing amendments for a vote. He did this more often than any Senate leader in history, essentially obviating the amendment process. He thus destroyed an important tool that senators historically used to work together and compromise on bills.
This is why, earlier this year, it took Republicans just a few hours to consider more amendments than Reid had allowed on the floor during the entire previous Congress. Reid’s strategy of preventing Republican amendments protected Democratic senators from taking a lot of embarrassing votes, but it also backfired. It prevented them from staking out reasonable positions or expressing independence from President Obama.
Republicans found the vulnerability in Reid’s strategy last year when they began pummeling his colleagues with ads that showed how often each one of them voted with Obama — 90, 95, 98 percent of the time. Contrary to popular belief, this was not what gave him that very real black eye which is nonetheless rich in symbolism.
Reid’s destruction of Senate procedure and collaboration has had consequences beyond election results. It is also the single biggest factor in turning the Senate into a place so lacking in comity that not even a bill to help victims of human trafficking can pass with less than 60 votes.
That is Reid’s true legacy — that and his party’s net loss of 14 Senate seats and a 60-seat supermajority over a period of just five years. May he live long in retirement, and may the Republican Senate reward him by naming several nuclear waste repositories in his honor.
