Well, as we flush out another bad year like so much cheap Mexican food, there was at least one more significant celebrity death this week (besides Betty White, of course): Former Nevada Senator and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
It was only a few weeks ago that the state of Nevada completed its goal to rename Las Vegas’ famous McCarran Airport to Harry Reid International Airport, which now seems even more appropriate, since Reid was that much more powerful a Senator and that much more beneficial for Nevada than Pat McCarran, the Nevada Senator for whom the airport was originally named.
There have already been lots of biographical articles out for Reid: I recommend an excellent obituary by Megan Messerly for Jon Ralston’s The Nevada Independent, to which I will be referring. Most coverage of Reid’s life refers to his small-town values, his hard work, his Mormonism (although neither he nor his wife were raised Mormon) and his hardscrabble upbringing, but now that he is gone, it might be best to compare where the Democrats were with him to where they are without him.
Reid’s record belies the impression in modern politics (among both Democrats and Republicans) that power and virtue are mutually exclusive. Of course, many would argue whether Reid was truly virtuous. In office he engaged in land deals that benefited him and his family. In the 2012 campaign, Reid accused fellow Senator (and Republican presidential candidate) Mitt Romney of having not paid income tax for several years. This led Romney to release his records, which proved Reid wrong but also illustrated how Romney gamed the system. Asked if he had any regrets, Reid just said, “Romney didn’t win, did he?”
Reid was never really that popular; in his last election in 2010, he barely beat Sharron Angle, or as I called her, “the glassy-eyed fanatic.” That campaign was a great example of how Democrats struggle against the other party but succeed not so much through their own efforts but because the Republican challengers have made themselves that much more unpopular.
And with Reid it wasn’t just a case of “Democrats are bad, but Republicans are worse.” Reid actually did constructive and proactive things with his position, which matters because as we’ve seen from the last few elections, simply being a net zero or not actively bad doesn’t really help Democrats when voters want change and reform.
I’ll tell you this, even back when I was a lot more conservative and Republican-sympathetic than I am now, I knew that Harry Reid was the main reason that Nevada avoided having the Feds foist the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository on us. Or as we in the state call it, the nuclear waste suppository. (It was so called when former Nevada Republican Senator Chic Hecht accidentally used that term in a public appearance and created one of the great Freudian slips of American politics.)
And that’s because Reid may have been cynical and ruthless, but it was because he had a purpose. One reason he had endorsed the Affordable Care Act for President Obama (and bitterly resisted President GW Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security) is because of that hard early life, in which he and his family had to get along with no medical care at all, and his father ultimately died of suicide. He had ideals, but no real illusions. Reid mentioned how in one pressure campaign to stop financing of a polluting copper mine, “I called the head of a hedge fund. I said, ‘I don’t know how I can get even with you. But you mark my word, I will get even in some way. I don’t know how. You back out of that deal to build that plant or you’ve got me just out there looking at everything you do.’ So, I did that with all four of them, and they all backed out.”
Reid illustrated one of the issues with politics, where people become corrupted for the sake of ostensibly valid goals, pursuing those goals with any means necessary. This may be why a lot of Democrats, both mainstream institutionalists and idealist “progressives” try to imagine themselves as being above such games. But Reid knew what approach worked against the opposition he had, and that Republican opposition had a lot more respect for the mainstream institution than the Party of Trump and Mitch McConnell does now.
I mean, I assume there is a reason that Chuck Schumer is still the Democrats’ Senate leader, I just don’t know what it is. By comparison, I don’t think much of Nancy Pelosi as a person, but everyone acknowledges she knows her job and she can enforce a consensus among her party. A large part of the Biden Administration’s problem is that they can’t enforce a standard even as well as Democrats could when they had a majority under Barack Obama, but then, Harry Reid was the Majority Leader back then.
And in regard to the mainstream institution and Mitch McConnell, Reid’s record is often disparaged for his decision to remove the filibuster for judicial nominations, but it isn’t considered that this was the best compromise he could make towards eliminating it altogether. And this was done largely in response to McConnell pre-emptively declaring a filibuster on every initiative the Democrats wanted. It demonstrated the reality of politics: You have to have a goal, but you also have to know where you are, and how to get to the goal from where you are. Reid’s decision did ultimately pave the way for Donald Trump to have no less than three Supreme Court nominations (again, partly with McConnell’s help) but it also meant that President Biden has been able to nominate more judicial appointments in his first year than any president since Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Reid’s hardball approach is an example of the way Democrats used to do things: using power unapologetically and often unethically. But it got results. And after four years of a Trump Organization whose persistent self-dealing made the nepotist Kennedy Administration look like actual Camelot, Republicans are in no position to argue that Reid or any other Democrat is more crooked or self-serving than they are, and unlike Reid cannot seriously argue that their changes benefit anyone other than the Religious Right and the donor class.
Basically, as we remember Harry Reid, Democrats who seek to honor him should try to learn from his example. That is, they need to be the vicious partisan bastards that Republicans merely project them to be. If more of them were like Reid than Schumer, they might be able to get more done with Joe Manchin, if not with actual Republicans.