Harry Reid, the previous Senate majority chief and Nevada’s longest-serving member of Congress, has died. He was 82.
Reid died Tuesday, “peacefully,” surrounded by household, “following a brave, four-year battle with pancreatic most cancers,” Landra Reid mentioned of her husband in a press release.
“Harry was a religious household man and deeply loyal good friend,” she mentioned. “We tremendously admire the outpouring of help from so many over these previous few years. We’re particularly grateful for the docs and nurses that cared for him. Please know that meant the world to him.”
Funeral preparations could be introduced within the coming days, she mentioned.
The combative former boxer-turned-lawyer was broadly acknowledged as one of many hardest dealmakers in Congress, a conservative Democrat in an more and more polarized chamber who vexed lawmakers of each events with a brusque method and this motto: “I might relatively dance than struggle, however I understand how to struggle.”
Over a 34-year profession in Washington, Reid thrived on behind-the-scenes wrangling and stored the Senate managed by his occasion by means of two presidents — Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama — a crippling recession and the Republican takeover of the Home after the 2010 elections.
He retired in 2016 after an accident left him blind in a single eye.
Reid in Might 2018 revealed he’d been identified with pancreatic most cancers and was present process therapy.
Abrupt and underestimated
He was recognized in Washington for his abrupt fashion, typified by his behavior of unceremoniously hanging up the cellphone with out saying goodbye.
“Even after I was president, he would cling up on me,” Obama mentioned in a 2019 tribute video to Reid.
He was continuously underestimated, most not too long ago within the 2010 elections when he appeared just like the underdog to tea occasion favourite Sharron Angle. Formidable Democrats, assuming his defeat, started angling for his management put up. However Reid defeated Angle, 50% to 45%, and returned to the head of his energy. For Reid, it was legacy time.
“I haven’t got individuals saying, ‘He is the best speaker,’ ‘He is good-looking,’ ‘He is a person about city,'” Reid informed The New York Occasions in December that 12 months. “However I do not actually care. I really feel very snug with my place in historical past.”
Nevada born
Born in Searchlight, Nevada, to an alcoholic father who killed himself at 58 and a mom who served as a laundress in a bordello, Reid grew up in a small cabin with out indoor plumbing and swam with different kids at a pool at a neighborhood brothel. He hitchhiked to Fundamental Excessive Faculty in Henderson, Nevada, about 65 km from residence, the place he met the girl he would marry in 1959, Landra Gould. At Utah State College, the couple turned members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The long run senator put himself by means of George Washington College regulation college by working nights as a U.S. Capitol police officer.
At age 28, Reid was elected to the Nevada Meeting and at age 30 turned the youngest lieutenant governor in Nevada historical past as Governor Mike O’Callaghan’s operating mate in 1970.
Elected to the U.S. Home in 1982, Reid served in Congress longer than anybody else in Nevada historical past. He narrowly prevented defeat in a 1998 Senate race when he held off Republican John Ensign, then a Home member, by 428 votes in a recount that stretched into January.
After his election as Senate majority chief in 2007, he was credited with placing Nevada on the political map by pushing to maneuver the state’s caucuses to February, firstly of presidential nominating season. That compelled every nationwide occasion to pour assets into the state, which nonetheless had solely six votes within the Electoral Faculty regardless of having the nation’s quickest development over the previous 20 years. Reid’s intensive community of marketing campaign staff and volunteers twice helped ship the state for Obama.
In 2016 Obama lauded Reid for his work within the Senate, declaring, “I couldn’t have achieved what I achieved with out him being at my facet.”
Legislative battles
Probably the most influential politician in Nevada for greater than a decade, Reid steered a whole bunch of tens of millions of {dollars} to the state and was credited with virtually single-handedly blocking development of a nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain exterior Las Vegas. He typically went out of his strategy to defend social applications that make straightforward political targets, calling Social Safety “one of many nice authorities applications in historical past.”
Reid championed suicide prevention, typically telling the story of his father. He stirred controversy in 2010 when he mentioned in a speech on the ground of the Nevada legislature it was time to finish authorized prostitution within the state.
Reid’s political moderation meant he was by no means politically safe in his residence state, or fully trusted within the more and more polarized Senate. Democrats grumbled about his votes for a ban on so-called partial-birth abortion and the Iraq battle decision in 2002, one thing Reid later mentioned was his greatest remorse in Congress.
He voted in opposition to most gun management payments and in 2013 after the Sandy Hook Elementary Faculty bloodbath, dropped a proposed ban on assault weapons from the Democrats’ gun management laws. The bundle, he mentioned, wouldn’t go with the ban connected.
Reid’s Senate significantly chafed members of the Home, each Republicans and Democrats. When then-Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, muscled Obama’s well being care overhaul by means of the Home in 2009, a special model handed the Senate and the reconciliation course of floundered lengthy sufficient for Republicans to show it into an election-year weapon they used to demonize the California Democrat and forged the laws as a big-government energy seize. Obama signed the measure into regulation in March 2010. However angered by the recession and impressed by the small-government tea occasion, voters the subsequent 12 months swept Democrats from the Home majority.
Reid hand-picked a Democratic candidate who received the election to exchange him in 2016, former Nevada Lawyer Common Catherine Cortez Masto, and constructed a political machine within the state that helped Democrats win a sequence of key elections in 2016 and 2018.
On his approach out of workplace, he repeatedly lambasted Donald Trump, calling him at one level “a sociopath” and “a sexual predator who misplaced the favored vote and fueled his marketing campaign with bigotry and hate.”
Goal of organized crime
As head of the Nevada Gaming Fee investigating organized crime, Reid turned the goal of a automobile bomb in 1980. Police referred to as it an tried murder. Reid blamed Jack Gordon, who went to jail for attempting to bribe him in a sting operation that Reid participated in over unlawful efforts to convey new video games to casinos in 1978.
Following Reid’s prolonged farewell handle on the Senate flooring in 2016, his Nevada colleague Republican Dean Heller declared: “It has been mentioned that it is higher to be feared than cherished, for those who can’t be each. And as me and my colleagues right here as we speak and people within the gallery most likely agree with me, no particular person in American politics embodies that sentiment as we speak greater than my colleague from Nevada, Harry Mason Reid.”
