New York Times
By David M. Herszenhorn
March 13, 2016
If there were any doubt, Senator Harry Reid clearly has one last, good fight in him.
Instead
of cruising to retirement after securing a two-year budget deal last
fall and essentially bequeathing his leader’s suite to Senator Chuck
Schumer of New York, Mr. Reid, Democrat of
Nevada, is waging war with Republicans over the Supreme Court vacancy
left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
Though
the battle is decidedly uphill, it is one that supporters of Mr. Reid,
76 and in his 30th and last year in the Senate, say he is well suited to
wage. Win or lose, it will be a fitting
capstone to a career that included eight years as majority leader, and
countless bitter feuds, during one of the most rankly partisan periods
in Senate history.
“It’s
tailor-made for him,” said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, who
was with Mr. Reid in Las Vegas days after Mr. Scalia’s death. Mr. Kaine
said that Mr. Reid viewed the Republicans’
refusal to even meet with a potential Supreme Court nominee as
disrespectful to President Obama and a threat to the Senate as an
institution.
“It’s
a battle for the job description of what a U.S. senator is,” Mr. Kaine
said. “We should be guardians of this institution. To have a battle in
your last year, to try to guard something
important about the institution, that’s a good battle for Harry Reid to
have.”
Mr.
Reid has relentlessly denounced the Republican position as
obstructionist. And each morning he has taken to the Senate floor to
excoriate the Judiciary Committee chairman, Senator Charles
E. Grassley of Iowa, and to demand that Republicans fulfill what Mr.
Reid says is their constitutional duty to act on a nominee. But even all
this is just throat clearing, with heavier rhetorical firepower to
begin when Mr. Obama announces his nominee, expected
as soon as this week.
While
such a Supreme Court fight is almost unheard-of, Mr. Reid is a veteran
of partisan battles. In his first year as Democratic leader, when the
party, like now, was in the minority, he
helped defeat President George W. Bush’s plan to partially privatize
Social Security. Later, as majority leader, Mr. Reid helped win the
passage of Mr. Obama’s stimulus package with just three Republican
votes, and he muscled through the Affordable Care Act
on a strictly party-line vote that delivered the president’s signature
achievement and, critics say, did lasting damage to the institution Mr.
Reid professes to love.
But
while Mr. Reid is known as a skilled tactician and a masterful
arm-twister in procuring needed votes, the Republicans’ entire approach
is to prevent any Supreme Court nominee from ever
reaching the Senate floor. That means there is no parliamentary
maneuver for him to make, or horse-trading for him to conduct.
That
leaves Mr. Reid armed with nothing but pure political messaging, at a
time when Republicans, led by his nemesis, the majority leader, Senator
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, see absolutely
no reason to budge.
With
the Supreme Court now evenly split, a new justice could determine the
outcome of cases that might reshape American life. Republicans believe
their core voters strongly support their
decision and the issue will unify them in the fall election.
Of course, Mr. Reid is certain he will win.
In
some respects, he said, the court fight is easier than others. On
Social Security, Democrats were battling a popular president. On health
care, they had to explain highly complex legislation
to a skeptical public. A Supreme Court vacancy, by comparison, is easy
to understand.
“McConnell
and the Republicans think this is going to go away,” Mr. Reid said in
an interview in his office. “It is not going to go away.”
“We
are going to keep the pressure on,” he added. “I, frankly, don’t think
McConnell can withstand the pressure, ultimately. I think it’s going to
get much more intense than it is right now.”
Since
making that prediction, Mr. Reid has repeatedly accused Mr. McConnell
of shirking his responsibilities and blasted Mr. Grassley for
diminishing the stature of the Judiciary Committee.
“Senate
Republicans are known — and have been for some time now — as a set of
human brake pads, obstructing, filibustering virtually everything
President Obama has had on his agenda,” Mr.
Reid said in a characteristic floor speech on Feb. 25. “But this raises
obstruction to a new level never seen before in this country — the
Supreme Court: no hearings, no vote.”
He
ended with what has become a frequently repeated exhortation: “Once
again I tell my Republican friends: Don’t run away from your
responsibilities, just do your job. Do your job.”
Republicans
accuse Mr. Reid and Democrats of hypocrisy, citing statements by Vice
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. when he was Judiciary Committee chairman
in the early 1990s, to say that Democrats
would do the same thing to a Republican president’s nominee if
circumstances were reversed.
In
many ways, the night of Justice Scalia’s death on Feb. 13 highlighted
the extent to which various burdens of the Democratic Party often fall
on Mr. Reid’s slender shoulders. Mr. Reid was
home, ahead of the Nevada presidential caucuses, which had taken on
urgency after Hillary Clinton’s loss in New Hampshire.
Mr.
Reid did not formally endorse Mrs. Clinton until after the Nevada vote,
but his position was well known and his public appearances, ostensibly
for a get-out-the-vote effort, were clearly
orchestrated to secure her victory. She won, and her campaign was
widely viewed as being back on track.
“He got the job done,” said the House minority leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California.
Ms.
Pelosi called the Republican position on the court opening “so
disdainful and so contemptible” and said that Mr. Reid was the person to
fight it.
“Nobody is more up to the task than Harry Reid,” she said.
Mr.
Reid views Mr. McConnell as his chief rival, and after Senate
Republicans racked up a series of legislative accomplishments last year,
including a transportation infrastructure bill,
a major education bill and the two-year budget deal, Mr. Reid clearly
savors the court fight as a way to portray Mr. McConnell as the face of
obstruction.
In
the court fight, however, Mr. Reid’s primary target has been Mr.
Grassley, who is up for re-election and, as chairman of the Judiciary
Committee, has the power to convene confirmation
hearings. The other prong in Mr. Reid’s strategy is to tie the
Republicans’ position to the rise of Donald J. Trump.
Last
week, Mr. Reid stood on the Senate floor with a huge poster bearing a
quote from an op-ed in The Des Moines Register: “This isn’t the Chuck
Grassley we thought we knew.”
“I
agree with these Iowans,” Mr. Reid began, before launching into a
taunting critique. “He is allowing himself and his committee to be
manipulated by the Republican leader for narrow, partisan
warfare,” Mr. Reid said. “He is taking his orders from the Republican
leader and, sadly, Donald Trump.”
Mr.
Reid, a onetime amateur boxer who later worked nights as a Capitol Hill
police officer during law school, relishes a fight, so much so that
aides have warned him not to enjoy the court
clash too much, or at least not to show it.
Mr.
Reid’s oratorical style, which tends toward mumbling, helps create the
impression that he is not particularly having much fun. Still, his words
are designed to stab like daggers.
“He
started his tenure proclaiming that he would rather dance than fight,
and since then he has managed to do both,” said Jim Manley, a former
senior communications aide to Mr. Reid. “However,
it looks like he’s going to go out fighting.”
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