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Last Updated June 22, 2005
Harry Reid, a Democrat first elected to the House in 1982 and to the Senate in 1986, is the Senate minority leader. He grew up in Searchlight, Nevada, in the scorching desert south of Las Vegas, where his father was a hardrock miner and the family lived in a house without indoor plumbing. He hitchhiked 40 miles to high school in Henderson, where his civics teacher and boxing coach Mike O'Callaghan became his political mentor. Henderson businessmen helped him pay for college, and he graduated from Southern Utah State (where he became a Mormon) and George Washington law school. He was an amateur boxer and at nights during law school he worked as a Capitol Police officer; he likes to say, "I would rather dance than fight, but I know how to fight." He returned to Henderson and practiced law. Reid was elected to the Assembly in 1968, at age 28; in 1970 O'Callaghan was elected governor and Reid, running separately, was elected lieutenant governor. In 1974 he came within 624 votes of beating Paul Laxalt in the race for senator, lost for mayor of Las Vegas in 1976, and then became head of the Gaming Commission from 1977 to 1981--as sensitive a post as any in Nevada. His life was threatened and mobsters put a bomb in his car. In 1982, when Nevada got two House seats for the first time and Congressman-at-Large Jim Santini ran for the Senate, Reid ran in the Las Vegas-based 1st District and won. Laxalt retired in 1986 and Reid ran for the Senate again; his opponent turned out to be Santini, who had switched parties at the last minute and was running as a Republican. Reid's ads depicted him as David to Santini's Goliath, and he won 50%-45%. Reid has had a voting record more moderate than those of many Senate Democrats. He voted for the partial-birth abortion ban and against resolutions endorsing Roe v. Wade. He co-sponsored the constitutional amendment to allow the outlawing of flag burning. He was one of the few Democrats to vote for the Gulf War resolution in 1991 and voted for the Iraq war resolution in 2002. He has consistently and effectively opposed environmental groups on mining issues and blocked attempts by environmentalists and the Clinton administration to impose higher fees on hardrock miners. He has opposed most gun control measures. He pushed through a "source tax" amendment barring states from taxing the state pensions of retirees who move to another state, as many have to Nevada. He has steered counterterrorism money to Nevada and has worked to get the old Nevada nuclear test site, with its hundreds of underground tunnels, made into a $250 million center for training first responders how to cope with acts of terrorists. He has been a strong supporter of the gaming industry; when Bill Clinton proposed a 4% gaming tax, Reid promised, "I will become the most negative, the most irresponsible, the most obnoxious person of anyone in the Senate." He has worked to block the bill, backed by John McCain and others, to prohibit betting on college and amateur sports, which is legal only in Nevada; to block action he introduced many amendments, including one to ban gambling in all states but Nevada. In 2004 he blocked consideration of a bill limiting the state share of Indian gambling revenues and profits. He worked with Congressman Jim Gibbons on a Clark County Lands Act to declare some wilderness study areas as wilderness and open others to development; on another Clark County land transfer bill, he was criticized because his son and son-in-law worked for lobbying firms supporting the measure. The key federal issue for Nevada during his years in the Senate has been the proposed nuclear waste repository in Yucca Mountain. The federal government assumed responsibility for nuclear waste in 1982 and a bill passed in 1987, Reid's first year in the Senate, named Yucca Mountain and one other contender as the only two sites; the other one was later ruled out. Reid has stubbornly and persistently opposed the repository with every parliamentary and political tool at his command but other senators with nuclear waste piling up in their states (and 39 states have it) and especially Larry Craig of Idaho, where the government established a temporary nuclear waste site, have pressed hard for designation of Yucca Mountain. Bill Clinton carried Nevada by narrow margins in 1992 and 1996 largely because he promised to veto even a temporary site in Yucca Mountain, and so during his presidency Reid's task was to assemble enough votes to prevent an override of his veto. He did so in 1997, then prevented a vote in 1998 and 1999, then kept 34 votes in line in April 2000--just barely enough. George W. Bush in 2000 pledged not to support a temporary site, but he also refrained from promising to veto a permanent site, saying that his decision would be based on "sound science and not politics." In February 2002 Bush, on the recommendation of Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, designated Yucca Mountain as the permanent site. The law provided for a veto by the governor, which could be overridden by majorities in both houses of Congress. In April 2002, with great ceremony, Governor Kenny Guinn issued his veto. In May 2002 the House cast a large majority for Yucca Mountain. Reid lobbied furiously for Democratic votes, while John Ensign, his 1998 opponent and now his Republican colleague, lobbied desperately for Republican votes. Reid argued that the site was geologically flawed and that transporting nuclear waste to it would be hazardous, especially after September 11. He passionately when the issue was debated in July, enough so to convert Debbie Stabenow, who had voted for the Yucca Mountain site in the House. Altogether he got 35 Democrats and Jim Jeffords to vote his way. Ensign, opposed by the Bush administration, could get only two other Republicans, Lincoln Chafee and Ben Nighthorse Campbell. So the site was approved 60-39. But for Reid the fight was not over. Lawsuits had been filed against the plan, and the Energy Department must get approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which could take many years. Reid chaired the Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Energy Department; in 2002 it cut $189 million from the Yucca Mountain budget. Reid fiercely opposed the Bush administration proposal to finance work at Yucca Mountain from a nuclear waste trust fund funded by utility industry fees, on the ground that this would remove it from congressional supervision; when that resulted in the non-funding of the work in November 2004, appropriators scrambled to find cuts in other programs to pay for the $577 million price tag. Reid threw in a provision allowing Nevada counties to use Energy Department funding to take part in NRC licensing procedures. Also in November 2004 Reid, elected to be the new minority leader, negotiated with the Bush administration over appointments; he agreed to approve 175 Bush nominees in return for the recess appointment of his aide Gregory Jaczko to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where he is likely to vote against the Yucca Mountain repository. Reid had a close political call in his 1998 race against then-Congressman John Ensign, but he still spent much time seeking the votes of Democratic colleagues to replace Wendell Ford, who retired, as minority whip. After the election he got the job without opposition. For the next six years he was a constant presence on the floor, advancing the cause of his party and maintaining civil relations with Republican leaders. He played a key role in persuading Jim Jeffords to leave the Republican party in May 2001 and make the Democrats the majority party in the Senate again. For a month Daschle, Christopher Dodd and Reid talked with Jeffords and coaxed him to switch parties. Reid offered to decline the chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee, to which he was entitled by seniority, and let Jeffords be chairman. That may have been the vital selling point, though Jeffords, Daschle and Reid deny that there was a quid pro quo. He worked closely and cooperatively with Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, and in November 2002, when Daschle was considering running for president, he all but endorsed Reid to succeed him. "I honestly don't think he would be challenged if I were to run." But Daschle decided not to run for president. Reid's combativeness came out when Republicans ran all-night sessions in November 2003 to protest Democratic filibusters of nominees for appellate judgeships. Reid spoke for nine hours, reading from his book about his upbringing in Searchlight, Nevada. In 2004 Reid contributed generously to other Democrats; he gave $1 million to the Democrats' Senate campaign committee in September and in October, as Daschle's chances for winning reelection in South Dakota seemed to be waning, gave money to other colleagues as well. After Daschle lost on November 2, Reid already had enough votes lined up to become Minority Leader; Christopher Dodd, who was interested in the post, declined to run. He was officially selected on November 16 and after some talk of working with Republicans seemed to indicate that he would be as tough a partisan as Daschle had been. "If they want to get something done, they have to work with us. They can't just run over us," he said of Republicans. Of George W. Bush's proposal for personal retirement accounts in Social Security he said, "For someone who wants to privatize Social Security, they're going to have to look for somebody to go to bed with other than me." He gave up his seat on the Environment Committee to accommodate other Democrats, said he would rely on ranking Democrats on committees for policy positions (Daschle sometimes blocked them from taking action) and donated another $500,000 to the Senate campaign committee in January 2005. In December 2004, looking ahead to battles over Supreme Court nominees, he said that Justice Antonin Scalia was "one smart guy" but that Justice Clarence Thomas was "an embarrassment to the Court." When Bush renominated several filibustered judicial appointees, he promised to filibuster them again and threatened to bring the business of the Senate to a halt if Republicans changed the rules by majority vote. In January 2005 he and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gave a "prebuttal" of Bush's State of the Union speech two days before he delivered it; they also presented a Democratic response afterwards, in which Reid called for a Marshall Plan for America. In March 2005 he got 42 Democratic senators to sign a letter opposing personal retirement accounts in Social Security. "President Bush should forget about privatizing Social Security. It will not happen," he said. "They are trying to destroy Social Security by giving this money to the fat cats on Wall Street, and I think it's wrong." In February Reid prevented nongermane amendments from coming forward on the class action bill, which many Democrats and all Republicans supported. He was plainly irritated when the Republican National Committee shortly thereafter sent out an e-mail attacking him as "chief Democratic obstructionist," pointing out that his son and son-in-law were lobbyists (both had let their lobbyist registrations drop) and mentioning his $750,000 Washington condominium (Republicans had reminded South Dakotans that Daschle had bought a $1.7 million house in Washington). At a dinner at the White House that night Reid and Bush talked about the e-mail (neither disclosed what he said), and Reid told reporters afterwards, "When you have a real bad chafe--is that what they call it?--it's hard to get soothed." Reid started off as minority leader politically strengthened because in November 2004 he won by a large margin in Nevada for the first time. He was elected in 1986 by 50%-45%. In the 1992 primary he won 53%-39% over Charles Woods, a businessman badly wounded and scarred in World War II; in the general, he beat rancher Demar Dahl 51%-40%. In 1998, against Congressman John Ensign, he was very hard pressed. Ensign's father Mike Ensign is head of the Mandalay Resort Group, one of the big Las Vegas casino operations, and Ensign raised plenty of money from the gaming industry, as did Reid: Reid spent $4.9 million and Ensign $3.5 million. Reid in his feisty way attacked Ensign harshly as an "extremist" who called environmentalists "socialists," and would gut Social Security. Reid carried Clark County, which casts two-thirds of the vote and is normally more Democratic than the rest of the state, by only 53%-44%; he may have won because he ran ahead of party lines in the usually Republican Reno area, where his work on local projects was appreciated, and lost there by only 48%-46%. The election night tally showed Reid ahead by 459 votes; Ensign called for a recount, and a hand count in Reno's Washoe County took weeks. Ensign finally conceded December 9, with Reid ahead by 428 votes. Two years later Ensign was elected by a wider margin to Nevada's other Senate seat after Reid's Democratic colleague Richard Bryan retired. Despite his strong partisanship and the bitterness and the closeness of the 1998 campaign, Reid and Ensign have become friendly colleagues who work together on many Nevada projects; like Oregon's Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith, they know that after one bitter race they will never run against each other again. Going into the 2004 cycle Reid had a problem and found a solution. The problem was that there are so many newcomers to Nevada, most of them Republicans unfamiliar with his work in almost 40 years of public life. About 5,000 people have been moving to the Las Vegas area every month--which means nearly 300,000 Nevadans in 2004 were not in the state the last time Reid ran. Some 436,000 Nevadans voted in 1998, when Reid faced Ensign; 830,000 would vote in November 2004, which means that roughly half the voters (because some 1998 voters died or dropped out) never saw Reid's name on a November ballot before. The solution was to preclude serious opposition from 2d District Congressman Jim Gibbons or one of Nevada's several Republican statewide officeholders by showing strong support from Las Vegas big hitters. They are thoroughly bipartisan and have been the motivating force in Nevada state politics, smoothing the election of Democratic Governor Bob Miller in 1990 and 1994 and Republican Governor Kenny Guinn in 1998 and 2002. Reid got early support from Governor Guinn, former Reagan appointee Sig Rogich and gaming executives Terry Lanni and Mike Ensign. The Republican nominee turned out to be Richard Ziser, an evangelical Christian who led the drive to ban same-sex marriages on the 2000 and 2002 ballots. He got little financial support in Nevada or from national Republicans. Reid won with 61%, 10% more than he had won in any other Senate race, to 35% for Ziser. He carried Las Vegas's Clark County 65%-31% and Reno's Washoe County 58%-38%; he lost the usually Republican Cow Counties, which George W. Bush carried 65%-32%, by exactly 137 votes. He had the additional satisfaction of seeing his son Rory Reid elected chairman of the Clark County Commission.
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