Posted 2:43 PM by Robert

Harry Reid And The Chamber of Secrets

One could do worse than to read the extensive New Yorker magazine article on the life and hard times of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and contemplate how it came to be that such a remarkable man, almost a unique man, has assumed such a starring role in the Democratic Party. Read the whole thing, but here are some choice passages:

The day after Bush made his choice public ... Reid ... spent thirty minutes with Roberts. One thing he asked him was how he felt about Supreme Court precedents—in particular, on what grounds they might be overturned. “Precedent is so important to me in the law,” Reid told him.

Roberts, Reid recalled, said, “ ‘Oh, on the Supreme Court you can change precedent only if there’s this and this,’ and he was rattling them off. I hope I didn’t act surprised, but I’d never heard anything like that before.” Roberts, in Reid’s view, left no doubt that he would be very reluctant to overturn precedents. To do so, Roberts had said, the Court would first have to consider a series of objective criteria, two of which stood out: whether a precedent fostered stability in the nation; and the extent to which society had come to rely on an earlier ruling, even a dubious one. “I thought it would be more of a weaselly answer than that, but he said you have to meet all these standards before you can change a precedent,” Reid said. .... Reid more than once compared Roberts to Justice David Souter ... “If somebody is a real lawyer and not a Clarence Thomas or Edith Jones, who is there not to be a judge but to be a legislator, it gives us some hope, and so, if he is approved, I would hope he would turn out like Souter or somebody like that.” ...

Reid ... believes that Bush chose Roberts in a moment of political weakness. ... The filibuster issue was finally resolved by means of a complex bargain worked out by a group of centrist Republicans and Democrats, who became known as the Gang of Fourteen. ... The result was widely seen as a victory for Reid... After that, Reid said, Bush “just didn’t need another fight.” ... Reid also thought that Bush had come to have a different view of him. “I just don’t think he estimated me at all—under or over.” Now, Reid said, “I think he understands me a little bit more than he used to.” ....

[Reid] was embarrassed two years ago when a Los Angeles Times story revealed that one of his sons and his son-in-law had lobbied in Washington for “companies, trade groups and municipalities seeking Reid’s help in the Senate.” Over the previous four years, the newspaper reported, these efforts, supported by Reid, brought more than two million dollars in business to firms that employed family members. ... Howard Hughes Corporation alone “paid $300,000 to the tiny Washington consulting firm of [Reid’s] son-in-law Steven Barringer to push a provision allowing the company to acquire 998 acres of federal land ripe for development” in the Las Vegas metropolitan area. ... [Reid] pointed out that his son-in-law had been a lobbyist before his daughter married him. Susan McCue, Reid’s chief of staff, said in an e-mail that when the newspaper started making inquiries “Senator Reid (and I) agreed that we needed to put up a wall between any family members lobbying and this office for the sake of appearances, even if they’re working on issues that benefit Nevada.” Soon after he was interviewed by L.A. Times reporters, Reid banned relatives from lobbying his office. ...

Susan McCue says that Reid is always assessing a person’s vulnerabilities in order to “disarm, to endear, to threaten, but most of all to instill fear.” And Reid has made it plain that there are consequences for stepping out of line.... Reid has called Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, a “political hack,” said that Clarence Thomas was an “embarrassment,” and labelled Bush a “loser” and a “liar.”.... He has called Bush “King George,” and ...[said] that the President’s view was “If you’re poor it’s your fault. Go out and be part of America’s success. Go out and get a job and be rich.” ... McCue ... said "[Reid] knows they”—Reid and Bush—“are from different sides of the track.” ....

Reid has said that [he had a fight with his future father-in-law that] ended when he knocked his future father-in-law, a chiropractor, to the ground. ...

[One of Reid's three brothers,] an alcoholic, died in 1977 ...

Reid ... learned to box from [Donal (Mike)] O’Callaghan... O’Callaghan, like Reid, had larger ambitions: in the seventies, he served two terms as governor of Nevada, and he went on to become the executive editor of the Las Vegas Sun and a sometime columnist for the paper. When he died, last year, Reid eulogized him as the best friend he had ever had. McCue told me that the only time she ever saw Reid cry was at the news of O’Callaghan’s death. ....

As George W. Bush has learned, Harry Reid does not ignore slights. “I believe in vengeance,” he once told a reporter. In May, he began a commencement address at George Washington University Law School by saying that the last time he had set foot on the campus was January, 1964—the year he graduated from the school. “I’ve been holding a grudge,” he said. Law school was difficult. “We managed to get by, but just barely,” he said. At one point, while Landra was pregnant with their second child and he was working six days a week as a Capitol police officer, the transmission of their car, a 1954 Buick Special, broke down. He was desperate. “No car,” he continued. “No way to get to work. Too many bills.” When he approached a dean for help, he recalled, the dean said, “ ‘Why don’t you just quit law school?’ I don’t remember exactly what I thought he would say, but that was not it,” he said. “Since that day, I’ve harbored ill will toward this school.”

Reid told the graduates that he regretted his pettiness, but it’s fair to say that payback has been a factor in his career. ....

Reid says. “I lost [my first Senate race] by six hundred and twenty-four votes,” to Paul Laxalt. When friends told him that such reverses always turn out for the best, he said, “I wanted to kick them in the shins.” ....

Jack Gordon ... offered Reid twelve thousand dollars to approve two new, carnival-like gaming devices for casino use. Reid reported the attempted bribe to the F.B.I. and arranged a meeting with Gordon in his office. By agreement, F.B.I. agents burst in to arrest Gordon... [T]he videotape shows [Reid] getting up from his chair and saying, “You son of a bitch, you tried to bribe me!” and attempting to choke Gordon, before startled agents pulled him off.

[Reid] talked about his relationship with Bush, whom he regularly disparages; there appears to be no chance that Reid and Bush will duplicate the unusually friendly relationship that Ronald Reagan had with Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House, or even the businesslike partnership between Speaker Sam Rayburn and President Eisenhower. ... "[T]his President ... takes after his mother. It’s either his way or no way. It’s very, very difficult.... I’m sorry to give you this report on President Bush,” [Reid] said, “but that’s how I feel.” ....

What happened between him and Bush? Their first meetings, right after Bush’s 2000 election, were cordial enough, Reid told me. “He was an extremely personable man—the kind of guy you’d like to go to a ballgame with.” But, he went on, “I have a lot of history now that I didn’t have then. First of all, he started out on a real bad foot with me because of Yucca Mountain”—a site a hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas, which the federal government wants to use as long-term storage for tens of thousands of tons of radioactive waste. ... Bush seemed to oppose it as well, promising that he would base any decision on “sound science.” Reid believed Bush, but, he said, “my belief was short-lived.” Barely a year into his first term, Bush approved the project, and Reid accused him of lying ... Reid said that, in a private meeting in the Oval Office in February, 2002, he told Bush, “You sold out on this.” The Wall Street Journal later reported the Yucca Mountain decision as the “biggest defeat” of Reid’s career...

[Right after he was reelected in 2004] Bush called Reid in Nevada, and, Reid recalled, “he said, ‘This is a new term for me. I’m not running for anything ever again and I want to work with you again.’ ” ... [O]n February 7th, the Republican National Committee attacked Reid’s record on its Web site, citing the Los Angeles Times story ... in which Reid was accused of voting for legislation that benefitted his sons and son-in-law. ... On the Senate floor, Reid denounced the story as “scurrilous” and rebuked the President. Coincidentally, Bush had invited the Reids to dinner at the White House that night, along with three other senators and their wives. Reid initially thought about not going, but decided that “it would be too easy for them for me just not to go.” Still, it was clear that he and Landra were angry. Reid recalled that Bush said, “You know, I didn’t have anything to do with that. I don’t know what they do.” Reid wasn’t mollified. The next day, he reminded reporters of Bush’s campaign pledge to be a “uniter.” “I’m beginning to think those statements were just absolutely false,” he said.

There is no longer anything about Reid’s family on the R.N.C. Web site. The offending lines were removed on orders from Karl Rove. According to Rove, following the dinner Bush told him to tell Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the R.N.C., to “never mention Reid’s family again.” When I asked Reid about this, he said he was aware that the section had been deleted, but not of Bush’s role. “That’s nice of him,” he said.

Reid said that relations with Bush got worse in April, during the filibuster dispute ... Reid said that he appealed to Bush to stay out of the fight, telling him, “I hope you’re going to help us on this nuclear option.” The President, he said, “was very direct and blunt: ‘I have nothing to do with this. This is your business. It’s not mine.’ ” Reid thought that would remove one powerful obstacle. But, within days, Vice-President Dick Cheney announced that, as acting president of the Senate, he would provide the tie-breaking vote if it was needed to change the rule. Bush, Reid said, had pulled a “halfback’s stutter step”—a fake—on him. “He was just trying, it appears to me, to mislead me. He just wasn’t telling me the truth at that breakfast meeting. No question about it.” ... Reid paused. “Just tell me what I have to work with. Don’t mislead me. How do I say this—because I don’t want to appear holier than thou—but relationships are built on trust, and that’s the problem that I’m having with the White House today. It’s that I don’t think they want to establish trust with me.” Reid paused again and shrugged. “I’m not important to them. They can just go around me.” He sounded weary, but then his voice strengthened. “He’s not a dictator. He’s a President. And he has the same power that I do. He individually may have more power. But his branch of government has no more power than mine.” ....

Rove recalls that the conversation [Rove had with Reid during the filibuster negotiations] was mostly about making a deal on the judicial nominees. According to Rove, Reid said, “They’re all unqualified, but you can pick the one you want,” and eventually it got to two. At one point, Rove asked Reid, “If they’re unworthy, why are you letting us have any?” And he said, “Harry, it’s like you’re asking us to pick one of our children and kill them.” He said that Reid kept jumping around with the numbers: “It was a nutty conversation.” For Reid at this point, the individual nominees were a secondary issue ....

Yes, it's a remarkable man, almost a unique man, that the Democrats of the Senate have chosen as their leader. How many United States Senators have physically beaten their future father in law to the ground? - or physically struck any relative? - or wanted to kick their own well-wishers in the shins? How many Senators who have lost a brother to alchoholism have only been seen by one of their closest aides to cry at the death of a boxing coach and political mentor? How many law school students think their dean has an obligation to bail a student out of the consequences of a failed auto transmission? How many Senators take violent exception to something that appeared on the competing party's web site right to the President, and then not bother to check to see if the offending passage is deleted - while continuing to complain to reporters about it? How many Senators could dismiss an entire class of judicial nominees as "all unqualified", even though many of them received "well qualified" ratings from the leftish ABA? How many Senators repeatedly call a president a "liar," including for merely taking a decision that the president says is based on "sound science" - without citing a shred of evidence that the president didn't believe that? And how many Senators who say they are O-so-interested in judicial precedent don’t know that the Supreme Court has squarely articulated in its own opinions the standards it follows (or at least says it follows) in considering whether it should overturn one of its own precedents? (Contrary to Sen. Reid’s apparent understanding, the Court’s standards – as set forth in the Court’s own precedent - are not the same for every type of precedent.)

While the story is not yet completely told, it now looks as though Mr. Roberts will be confirmed, much to the frustration of most activist Democrats. And it also looks as though the Gang of Fourteen agreement will play a significant role in assuring that confirmation - and, most likely, future Bush appointments to the Supreme Court, too. So Harry Reid seems not to have done so well in that deal, after all - although he worked for it behind the scenes.

Yes, it's a remarkable man, almost a unique man, that the Democrats of the Senate have chosen as their leader. Vain, violent, ignorant, insecure, vindictive, small minded, corrupt, emotionally bitter and incoherent, ineffective, insightless and unwilling or unable to suppress his own petty feelings for the good of the nation or his colleagues. A man who seems to believe that the world owes him a living and hasn't yet paid out enough in dividends and interest. Why did the Senate Democrats elevate him to be their leader?

That's a secret; and that would be telling.