Harry Reid, the pugnacious son of a Nevada hard-rock miner who rose from poverty to become the US Senate majority leader and earned a reputation as a fierce partisan fighter during an era of political gridlock in Washington, died on Tuesday. He was 82.
Reid, a former amateur boxer who represented Nevada in the US Congress as a Democrat for more than three decades, died after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, his wife of 62 years, Landra, said in a statement.
“We are so proud of the legacy he leaves behind both on the national stage and his beloved Nevada,” Landra Reid said.
As majority leader, Reid served as President Barack Obama’s point man in the Senate and helped secure congressional passage of Obama’s signature healthcare law, known as Obamacare, in 2010 over furious Republican opposition.
Obama on Tuesday posted to social media a recent letter he had written to Reid:
“You were a great leader in the Senate, and early on you were more generous to me than I had any right to expect,” Obama wrote in the letter.
“I wouldn’t have been president had it not been for your encouragement and support, and I wouldn’t have got most of what I got done without your skill and determination.”
He had ascended to the job of majority leader in 2007 after the Democrats won control of the Senate.
Despite being a political moderate who differed from others in his party on abortion, the environment, and gun control, Reid regularly clashed with Republicans and maintained poor relations with the opposition party’s congressional leaders.
“I always would rather dance than fight but I know how to fight,” Reid said in 2004, in a reference to his boxing career.
In 2012, Mitch McConnell, then the Senate’s top Republican, labelled Reid “the worst leader in the Senate ever” while Reid accused McConnell of a breach of faith on an important issue.
During Reid’s time as majority leader, major legislation languished because Democrats and Republicans could not make compromises.
His relationship with McConnell was so strained that the Republican leader shunned Reid during crucial US fiscal policy talks and dealt directly with then Vice President Joe Biden.
In 2013, fed up with Republican procedural moves blocking Obama’s judicial and executive branch nominees, Reid pushed through the Senate a historic change to the Senate’s filibuster rules, preventing a minority party from blocking presidential appointments except those to the Supreme Court.
“There has been unbelievable, unprecedented obstruction,” Reid told his fellow senators, referring to the Republicans. “The Senate is a living thing and to survive, it must change as it has over the history of this great country.”
Republicans said the move was a naked power grab.
Reid was first elected to the House in 1982 and was sent to the Senate by Nevada voters in 1986.
He showed remarkable resilience, fighting off spirited re-election challenges.
Reid retired in 2016, one year after suffering broken ribs and facial bones, and an eye injury in an accident while exercising at home.
Reid and his wife, Landra, had five children.
