Washington-President Biden and former President Barack Obama praised Harry M. Reed as a loyal son of Nevada on Saturday and became a frank yet crucial leader in the Senate.
Biden said at the Smith Center for the Performing Arts in Las Vegas at the memorial service for Reed, who died last month at the age of 82, “Harry was very concerned about his fellow Americans, but most of them felt about him. I didn’t. ” Las Vegas.
“He was all searchlights and no spotlights,” he added, referring to the mine outpost in Nevada where Mr. Reed grew up.
In addition to the current and former presidents, the memorial service also included letters of recommendation from other prominent Democrats, such as Chairman Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. Vice President Kamala Harris, the second gentleman Douglas Emhoff, and the first female Jill Biden were also sitting in the audience.
Speakers, including Reed’s daughter and three sons, talked about their passion for the Senate and their love for their hometown. His son, Leif Reed, said his father was a fan of the Las Vegas-based band The Killers and asked lead vocalist Brandon Flowers to sing in his memorial service.
Before playing the Nevada state song “Home Means Nevada,” Mr. Flowers visited the Capitol and told the audience that Reed had instructed him to play a song for Schumer.
Other speakers include former boxer Reed, a radical economic stimulus to respond to the Great Depression, the most important expansion of health insurance since Wall Street and the great society of the 1960s.
“There is no doubt that Harry Reid will be considered one of the greatest Senate majority leaders in history,” Biden said.
Reed became the face of a Democrat in the Senate after being elected a minority leader by a colleague in 2005, and became a majority leader when Democrats ruled Congress in 2007. .. He would take on all visitors, whether Republicans or Democrats, and was known for his blunt approach that sometimes annoyed him.
Pelosi remembered Reed as a man with few words.
“And he wanted everyone else to be a person with few words,” she said.
Pelosi, along with other speakers, explained the tendency of Reed to hang up with his colleagues. He couldn’t stand pulling out a conversation with farewell. She explained his humility: he once stopped her attempt to celebrate his achievements by throwing him a dinner party for his retirement.
“I don’t want to do that,” Pelosi recalled what Reed had told her. “Save money. Feed the poor.”
Pelosi said he had never heard Reed say “unfriendly words about his Senate colleagues” and urged Obama to confirm the facts.
“I don’t know about that, Nancy,” Obama later said when the audience laughed. “But he will work with them.”
After the development of the hard scrubbull, famous for searchlight, and the start of state politics, Reed was elected to the House of Representatives in 1982 and to the Senate in 1986. When South Dakota Senator Tom Dashur was leader, he was a member of the Second Senate Democratic Party. , And when Dashur lost the reelection bid in 2004, Reed quickly defeated a potential rival in the top slots.
As a leader of the Democratic Party, Reed played a joust with President George W. Bush, who once called the “loser”, on the Iraq War and various domestic issues. In the 2006 elections, Democrats drove voters’ dissatisfaction with Mr Bush into Senate domination.
At the end of Mr. Bush’s second term in late 2008, Mr. Reed worked with the White House to lead a $ 700 billion trooped asset relief program through Congress and stabilize the economy, resulting in the collapse of the national economy. I stopped it.
Reed took an apparently conservative stance early in his career, especially against abortion and immigration easing. However, as his state’s demographics changed, his position changed, eventually becoming an undocumented advocate of immigrants and an advocate of abortion access. Obama upset him about immigrants by reminding him that his father was a Russian immigrant, after Reed introduced a law to abolish his innate citizenship. He said he had.
Obama added: I am very happy that she has corrected the ship. “
Reed encouraged Obama to run for president before the 2008 election, even though he was a junior member of the Senate at the time. And after Obama won the White House, Reed was one of his most credible and important allies, the economic stimulus bill, and most importantly, the memorable and affordable care method. He used all his free legislative weapons to get approval and passed the Senate in 2009 during the blizzard on Christmas Eve.
“The deals Harry made to achieve that law didn’t always look pretty,” Obama said. “Whenever I oppose the changes he wants, because of some policy or optics concerns, Harry told me with some frustration in his voice, President, you I. You know more than you know about health policy? I know the Senate. “
Biden, a former senator who is currently struggling to pass his own drastic domestic policy bill, has become vibrant, explaining Reed’s bargaining tactics and Congressional victory. became. “When Harry said he was going to do something, he did it,” he said. “You can rely on it. That’s how he’s done a lot for the country over the decades.”
The Democrats suffered significant losses in 2010, but remained in the Senate. Meanwhile, Reed himself survived a strong challenge from the far-right enemy. Severely injured in a 2015 home exercise, Reed chose not to run for reelection in 2016 and returned to Nevada to remain a major political power broker.
Obama concludes with the words Reed shunned during the call. He didn’t think he needed to say goodbye.
“But it’s for us,” Obama said. “Goodbye, Harry.”
