Former US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid dies at age 82 | WGN Radio 720

Las Vegas (AP) —Harry Reid, a former US Senate majority leader and longest-serving member of Nevada, has died. He was 82 years old.

According to a statement from his family and his 62-year-old wife, Randora Reed, Reed died “peacefully” on Tuesday, surrounded by friends at his home outside Henderson, and “a brave four-year fight against pancreatic cancer. Later “died.

“Harry was a devout family member and a very loyal friend,” she said. “I would like to thank all the people for their support over the last few years, especially the doctors and nurses who took care of him. I know that it means the world to him. Please, “said Randora Reed.

She said funeral arrangements would be announced in the next few days.

Harry Mason Reed, who turned from a combative former boxer to a lawyer, was widely recognized as one of the toughest deal makers in Congress. Conservative Democrats plagued members of both parties in an unfriendly manner. Dance rather than fight, but I know how to fight. “

Throughout his 34-year career in Washington, Reed thrived in a behind-the-scenes controversy, putting the Senate under party control through two presidents, Republican George W. Bush and Democratic Barack Obama. After the 2010 election.

“If Harry said he would do something, he did it,” President Joe Biden said in a posthumous statement of his longtime Senate colleague. “If he gives you his words, you can count on it. That’s how he did things for the country for decades.”

Reed retired in 2016 because one of his eyes was blinded by an accident, and in May 2018 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and revealed that he was being treated.

In less than two weeks, officials and one of his sons, Rory Reid, have shown that the busy Las Vegas Airport has been renamed to Harry Reid International Airport. Rory Reid is a former Clark County Commissioner and candidate for governor of the Nevada Democratic Party.

Neither Harry nor Randra Reed attended the December 14 ceremony held at a facility known as Harry Reid International Airport since 1948, after Patrick McCarran, a former U.S. Senator in Nevada. ..

Reed is known for his sudden style in Washington and is represented by his habit of inadvertently hanging up without saying goodbye.

“He will hang up with me even when I was president,” Obama said in a 2019 tribute video to Reed.

Reed was often undervalued, but in recent 2010 elections, he looked like the vulnerable of Sharron Angle, a popular tea party. Ambitious Democrats began fishing for his leadership position in anticipation of his defeat. However, Reed defeated Angle by 50% to 45% and returned to the pinnacle of his power. For Reed, it was a legacy era.

“He’s the best speaker,” “he’s handsome,” and “he’s a townsman,” Reed told The New York Times in December of that year. “But I really don’t care. I’m very happy with my whereabouts in history.”

Born in Searchwright, Nevada, between an alcoholic father who committed suicide at the age of 58 and a mother who worked as a laundry shop in Bordello, Reed grew up in a small hut without indoor pipes and others in a local brothel pool. I swam with my children. He hitchhiked to a basic high school in Henderson, Nevada, 40 miles (64 km) from his home, where he met his wife, Landlagourd, who married in 1959. At Utah State University, the couple became members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The future Senator attended George Washington University Law School by working night shift as a police officer at the US Capitol.

At the age of 28, Reed was elected to the Nevada State Assembly, and at the age of 30, he became the youngest vice-governor in Nevada history as Governor Mike O’Callaghan’s running mate in 1970.

Elected to the US House of Representatives in 1982, Reed attended Congress longer than anyone else in Nevada’s history. He barely avoided defeat in the 1998 Senate election when Republican John Ensign, then a member of the House of Representatives, was postponed by 428 votes in a recount until January.

After being elected to the Senate’s majority leader in 2007, he allegedly pushed Nevada to a political map by moving the state’s caucuses to February at the start of the presidential nomination season. This has forced political parties to invest resources in states that have achieved the fastest growth in the country in the last two decades, but with only six votes in the electoral college. An extensive network of campaign workers and volunteer leads helped serve the state twice for Obama.

In 2016, Obama praised his work in the Senate and declared, “Without he was on my side, I couldn’t have achieved what I had accomplished.”

Reed, Nevada’s most influential politician for more than a decade, allegedly spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the state to block the construction of a nuclear waste storage facility in Yucca Mountain, a suburb of Las Vegas, with almost one hand. increase. He often referred to social security as “one of the greatest government programs in history” and went off the road to defend a social program that set simple political goals.

Reed talked about his father, a hard rock miner who defended suicide prevention and often killed himself. He caused controversy in 2010 when he said in a speech on the floor of the Nevada State Assembly that it was time to end the state’s legal prostitution.

Reed’s political moderation meant that he had never been politically safe in his home state and was fully trusted in the increasingly polarized Senate. Democrats have complained about the so-called ban on partial abortion and his vote on the 2002 Iraq War resolution. Reed later stated that it was his greatest regret in Congress.

He voted against most gun control bills and withdrew the ban on offensive weapons from the Democratic Party’s gun control law in 2013 after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. The package will not pass with the ban, he said.

Reed’s Senate particularly rubbed both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. When Democratic Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House, reviewed Obama’s healthcare in 2009, another version passed the Senate and the reconciliation process was the election that the Republicans used to demonize it. A Democrat in California who was frustrated long enough to turn into a weapon of the year, he submitted legislation as a seize of big government power. Obama signed the bill in March 2010. However, angry at the recession and inspired by a small government tea party, voters the following year wiped out the Democratic Party from the majority of the House of Representatives.

Reed carefully selects Democratic candidates who won the elections to replace him in 2016, former Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortezmast, to help Democrats win a series of major elections in 2016 and 2018. Built a political machine in the state.

In his absence, Reed repeatedly accused President Donald Trump of being an “antisocial force” and “a sexual predator who lost his popularity vote and fueled his campaign with prejudice and hatred.” called.

Reed, a political veteran who seemed calm and dispelled verbal quarrels, was known for telling his staff that they were not in a life-threatening situation.

After all, Reed faced one of them before arriving in Washington. Later, Reed, the head of the Nevada Gaming Commission investigating organized crime, was the target of a car bomb in 1980. Police called it an attempted murder. Reed accused Jack Gordon of going to jail in an attempt to bribe him in a sting operation. Reed participated in an illegal effort to bring a new game to the casino in 1978.

Following Reed’s long farewell greeting in the Senate in 2016, his Nevada colleague, Republican Senator Dean Heller, declared: And I, my colleagues, and the people in the gallery here today probably agree with me. No one in American politics embodies that feeling today as much as my colleague in Nevada, Harry Mason Reed. “

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Kelman, the Associated Press writer in Jerusalem, took up AP’s parliament while Reed was the majority leader in the Senate. New York Associated Press author Michelle L. Price and correspondent Scott Sonner of Reno, Nevada contributed to this report.

Former US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid dies at age 82 | WGN Radio 720

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