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exit r eid EnD of an ER a • by dennis Myers •
March 7, 2011: On the anniversary of the historic 1965 Selma march, U.S. Sen. Harry Reid walks across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with Jesse Jackson and U.S. Rep. John Lewis (back to camera).
n December 1935, the Nevada Colorado River Commission reported to Gov. Richard Kirman that if the state built transmission lines to supply power to western and northern Nevada, the cost of electricity to consumers would be reduced. It didn’t happen. Not until three quarters of a century had passed, in February 2009, did U.S. Sen. Harry Reid pledge to support building a major transmission line linking north and south for the first time. As it happened, the same month—in a reaction to the Great Recession and the Wall Street meltdown—Reid and his fellow Democrats pushed stimulus funding through Congress, providing a source of funding for the line. The next month, President Obama signed a public lands act freeing up 70 acres for a transmission line corridor near Sunrise Mountain in Southern Nevada. Construction began in 2010. That same year, Reid pushed through a measure to shift the line to avoid sensitive historic and wildlife sites. Another year later, a federal $343 million loan guarantee was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy. In 2011 and 2013, the Energy Regulatory Commission—chaired by Reid nominee Jon Wellinghoff of Nevada—eased regulatory obstacles to the transmission line. In 2015, Reid won enactment of a measure assuring a corridor through an abandoned manganese mine and mill site used in World War I. The 235-mile, 500-kilovolt, 600-megawatt line is now in place. Cost: $510 million. Reid shepherded it along, removing roadblocks, clearing the way. And he insisted that part of the deal would be reduced coal use and increased renewables. The hatred that found its way to Reid during his Capitol Hill years cannot argue with his record of accomplishment. Indeed, it sometimes seemed his congressional tenure was devoted to unblocking old projects that had been proposed by earlier legislators but never reached fruition. On Nov. 4, 1986—the night he was elected to the U.S. Senate—he promised to win enactment of a Truckee River operating agreement, badly needed for decades. Indeed, his Senate predecessor Paul Laxalt was at that moment making a last, unsuccessful stab in his final weeks in office to push a Truckee agreement through Congress. It’s unlikely that even Reid had any idea how long the agreement would take—nearly his entire Senate service. It’s a separate, three-decade story that needs telling, but for our purposes here it’s useful to show Reid’s history of achievement that had eluded other state leaders. As a member of the U.S. House, Reid took on the task of creating Great Basin National Park, an idea that had been kicked around during the 20th century without success. In 1934, landscape architect William Penn Mott surveyed the area for the National Park Service and recommended creation of the park. It didn’t happen. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson supported the idea in the 1960s. Still no luck. Reid succeeded, pushing through legislation creating a park with 76,800 acres (about 120
square miles), including Wheeler Peak and the Lehman cavern. Reid went after wilderness areas, which Republicans had held to a minimum in Nevada. There was no reason for him to win. The state’s then-four person congressional delegation was anti-environment, with Reid the only Democratic member. He outlasted them. The two Republican senators departed, to be replaced by Reid and his friend Richard Bryan. Nevada got 700,000 acres of wilderness, and Reid has been adding to it ever since. Not all of his legislation concerned oncestymied projects, of course. He developed a terrific dislike of coal power, a factor in asthma attacks, chronic bronchitis, heart attacks, hospital admissions, premature deaths and lost work days. Reid worked on shutting down Reid-Gardner, one of the nation’s dirtiest coal plants. Most of it was finally closed, and a $4.3 million settlement was paid to the nearby Moapa Band of Paiutes for health problems. Reid also prevented construction of two coal plants in eastern Nevada, infuriating local leaders who wanted the jobs. In the Truckee Meadows in the 1990s, there was an unpopular plan to import water for growth from the Honey Lake area that straddles the Nevada/California border north of Reno. Reid helped kill it (though it later came quietly back to life). Paradoxically, in southern Nevada where water officials are trying to import water for growth from areas along the Nevada/Utah border, Reid has aided the importation plan. There are those who say Reid gets more credit than he is due for stopping the proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, that three governors kept the federal government chasing its tail for a couple of decades. That is certainly true. Reid did change the dynamic when he won for Nevada one of the first presidential nominating events in the nation— the early caucuses. An entire generation of political leaders came to Nevada and took a pledge against Yucca, akin to the Iowa pledge on ethanol.
T h E b a D n E w D ay s Reid’s career in Congress more or less parallels the Era of Bad Feeling, when Republicans stopped working with Democrats and learned to parlay polarization into election successes—if not legislative accomplishments. In 1999, Reid became the assistant Democratic leader in the Senate, informally known as the Democratic whip. In that post, he made allies in both parties by accommodating and servicing the needs of members. His cooperation coupled with his relatively conservative voting record made him the Republicans’ favorite Democrat. Trent Lott called him “soothing,” not the kind of term normally applied to a partisan fighter. But then in 2005, Reid became Senate Democratic leader. There is substantial reason to question whether Reid was ever the person for the job. Today’s party congressional
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