The ‘Incorrectness’ of Harry Reid

W hen asked about the late Harry Reid yesterday, Mitt Romney politely noted that the former Senate majority leader had spoken “with incorrectness” when accusing him in 2012 of not paying any taxes for ten years.

Well, that’s one way to put it. During that 2012 presidential race, Reid had alleged, without any evidence, that “someone” had told him Romney had avoided taxes for an entire decade. This accusation was part of a concerted effort to frame the GOP candidate as a pitiless Gilded Age type intent on stripping children of food stamps, throwing the elderly off their insurance, and defrauding the U.S. government. So, just another election.

What was unusual in 2012 was that Reid hadn’t made the tax claim at a campaign event or on CNN, but rather from the floor of the Senate, an institution he helped degrade. Reid, of course, “spoke with incorrectness” all the time and never made any apologies about it. He celebrated his mendacity as a moral good. “He fought,” as Donald Trump fans might say. And though the press would call Reid a “political pugilist” due to his boxing past — the kind of euphemism Democrats are often afforded — a better description would be that he had a preternatural partisan instinct. When Reid was asked in 2016 what line he wouldn’t cross in partisan warfare, he responded, “I don’t know what that line would be.”

Indeed, even after Romney released his tax records, showing he had paid nearly $2 million in taxes in 2010 and more than $3 million in 2011, Reid not only refused to walk back the allegations but pointed out the efficacy of lying. “Romney didn’t win, did he?” Reid told CNN’s Dana Bash. And when asked again in 2016 about the lie, Reid told the Washington Post:

People bring that up, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. Why? Because I knew what he had done was not be transparent and forthright about his taxes and to this day he hasn’t released his tax returns. . . . Did I want to do that? No. I had the information, I tried to get somebody else to do it. I tried to get somebody in the Obama “reelect,” I tried to get one of the senators, I tried to get one of the outside groups, but nobody would do it. So I did it. And with that, like everything, I think in life, here’s something I learned from my father, if you’re going to do something, don’t do it half-assed, don’t play around. With the Mitt Romney stuff, I didn’t play around.

Even then, Reid was speaking “with incorrectness,” insisting, falsely, that Romney was hiding something.

Incidentally, you know who never released his tax returns? Harry Reid. When in 2012 the Las Vegas Review-Journal found a 1974 statement in which Reid argued that any “man or woman who will not be completely candid about his or her finances does not deserve to be in public office,” his response was: “In 1974, I wasn’t in Congress.” Reid had no line.

While the source of Romney’s fortune would be well documented, Reid’s fiscal situation was always, shall we say, opaque. “I’m a member of Congress now; I don’t make too much money,” Reid, a multimillionaire living in Washington’s Ritz-Carlton, once told reporters. This was quite an accomplishment for a man who had been a “public servant” for all but two years of his professional life, never bringing in a salary of more than $200,000. Reid would never reveal the secrets of this amazing success. And the press would show more interest in Romney’s family dog than it ever did in Reid’s situation.

Reid’s most notable achievement will always be his blowing up the judicial filibuster. The same man who once warned that weakening Senate rules would “destroy the very checks and balances our Founding Fathers put in place to prevent absolute power by any one branch of government,” threw away those principles when Barack Obama, the man who will deliver the eulogy on Saturday at Reid’s funeral, came calling. His rationalization for using the “un-American” nuclear option — pretending the nation was facing an existential threat because his party couldn’t get its way — is now the norm for Democrats whenever they are unable to exert unilateral power. His inadvertent legacy, however, was allowing Trump to send three justices to the Court who might end up preserving many of the constitutional protections that Democrats have been hankering to overturn.

But it shouldn’t be forgotten that, twined with the GOP’s inability to slow Obama’s executive abuses, it was Reid who helped feed the perception that the GOP was unable or unwilling to fight back. It was a perception that had a great deal to do with the rise of Donald Trump, a man who had absolutely no compunction about acting like Reid.