• U.S. Senator from Nevada
• Became Senate Majority Leader in 2006
• Has been involved in several serious ethics scandals
• Vocal critic of former President George W. Bush and the Iraq War
• In April 2007, he said that the Iraq War was "lost."
• Believes that human industrial activity is destroying the natural environment and causing "global warming"

Harry Mason Reid was born in December 1939 in Searchlight, Nevada. A member of the Mormon Church, Reid attended Southern Utah University and Utah State University. He went on to earn a law degree from George Washington University and then took a job as a city attorney in Henderson, Nevada.

In 1967 Reid, a Democrat, was elected to the Nevada State Assembly. From 1970-1974 he served as the state's lieutenant governor. In 1974 he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate, and a year later he lost an election for Las Vegas mayor.

From 1977 to 1981, Reid chaired the Nevada Gaming Commission. In 1982 he was elected to represent Nevada's First Congressional District (based in Las Vegas) in the House of Representatives, where he served two terms. In 1986 he won a seat (representing Nevada) in the U.S. Senate, where he has been re-elected every six years since then.

From 1999 to 2005, Reid was the Senate Democratic Whip and he chaired the Senate Ethics Committee from 2001 to 2003. He was Senate Minority Leader from 2005 until the 2006 congressional elections, when the Democrats took control of the Senate; he then became Senate Majority Leader.

Over the course of his political career, Reid has been implicated in several serious ethics scandals:

• In a 1998 real estate deal engineered by Jay Brown (a former casino lawyer and a longtime friend of Reid), the senator purchased two undeveloped residential-property lots on Las Vegas' rapidly growing outskirts for approximately $400,000. Reid bought one of the parcels on his own, and the second one jointly with Brown. One of the sellers was a developer who was benefiting from a government land swap supported by Reid. In 2001 Reid sold both of his lots for $400,000 to a limited liability corporation created by Jay Brown, but he never disclosed the sale on his annual public ethics report. Nor did he inform Congress that he held any stake in Brown's company. As far as Congress knew, Reid was still the owner of the two lots he had purchased three years earlier.
  
  In 2004 Brown's company, having negotiated with local officials to rezone the property for a shopping center, sold the land to other developers in a deal that earned Reid $1.1 million -- a $700,000 profit on his initial investment. Reid falsely reported the transaction to Congress as a personal land sale.
  
  
• In 2001 Reid paid cash for a $750,000 condominium at the Washington, D.C. Ritz-Carlton where he resides. When he subsequently gave Christmas bonuses (in 2002, 2004, and 2005) to the doorman and other support staff at his building, he used $3,300 in campaign donations rather than his own separate funds -- in contravention of federal election law. Reid's campaign falsely listed the bonuses as campaign "salary" expenditures for two of the years in question, and as a "contribution" for the other year. When news of Reid's misappropriation of campaign funds became public in 2006, the senator's office said the listing as salary had been a "clerical error." Added Reid: "I am reimbursing the campaign from my own pocket to prevent this issue from being used in the current campaign season to deflect attention from Republican failures."
  
  
• In a $286 billion federal transportation bill passed by Congress in 2005, Reid secured $300 million in earmarks for projects in his home state, including $18 million to fund the construction of a bridge spanning the Colorado River. On the Arizona side of that bridge, Reid owned 160 acres of undeveloped land around which many new housing units were being built. Noting that the new bridge would cause the value of Reid's property to skyrocket, Norman Ornstein, co-author of a book that examines earmarking, said: "It's a really bad idea for lawmakers to earmark projects when they have a financial interest that could in any way be affected by it." Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, noted: "Unwittingly, the taxpayer may have helped inflate the value" of Reid's land.
  
  
• Between 2002 and 2006, Reid intervened to gain monumental government concessions on behalf of a powerful Nevada land developer, Harvey Whittemore, who wished to build thousands of homes and numerous golf courses on 43,000 acres of barren land in an area called Coyote Springs, an hour northeast of Las Vegas. This land had a number of federal restrictions on its use: One-fourth of it was off-limits to developers because of federal protections for an "endangered" species of desert tortoise that dwelt there; another one-fourth was government-owned and was subject to a federal power-line right of way; and the territory overall was rife with streams and washes that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had designated as crucial to the health of the desert's ecosystem, and was therefore generally off-limits to construction.
  
  Thanks to Senator Reid's intercession, however, the Bureau of Land Management agreed to relocate the tortoises to an adjacent federal preserve, thereby opening that portion of Coyote Springs to developers.
  
  In 2002 Reid inserted some obscure provisions into a land-management bill that relocated the aforementioned power corridor, thereby apparently freeing Whittemore to build on the 10,500-acre parcel he coveted. But the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee balked at the deal, and Reid in turn negotiated an alternate arrangement where Whittemore was permitted to purchase the land at a fair market rate while the government relocated the corridor.
  
  Finally, in 2005 Reid and fellow Nevada Senator John Ensign used their influence with the EPA to eliminate the environmental-impact obstacle.
  
  In return for Reid's efforts, Whittemore gave tens of thousands of dollars to the senator's political campaigns and to his leadership fund (which Reid used to help bankroll the campaigns of fellow Democrats). In addition, Whittemore gave $5,000 to each of Reid's two sons, to finance their efforts to win local political offices. The developer also hired one of those sons as his personal lawyer to represent him in his dealings with federal officials.
  
  
• Between 2001 and 2004, Reid wrote at least four letters pressing the Bush administration to take action on certain issues of importance to Indian tribes that were clients of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Abramoff, whose staff was in regular contact with Reid's office, lobbied on behalf of tribes involved in the gambling casino industry; he would later be convicted in federal court for defrauding those tribes. Each time Reid wrote a letter on behalf of the Indian tribes, he collected donations from Abramoff and his lobbying partners and clients around the same time period. All told, these donations totaled nearly $68,000. Also between 2001 and 2004, Reid received more than $50,000 directly from four Indian tribes that were clients of Abramoff.

Reid has been one of the Senate's most vocal critics of the Iraq War. In April 2007, shortly after President Bush had initiated a "surge" that sent 21,000 additional troops to combat the insurgent violence in Iraq, Reid, counseling American surrender, stated publicly: "I believe ... that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything."

On the environmental front, Reid strongly believes that human industrial activity is destroying the planet. In June 2008, he said, "Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. And this global warming is ruining our country. It's ruining the world."

Also in 2008, Reid advocated a ban on all oil exploration in the massive shale depositories of America's western states, which are estimated to hold between 800 billion to 2 trillion barrels of oil.

In 2008, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), a non-partisan government watchdog group, named Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as its "Porkers of the Year" because of what CAGW viewed as their consistent record of fiscal irresponsibility.

Reid supports the passage of an immigration-reform bill that would create a path to citizenship for all illeal immigrants currently residing in the United States. In June 2009, he said:

"I'm going to do comprehensive immigration reform. I'm not going to do it piecemeal. That's an excuse for everybody to do too little. We're going to do it all at once, and we're going to have comprehensive immigration reform that will include taking care of our borders, a decent guest-worker program, bringing the 11 million people out of the shadows, doing something that's so important with the employer sanctions bill that really is a catch-22 for everyone and a number of other things. We're going to do it all in one piece of legislation, not give people an excuse that they voted for one thing and think that they're through with it."

In December 2009, Reid likened Republicans who opposed the implementation of government-run healthcare, to those who opposed the abolition of slavery in centuries past. In a December 7th speech on the Senate floor, Reid said:

"Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, 'Slow down, stop everything, let's start over.' If you think you've heard these same excuses before, you're right. When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said, 'Slow down, it's too early, things aren't bad enough.'"

In January 2010, it was reported that a forthcoming book -- Game Change, by Mark Halperin -- quoted Senator Reid as having said during the 2008 presidential campaign that Barack Obama stood a good chance of winning because he is "light-skinned" and has "no negro dialect -- unless he wants to." Reid quickly issued a public apology for his remarks, saying: "I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words. I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments."

For an overview of key votes that Reid has cast during his Senate career, click here.