Breitbart News reports that Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader and Nevada’s longest-serving member of Congress, has died from pancreatic cancer at home in Henderson, Nevada at the age of 82.
Harry Mason Reid, a combative former boxer-turned-lawyer, was widely acknowledged as one of toughest dealmakers in Congress, with a brusque manner and this motto: “I would rather dance than fight, but I know how to fight.” He was known for his abrupt style, typified by his habit of unceremoniously hanging up the phone without saying goodbye. “Even when I was president, he would hang up on me,” Obama said in a 2019 tribute video to Reid. But Obama also stated, “I could not have accomplished what I accomplished without him being at my side.”
Reid hand-picked a Democratic candidate who won the election to replace him in 2016, former Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, and built a political machine in the state that helped Democrats win a series of key elections in 2016 and 2018.
On his way out of office, Reid repeatedly lambasted President Donald Trump, calling him at one point “a sociopath” and “a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate.”