Harry Reid died on Tuesday, and it’s quite predictable that there immediately appeared comparisons of his leadership of the Senate Democrats to the leadership currently on display from Senate top dog Chuck Schumer. We should be careful here, however. The two men are very different, certainly, but so are their circumstances.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that party leaders in Congress, particularly in the Senate, do not have a free hand to do anything they choose. They must hold together a coalition while seeking to gain, maintain or grow a majority. They have to protect their most vulnerable members, and that means they can’t just bully them into submission. Harry Reid had a nice run where he enjoyed a healthy majority–briefly reaching a theoretically filubuster-proof 60 seats. Schumer has only 5o seats under his control, meaning he cannot hope to break a filibuster with a few Republican votes and must have absolute unanimity to pass anything. Reid could tolerate dissension in his ranks, and even encourage it in specific circumstances where it might help a member establish some strategic distance from the party brand. Schumer doesn’t have that luxury.
When Reid used the nuclear option to facilitate the confirmation of President Obama’s nominations, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia opposed him. It didn’t matter because Reid didn’t need his support. Schumer would like Manchin to back him on a similar rules change to facilitate a voting rights bill, but this time Manchin’s support is required. That’s just one example–there are many others–where Schumer faces a more challenging problem than Reid typically faced.
Right now, there’s an article up at HuffPost that credits Donald Trump with making Schumer’s Senate majority. That’s fair enough, since Trump’s delusional insistence that he was robbed of Georgia’s Electoral College votes clearly dissuaded thousands of Republicans from participating in the two Senate runoff elections that resulted in the narrow election of Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, and created a 50-50 split in the upper chamber. But the author, S.V. Date, goes further by arguing that Trump is responsible for Biden’s success in confirming a record-tying 40 federal judges during his first year in office. This is less accurate because it wouldn’t have been possible in a 50-50 Senate without the support of Senator Manchin, and those justices would have been subject to a filibuster if not for Reid’s decision to use the nuclear option back in 2013.
Reid might have gone nuclear earlier but he had to have enough support from his own caucus. He waited until Mitch McConnell’s obstruction had caused enough frustration that there were 50 votes to support the change. Schumer is facing the same constraint with voting rights, but he lacks the wiggle room that Reid enjoyed.
A better way to compare Reid to Schumer than looking at their records is to try to imagine what they would have done in each other’s shoes. Manchin seems to have a better relationship with Schumer than he enjoyed with Reid, but Reid didn’t have to worry that he’d lose his majority if Manchin got angry.
I preferred Reid’s combative style to Schumer’s but I know Schumer isn’t free to use the same strategies. I don’t think the two men are as different as it might seem. They do have the same job description, however, and the same determined adversary in McConnell.
