How a pro-gun, anti-abortion Nevadan leads the Senate’s Democrats.

[NVMojo]

Issue of 2005-08-08 and 15
Posted 2005-08-01



About twenty minutes before President Bush announced that John G. Roberts, Jr., was his choice to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, he telephoned Harry Reid, of Nevada, the Senate Minority Leader. As Reid recalls the brief conversation, Bush said, “This guy is really smart, and you’ll like him.” Reid replied, “I hope so,” and added that, during the search, he had enjoyed working with the White House legal counsel, Harriet Miers. (A few days earlier, Reid had met with Miers and had suggested ways to avoid a divisive confirmation process.) Mentioning her name, Reid said, was a signal—his way of telling Bush, “Thanks for not giving us any of these crazies.” Or, as he put it a little later, the President “didn’t give us somebody who people like me were jumping up and down screaming the first time the name was uttered.”

Reid has been the Democrats’ leader in the Senate for six months. He is sixty-five, a trim man with short, graying hair and slightly stooped shoulders, and not someone who appears likely to jump up and down screaming. When we met last week in his Capitol office, it was clear that the Roberts nomination had come as a relief. “There were lots of people we didn’t want, and I made sure he knew what those names were,” Reid said, and mentioned the federal judges Edith Jones and Janice Rogers Brown, among others. “I think the President submitted someone who he thinks won’t be much trouble.” Nonetheless, Reid was reserving judgment until the F.B.I. investigation and the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings were completed. “Roberts is not a slam dunk,” he said. “I’m just keeping, as some have heard me say, my powder dry until we find out what the deal is.” And yet he couldn’t quite conceal his pleasure.

The day after Bush made his choice public, Roberts went to Capitol Hill to meet with some of the senators who will eventually be asked to vote on his confirmation. Reid, who is a former trial lawyer, spent thirty minutes with Roberts. One thing he asked him was how he felt about Supreme Court precedents—in particular, on what grounds they might be overturned. “Precedent is so important to me in the law,” Reid told him.

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http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/050808fa_fact

[Dickie Flatt]

1. poorly?