WP: Reid Vows to Stand Up to GOP

[kskiska]

A Moderate, Party's New Senate Leader Says He Won't Yield

The new leader of Senate Democrats sent a shiver down liberals' backs this month when he seemed to endorse conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as a possible chief justice of the United States.

Sen. Harry M. Reid's opposition to abortion was well known and generally accepted, liberal activists said, but this was something else. Some wondered if Senate Democrats had replaced Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) with a considerably more conservative lawmaker who might yield to Republicans, especially in light of the party's four-seat net loss in November's elections.

The answer is no, according to a review of the Nevada senator's voting record, assessments by his colleagues, and his comments in a recent interview. By most measures Reid is a mainstream Democrat, landing slightly to the right of his party's average score on congressional ratings issued by a wide range of interest groups. And by his own accounts, Reid, a former boxer, is ready to go toe-to-toe with President Bush and the Senate's GOP majority on the biggest issues facing the 109th Congress.

"As far as I'm concerned, there will be no privatization" of even a small portion of workers' Social Security contributions, he said, rejecting what the president trumpeted as a priority at a White House conference last week. And Senate Republicans, he said, "will rue the day" they try to carry out a threat to end a senator's right to filibuster judicial nominees.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10764-2004Dec18.html