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Reid Retires

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Harry Reid is retiring — an a presidential cycle, luckily. Kilgore on his legacy:

We’ll soon get around to appreciations of what Reid accomplished and tried to accomplish, and an assessment of the contest to succeed him as Senate Democratic Leader (Chuck Schumer and Dick Durban are the most likely candidates). I think he will be most remembered as the Senator who finally began restricting the out-of-control use of the filibuster, though he also deserves significant credit (or blame) for how the Affordable Care Act was put together and enacted. For now we can just marvel at his long and very significant career.

I’ve said this before, but I think Ed’s assessment of Reid’s work on the ACA is far too equivocal. It seems ever more obvious in retrospect that what’s surprising is not that something much better than the ACA couldn’t pass but that Reid and Obama were able to get 60 votes for anything. Certainly, the next person with an even slightly plausible argument explaining how he could have gotten the votes of Lieberman, Bayh, Nelson, Landrieu, Lincoln, et. al for, say, a meaningful public option will be the first. There were certainly more liberal senators than Reid, but I’m not sure how many of them would have been more effective parliamentarians. He was very good at his job at a time when the Democrats really needed him to be.

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