Harry Reid was a man on fire Thursday.
He wasn’t just smoking, or doing a slow burn. He was a 1,000-acre raging bonfire of disdain and contempt for his Republican colleagues in Congress and the Donald Trump they created.
Yet Trump was not the mainstay of Reid’s speech titled “Donald Trump and the Future of American Politics” at the Center for American Progress in Washington.
What really was at the center of Reid’s address was hope – along with a stout dose of reality about the race, class and ethnic war the GOP has fostered and stoked throughout the two terms of Barack Obama – America’s first black president.
Reid aptly called the dose of reality “the big lie” of the GOP. That one “big lie” told over and over has fill-in-the-blank issues but a broken record of its central message: “Any policy put forward by Democrats was nefarious simply because it came from President Obama.”
The newest example is the President’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Republican leaders, a full month before they knew who the nominee would be, pledged to block him and treat him like a piñata, Reid said.
But Reid said the Obama snubbing actually began on the night of Obama’s first inauguration when a group of Republican congressmen, senators and strategists met at a nearby restaurant to plot the party’s opposition to him. Those in attendance decided they would do everything in their power to keep President Obama from being re-elected and they would prevent him from achieving any of his legislative priorities.
“For eight years, they drained all the oxygen from the policy debate in this country by replacing thoughtful engagement with resentment and hatred,” Reid said.
Thus, administration efforts to ease the economic hardships Americans faced with smart, targeted policy solutions (like the stimulus, middle class tax cuts, unemployment insurance, Wall Street reform and infrastructure investment) were met with shaking GOP heads and a near chant: If Obama supports it, it won’t help you.
What about issues that once basked in bipartisan support – payroll tax cuts, mortgage refinancing, student loans, immigration reform? Over and over, Republican leaders told Americans that any policy put forward by Democrats was nefarious simply because it came from President Obama.
And certainly we can’t forget the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare that once was Romneycare and before that was an idea championed by the conservative Heritage Foundation. “As soon as President Obama proposed the individual mandate, it became socialism in the eyes of Republicans,” Reid reminded his audience.
And he noted that no president in history faced the number of filibusters (more than 500) that President Obama has faced.
To prop up the mainstay “big lie,” Republican leaders also had to disrespect science, statistics and research. Energy? Climate change is a “hoax,” they said. Preventing gun violence? Republicans decided more guns are the answer. The economy? Pay no mind to 72 consecutive months of private-sector job growth and an unemployment rate below 5 percent. GOP leaders ignore common-sense facts and respected authorities to falsely tell us that President Obama has been a disaster for the economy.
Sound familiar? It should. Who’s slogan is “Let’s Make America Great Again?
This is where Reid, in his speech Tuesday, brought the thread back to Trump – the creator of the Obama “birther” fable and extender of race, religion and ethnic fear-mongering. We might call Trump the love child of the GOP’s big lie.
“The only possible message such unprecedented and blind opposition could send is that this President and his policies are illegitimate,” Reid said. “Indeed, Sen. (Mitch) McConnell’s blind rejection of any policy proposed by President Obama, regardless of the merits, is the kinder, gentler, Senate version of birtherism.”
And now, after years of refusing to denounce birtherism and all the other versions of the big lie that goes with it, GOP leaders are wringing their hands.
“What more do they need to see?” Reid asked of Sen. McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan. “Trump has made disgusting, sexist statements. He has insulted veterans, immigrants and people with disabilities. Americans are being assaulted and taunted with racial slurs at Trump’s rallies. Violence is being threatened and committed against African-Americans with disturbing regularity. And Trump encourages it all,” Reid said. “There is no grey area here. It is time for Sen. McConnell and Speaker Ryan to find the backbone to say: ‘Enough!'”
Reid is hoping ideas will trump both the big lie and Trump. But we have to take on the lie first.
Here are the facts born of ideas: Democratic policies of the last seven years have created 14 million jobs, dropped unemployment and helped 20 million Americans gain health care. Today, there are more jobs in clean energy than there are jobs in the coal mines.
Trump may think America was great before African-Americans attained civil rights, or before women had the right to vote, or before Medicare, Social Security or the Clean Air Act.
But the fact is that America is already great. And so was Harry Reid’s speech.