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Impeachment, Insurrection and Billions in Spending: 2021 was Tumultuous Year on Capitol Hill

From insurrection and impeachment to infrastructure and COVID relief funding, 2021 was one of the most significant years on Capitol Hill in decades. Lawmakers had to deal with the impact of a global pandemic while trying to pass an ambitious legislative agenda during the first year of a new presidency. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson has more on a historic year in the U.S. Congress.

Produced by: Katherine Gypson
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Harry Reid, Former US Senate Majority Leader, Dies at 82

Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader and Nevada’s longest-serving member of Congress, has died. He was 82. 

Reid died Tuesday, “peacefully,” surrounded by family, “following a courageous, four-year battle with pancreatic cancer,” Landra Reid said of her husband in a statement.

“Harry was a devout family man and deeply loyal friend,” she said. “We greatly appreciate the outpouring of support from so many over these past few years. We are especially grateful for the doctors and nurses that cared for him. Please know that meant the world to him.” 

Funeral arrangements would be announced in the coming days, she said.

The combative former boxer-turned-lawyer was widely acknowledged as one of the toughest dealmakers in Congress, a conservative Democrat in an increasingly polarized chamber who vexed lawmakers of both parties with a brusque manner and this motto: “I would rather dance than fight, but I know how to fight.” 

Over a 34-year career in Washington, Reid thrived on behind-the-scenes wrangling and kept the Senate controlled by his party through two presidents — Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama — a crippling recession and the Republican takeover of the House after the 2010 elections. 

He retired in 2016 after an accident left him blind in one eye.

Reid in May 2018 revealed he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was undergoing treatment.

Abrupt and underestimated 

He was known in Washington for his abrupt style, typified by his habit of unceremoniously hanging up the phone without saying goodbye.

“Even when I was president, he would hang up on me,” Obama said in a 2019 tribute video to Reid.

He was frequently underestimated, most recently in the 2010 elections when he looked like the underdog to tea party favorite Sharron Angle. Ambitious Democrats, assuming his defeat, began angling for his leadership post. But Reid defeated Angle, 50% to 45%, and returned to the pinnacle of his power. For Reid, it was legacy time. 

“I don’t have people saying, ‘He’s the greatest speaker,’ ‘He’s handsome,’ ‘He’s a man about town,'” Reid told The New York Times in December that year. “But I don’t really care. I feel very comfortable with my place in history.” 

Nevada born 

Born in Searchlight, Nevada, to an alcoholic father who killed himself at 58 and a mother who served as a laundress in a bordello, Reid grew up in a small cabin without indoor plumbing and swam with other children at a pool at a local brothel. He hitchhiked to Basic High School in Henderson, Nevada, about 65 km from home, where he met the woman he would marry in 1959, Landra Gould. At Utah State University, the couple became members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

The future senator put himself through George Washington University law school by working nights as a U.S. Capitol police officer. 

At age 28, Reid was elected to the Nevada Assembly and at age 30 became the youngest lieutenant governor in Nevada history as Governor Mike O’Callaghan’s running mate in 1970. 

Elected to the U.S. House in 1982, Reid served in Congress longer than anyone else in Nevada history. He narrowly avoided defeat in a 1998 Senate race when he held off Republican John Ensign, then a House member, by 428 votes in a recount that stretched into January. 

After his election as Senate majority leader in 2007, he was credited with putting Nevada on the political map by pushing to move the state’s caucuses to February, at the start of presidential nominating season. That forced each national party to pour resources into the state, which still had only six votes in the Electoral College despite having the country’s fastest growth over the past two decades. Reid’s extensive network of campaign workers and volunteers twice helped deliver the state for Obama. 

In 2016 Obama lauded Reid for his work in the Senate, declaring, “I could not have accomplished what I accomplished without him being at my side.” 

Legislative battles 

The most influential politician in Nevada for more than a decade, Reid steered hundreds of millions of dollars to the state and was credited with almost single-handedly blocking construction of a nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain outside Las Vegas. He often went out of his way to defend social programs that make easy political targets, calling Social Security “one of the great government programs in history.” 

Reid championed suicide prevention, often telling the story of his father. He stirred controversy in 2010 when he said in a speech on the floor of the Nevada legislature it was time to end legal prostitution in the state. 

Reid’s political moderation meant he was never politically secure in his home state, or entirely trusted in the increasingly polarized Senate. Democrats grumbled about his votes for a ban on so-called partial-birth abortion and the Iraq war resolution in 2002, something Reid later said was his biggest regret in Congress.

He voted against most gun control bills and in 2013 after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, dropped a proposed ban on assault weapons from the Democrats’ gun control legislation. The package, he said, would not pass with the ban attached. 

Reid’s Senate particularly chafed members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. When then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, muscled Obama’s health care overhaul through the House in 2009, a different version passed the Senate and the reconciliation process floundered long enough for Republicans to turn it into an election-year weapon they used to demonize the California Democrat and cast the legislation as a big-government power grab. Obama signed the measure into law in March 2010. But angered by the recession and inspired by the small-government tea party, voters the next year swept Democrats from the House majority.

Reid hand-picked a Democratic candidate who won the election to replace him in 2016, former Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, and built a political machine in the state that helped Democrats win a series of key elections in 2016 and 2018. 

On his way out of office, he repeatedly lambasted Donald Trump, calling him at one point “a sociopath” and “a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate.” 

Target of organized crime

As head of the Nevada Gaming Commission investigating organized crime, Reid became the target of a car bomb in 1980. Police called it an attempted homicide. Reid blamed Jack Gordon, who went to prison for trying to bribe him in a sting operation that Reid participated in over illegal efforts to bring new games to casinos in 1978. 

Following Reid’s lengthy farewell address on the Senate floor in 2016, his Nevada colleague Republican Dean Heller declared: “It’s been said that it’s better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both. And as me and my colleagues here today and those in the gallery probably agree with me, no individual in American politics embodies that sentiment today more than my colleague from Nevada, Harry Mason Reid.” 

 
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Biden Signs $768.2 Billion Defense Spending Bill into Law

President Joe Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law Monday, authorizing $768.2 billion in military spending, including a 2.7% pay raise for service members, for 2022. 

The NDAA authorizes a 5% increase in military spending and is the product of intense negotiations between Democrats and Republicans over issues ranging from reforms of the military justice system to COVID-19 vaccine requirements for soldiers. 

“The Act provides vital benefits and enhances access to justice for military personnel and their families and includes critical authorities to support our country’s national defense,” Biden said in a statement. 

The $768.2 billion price tag marks $25 billion more than Biden initially requested from Congress, a prior proposal that was rejected by members of both parties out of concerns it would undermine U.S. efforts to keep pace militarily with China and Russia.

The new bill passed earlier this month with bipartisan support, with Democrats and Republicans touting wins in the final package. 

Democrats applauded provisions in the bill overhauling how the military justice system handles sexual assault and other related crimes, effectively taking prosecutorial jurisdiction over such crimes out of the hands of military commanders. 

Republicans, meanwhile, touted success in blocking an effort to add women to the draft, as well as the inclusion of a provision that bars dishonorable discharges for service members who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine. 

The bill includes $7.1 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and a statement of congressional support for the defense of Taiwan, measures intended to counteract China’s influence in the region. 

It also includes $300 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, a show of support in the face of Russian aggression, as well as $4 billion for the European Defense Initiative. 

In his statement, the president also outlined a number of provisions his administration opposes over what he characterized as “constitutional concerns or questions of construction.” 

Those planks include provisions that restrict the use of funds to transfer or release individuals detained at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, which the Biden administration is moving to close. Biden’s statement said the provisions “unduly impair” the executive branch’s ability to decide when and where to prosecute detainees and where to send them when they’re released and could constrain U.S. negotiations with foreign countries over the transfer of detainees in a way that could undermine national security. 

The law also has provisions barring goods produced by forced Uyghur labor in China from entering the U.S., and it begins to lay out plans for the new Global War on Terror Memorial, which would be the latest addition to the National Mall. 

 
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The Year in US Foreign Policy 

President Joe Biden came into office at a time when U.S. standing in the world had reached a record low point. Across 60 countries and areas surveyed by Gallup’s U.S. Leadership Poll during the last year of Donald Trump’s presidency, median approval of U.S. leadership stood at 22%.

Six months into Joe Biden’s presidency, American global standing had largely rebounded. According to Gallup’s August poll across 46 countries and territories, median approval of U.S. leadership stood at 49%.

Biden entered the presidency with a very low bar, said Thomas Schwartz, a historian of U.S. foreign relations at Vanderbilt University. “Outside of a very few countries, most significantly Israel and Saudi Arabia, Donald Trump was so disliked by most foreign leaders that simply not being Trump was an immediate advantage,” he said.

However, not being Trump could take Biden only so far, said Schwartz. Despite inheriting the deadline to withdraw from Afghanistan from his predecessor, Biden’s disastrous execution of the exit gravely damaged America’s credibility internationally and reputation for competence domestically.

“Terrorism has intensified, and the Taliban takeover has led to sanctions that have put Afghanistan in a position where it has an acute humanitarian crisis that could well lead to mass famine,” said Michael Kugelman, a senior associate for South Asia at the Wilson Center. “And I think that this very precipitate, chaotic U.S. withdrawal is seen as links to those outcomes.”

The tumultuous withdrawal betrayed Western and other allies, including the increasingly educated women of Afghanistan who will suffer the most under the Taliban, said Kenneth Weinstein, Walter P. Stern distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. It will make it harder for American presidents to ask our allies to sacrifice for common goals in the future, he added.

Weinstein pointed to the administration’s handling of the southern border as another failure. As the crisis grew, Weinstein said, the U.S. has returned to “watered-down versions of Trump administration policies that the Biden-Harris campaign denounced as inhumane in 2020.”

Is America back?

Following years of “America First” under Trump, Biden delivered a diametrically opposed message that America was back, returning to multilateralism and diplomacy as the main instruments of foreign policy, rejoining multilateral organizations, returning to withdrawn agreements and bringing more engagement on global issues including pandemic recovery and climate change.

“If the measure of success is global engagement and the baseline is 2020, then President Biden’s first year in office has been nothing short of restorative,” said Leslie Vinjamuri, director of U.S. and the Americas Program at Chatham House.

Responding to a question from VOA, White House press secretary Jen Psaki listed several achievements, saying the U.S. has reclaimed leadership on some of the biggest global challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, while restoring alliances, resolving trade disputes with European countries, and elevating partnerships in the Indo-Pacific through the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) involving the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan, and AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership that includes the U.S., Australia and U.K.

AUKUS will provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines and promote cutting-edge three-nation collaboration on cyber, artificial intelligence and quantum technologies. “The deal could change the security dynamic of the Indo-Pacific if we can actually deliver the subs before their due date of 2042,” said the Hudson Institute’s Weinstein.

However, AUKUS’s launching blindsided France, a close ally, and scuttled the $66 billion conventional submarine deal Paris had underway with Australia. It was widely seen as another foreign policy blunder and an example of a disconnect between the administration’s messaging and policies.

The administration has shown very little regard for traditional allies and does not back its rhetoric with action that would be discernibly different or better than some of the isolationism seen under Trump, said Dalibor Rohac, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Rohac pointed also to the continuation of the European Union travel ban and tariffs months into the administration as other illustrations of the disconnect.

“Whether the president can bridge the gap between rhetoric and action is the most important question facing him today,” Rohac said.

China and Russia

Managing strategic competition with Beijing, a key doctrine of the Trump administration, remains the defining framework of the U.S.-China relationship under the current administration.

Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping virtually in November to discuss “ongoing effort to responsibly manage” a relationship that threatens to spiral out of control between two rivals competing in areas of trade, geopolitical influence and, more recently, military might.

The biggest thorn in this troubled U.S.-China relationship is the issue of Taiwan, a democratic self-governing island that Beijing considers a breakaway province.

“The United States is asking China not to escalate pressure on Taiwan. China is asking the United States not to fiddle around with and test the limits of the One China policy,” said Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, describing a key point in the Biden-Xi meeting. “Both countries are guilty as charged, and neither is in a position where it’s going to reconsider its policies.”

Meanwhile, Russia is not staying on the sidelines. In recent weeks President Vladimir Putin has mobilized tens of thousands of troops along the Ukrainian border. He says he wants to prevent NATO’s eastward expansion — the main focus of the Biden-Putin virtual summit in December.

“What we’re seeing here is some behavior from the Russian Federation to remind the United States that it’s still there, it still has interests that it wants to pursue and that those interests can’t be ignored,” said Andrew Lohsen, fellow in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Moscow recently outlined demands for a sweeping new security arrangement with the West, including a guarantee that NATO will not only cease expanding farther east but also will roll back all military activity in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus. It also included a ban on sending U.S. and Russian warships and aircraft to areas within striking distance of each other’s territory.

Russia wants Washington and Moscow “to sit down and draw up the world like it’s 1921 instead of like it’s 2021,” said Max Bergmann, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. The tough demands appear certain to be rejected by the U.S. and its allies, who insist that Moscow does not dictate NATO’s expansion.

The administration says it will continue to hold high-level talks with both Moscow and Beijing, not only to avoid conflict but also to collaborate on areas of common interest, such as the pandemic, climate change and regional issues like Iran.

So far, Biden’s two-track strategy of deterrence and diplomatic engagement has not led to grave setbacks or negative consequences, said Leslie Vinjamuri of Chatham House. “But defending the rules-based order in the context of power shifts and technological change — and in a world where the leading powers embrace radically different value systems — is a tall order and the future is uncertain,” she said.

Moreover, Putin’s threats to Ukraine and Xi’s crushing of democracy in Hong Kong, intimidation of Taiwan and allegedly genocidal policies toward the Uyghurs has fed the narrative of an administration too weak to stand up forcefully for American interests and values against aggressive adversaries, said Vanderbilt University’s Thomas Schwartz. “Iran’s continuing defiance and move toward acquiring a nuclear weapon strengthen this portrait,” he said.

Other unsolved problems include North Korea, where the administration appears in no hurry to push for a deal unless Kim Jong Un commits to winding down his nuclear weapons program, and simmering tensions between Israel and Hamas. More than one year following the Abraham Accords that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and two of its Arab neighbors, the administration has reestablished ties with Palestinians severed under Trump but has made little progress in advancing the broader Middle East peace process.

Democracies vs autocracies

The administration frames relations with rivals in the context of a global struggle, drawing a fault line between democracies and autocracies.

“We’ll stand up for our allies and our friends and oppose attempts by stronger countries that dominate weaker ones, whether through changes to territory by force, economic coercion, technical exploitation or disinformation,” Biden said in remarks at the U.N. General Assembly in September. “But we’re not seeking — say it again, we are not seeking — a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs.”

A “Cold War mentality” is exactly what China and Russia accuse Washington of fostering. Their leaders were excluded from the Summit for Democracy where Biden hosted more than 100 countries on December 9-10. Xi and Putin held their own virtual meeting a week after the democracy summit.

While activists applaud the summit’s goals of “strengthening democracy and defending against authoritarianism,” combating corruption and promoting human rights, some analysts warn of overreach.

If Biden pushes his democracy-vs.-autocracy framing too far, there’s a danger of losing collaborative ground on global issues such as climate change with China and arms control with Russia, said Stacie Goddard, Mildred Lane Kemper professor of political science at Wellesley College. “Those are the types of global issues where you really do need that type of cross-ideological cooperation,” she said.
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Trump Asks US Supreme Court to Block Release of White House Records

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the release of White House records sought by the House of Representatives committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Trump’s request came two weeks after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the former president had no basis to challenge Democratic President Joe Biden’s decision to allow the documents to be handed over. That decision will remain on hold until the Supreme Court acts.

Biden had previously determined that the records, which belong to the executive branch, should not be subject to executive privilege, which protects the confidentially of some internal White House communications, and that turning them over to Congress was in the best interest of the nation.

Trump’s lawyers say in their court filing that the House Select Committee’s request is “exceedingly broad” and an “unprecedented encroachment on executive privilege.”

The appeals court ruling was another blow to the Republican former president and his allies, who have waged an ongoing legal battle with the committee over access to documents and witnesses.

The committee has asked the National Archives, the U.S. agency housing Trump’s White House records, to produce visitor logs, phone records and written communications between his advisers.

The panel has said it needs the records to understand any role Trump may have played in fomenting the violence.

Trump has argued that he can invoke executive privilege based on the fact that he was president at the time even though he is no longer in office.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Nov. 9 rejected Trump’s arguments, saying he had not acknowledged the “deference owed” to Biden’s determination that the committee could access the records. adding: “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.”

The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority that includes three justices appointed by Trump, but it has not always been receptive to his requests.

In February, the court rejected  his request to block disclosure of his tax records as part of a criminal investigation in New York and in 2020 also turned away attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn  that year’s presidential election, which he lost to Biden.
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