The largest newspaper in Nevada is taking Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to task, saying that the Democrat’s recent comments about Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas highlight a pattern of race card rhetoric.
“Harry Reid is the da Vinci of distraction,” reads the editorial from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which was posted online Friday.
“The moment any scandal, policy failure or political defeat crashes down on him — and there have been plenty the past few years — the Senate majority leader unleashes outrageous rhetoric,” the editorial continues, adding that Reid “has become especially fond of slinging race cards just to crank up the outrage.”
The trigger for the Review-Journal was a comment Reid made earlier this week after the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision.
In a 5-4 decision, the Court sided with Hobby Lobby, allowing it and other “closely-held” corporations to skirt the Obamacare mandate that requires companies to provide health insurance plans to their employees that contain coverage for certain contraceptives. Companies like Hobby Lobby can now cite their religious principles in deciding to not provide coverage for those contraceptives.
An angry Reid criticized the decision, saying, “The one thing we are going to do during this work period, sooner rather than later, is to ensure that women’s lives are not determined by the virtues of five white men.”
The issue there is that only four of the justices that sided with Hobby Lobby are white. The fifth justice was Clarence Thomas, who is black.
“Sen. Reid’s slip was no accident,” reads the Review-Journal editorial. “He believes racial and ethnic minorities are ideologically monolithic constituencies who are incapable of independent or — gasp! — right-of-center thinking.”
“In the majority leader’s mind, Mr. Thomas is not an African-American because the justice doesn’t blindly subscribe to liberal orthodoxy,” the paper wrote, before pointing out other examples of Reid compartmentalizing minorities.
During his 2010 re-election campaign, Reid said of Latino voters, “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, OK? Do I need to say more?”
As the editorial points out, Nevada’s Republican governor, Brian Sandoval, is Hispanic.
“Never mind that Sen. Reid himself, like the entire Senate Democratic leadership, is as white as an Irishman in a snowstorm,” the editorial continues, arguing that after more than five years of Democrats controlling the White House and Senate, unemployment rates for blacks and Hispanics “remains scandalously high.” (RELATED: Harry Reid Apparently Thinks Clarence Thomas Is White)
Reid’s proposed solution to the problem, a higher minimum wage, will make the problem worse, according to the paper.
“Quit the race-baiting already, Sen. Reid,” the editorial continues. “You’re clearly colorblind — in all the wrong ways.”
Despite the brutality of its take-down, the Review-Journal left out one prominent example of Reid’s awkward race-based remarks. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Reid said that then-Sen. Barack Obama would be electable because he is “light-skinned” and speaks with “no Negro dialect.”
Reid apologized in 2010 for those comments.