Reid pounds GOP united against Obama Supreme Court choice

Never one to back down from a political fight, the five-term Nevada Democrat has been relentlessly pounding Republicans over their insistence that President Barack Obama's successor fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court.

Each day of the Senate session, the 76-year-old Reid, who is retiring at the end of his term, stands on the floor and rails against the GOP, casting them as obstructionists and lackeys of presidential front-runner Donald Trump.

Reid, a former middleweight boxer and U.S. Capitol police officer, is famous — or infamous if you talk to Republicans — for bare-knuckles politics.

[...] this was the Democrat who called President George W. Bush a "loser" and poked the hornet's nest of the 2012 presidential campaign by suggesting — without documentation — that Mitt Romney hadn't paid taxes in 10 years.

Particularly galling to Republicans is the fact that Reid changed the Senate rules, eliminating filibusters for most of the president's nominations, an extraordinary step known in the Senate as the nuclear option.

If she can win the Democratic nomination, she faces an uphill fight against the plain-spoken, popular Grassley although the incumbent has been battered by scathing editorials back home in a state that voted for Obama twice.