Thursday, June 19, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Backstory: The unending session

By Michael Green

Meeting Chinese leader Chou En-lai in 1971, Henry Kissinger sought his opinion of the French Revolution of 1789. Chou replied that we had to wait for enough time to pass to see how it comes out.

It would be fair to wait until the 2003 Nevada Legislature is done before judging it, but it probably will never end, so this is the time to name the likely losers in this session: the legislators themselves.

History tells us Nevadans prefer low taxes and limited government, but it also makes clear that they--we--have little tolerance for excessive stupidity and cupidity in Carson City, and that legislators pay for their transgressions.

In 1908, Gov. John Sparks called a special session to create a state police force. At the request of George Wingfield, then Nevada's political boss because he controlled Goldfield's major mines, Sparks asked President Theodore Roosevelt to send federal troops to the central Nevada boomtown. The ostensible reason was to stop labor violence; the real reason was to break efforts to unionize the miners. That part was successful, but Roosevelt planned to withdraw the troops. Sparks and the Legislature set up the police force to replace them.

Several of the legislators lost their re-election bids later in 1908. Their campaign money came from Wingfield and his allies, but the voters included miners unhappy with the state telling them that improving their wages and working conditions was unacceptable.

Two decades later, this lesson went unlearned. Gov. Fred Balzar called another special session when the state controller and treasurer--both Wingfield lackeys--embezzled more than $500,000 in state money illegally deposited in a bank owned by--you guessed it--Wingfield. The Legislature raised taxes to help make up the loss. Again, large numbers of lawmakers lost at the polls.

Ah, you say, but Wingfield no longer rules Nevada, and the state has grown rapidly. But one individual or industry traditionally exerts more power here than any other. In Wingfield's time it was mining. Now it's gaming.

As for rapid growth, the population just about doubled from 1980 to 1990 and from 1990 to 2000. But history repeated itself in 1989 when legislators voted themselves a big pension increase. Granting they deserved one, that package would give the longest-tenured members a 300 percent hike.

That would be only a few of them, but the public outcry was enormous--rightly. A few legislators warned against the bill, but the leadership warned them: Vote yes or we will kill your legislation and your chances of re-election. One lawmaker replied that he would vote against the increase because, if they approved it, he would be the only one re-elected. He was almost right. In the end, Gov. Bob Miller--who reportedly had promised to support the measure originally--called a special session to repeal it. It was repealed, but several legislators went down to defeat anyway.

This time, the circumstances are different. Many Republican legislators--and Democrats--are understandably angry at Gov. Kenny Guinn. Not so much because he sat on this until his second term and sloughed off the responsibility at first to a task force. Not even because several GOP legislators want to turn the clock back to the 14th century, where they would be much happier and fit in beautifully as precursors to the Spanish Inquisition.

Rather, Guinn ignored and insulted them. He and his advisers put together a tax plan with little input from the legislative branch, presented it and announced that attacking it would make the critics "irrelevant." While some of them are indeed narrow-minded, as long as they are in the Legislature they are very relevant--not to mention downright scary.

Nor did Guinn make, in their minds, a good-faith effort to cut red tape and red ink. He made a legitimate, logical case: Nevada is growing fast and needs to make progress in all the right areas. While some conservative lawmakers opposed every form of progress in their lifetimes, no one can claim that no room exists to cut.

But the Legislature has no time, thanks to approval of the 120-day limit for legislative sessions, and because no one has the guts to push for the annual sessions the state so desperately needs. Worse, thanks to the addled thinking of Rep. Jim Gibbons and unthinking voters, the Nevada Constitution now requires a two-thirds majority of the Legislature to increase taxes. This means eight members of the 21-seat Senate--one more than one-third--can hold the rest of the state hostage, even if the rest of the Legislature is unanimous. This is not democracy, but it would have appealed to the Southerners who seceded and started the Civil War.

Will the public realize all of this or just take it out on legislators who fell victim to their and their governor's political ineptitude? If you want to know what the public is thinking, watch "Survivor." That silliness is popular, but appropriate: Several lawmakers are about to be voted off the island--not for taxing our wallets, but for taxing our credulity.