Backstory: A new screwing from the screw-up

By Michael Green

One of President Bush's plans to cut the monstrous deficit he created is to take profits from federal land sold in Nevada. Of the $1.6 billion in sales since the 1998 Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, much of it has gone into local park projects, environmental protection efforts and education.

Granting that Bush usually opposes anything to improve our quality of life, his new proposal to "screw Nevada" is only the latest turning of the screw.

When the colonists revolted against England, they cried taxation without representation. Yet the issue's roots went deeper. From the beginnings of colonization, especially in the South, those who moved west resented those in the East. Westerners felt Easterners ignored or belittled them, and certainly didn't want to share power with them. That feeling has survived until, oh, what time is it?

The idea of the West as a colony of the East has been popular with many historians--and while they haven't necessarily articulated it the same way, many of its residents agree. They argue the West has served the East much as the colonies served the mother country: supplying resources, but without reaping the wealth those resources produced.

If the West has anything in abundance, it's land. But the feds own most of it, and now propose to take the money made from selling the land where Westerners live to pay off a deficit caused by Easterners (Bush is from Texas. That's east of here, geography fans).

In 1873, just as the Comstock Lode hit its "Big Bonanza"--a vein of gold and silver as wide as you are tall--the feds pushed through the Mint Act. This demonetized silver, removing it as a medium of circulation just when Nevada would provide more silver than ever.

It was part of a federal policy to reduce the currency in circulation. But Nevadans claimed a conspiracy of Eastern gold buyers and bankers, with their tame politicians, against Nevada. For the rest of the 19th century, candidates for the House and Senate almost always ran on a platform favoring remonetization of silver and claiming victimhood even more than Michael Jackson does.

Sound familiar? Say, like the rhetoric about Yucca Mountain? Many critics of this project probably don't realize it, but they are walking in footprints originally made more than a century ago.

Back then, Nevada wasn't unique. Other states and territories boasted gold, silver and wide-open spaces. But after 1931, only Nevada boasted wide-open gambling, creating a problem: the image that Nevada had to be worse than other places because it allowed gambling, prostitution and other immoral activities to go on in the open. This made Nevada different from the 49 other states, whose leaders allowed many of the same things but opposed legalizing them--doing so would have eliminated the bribery of politicians and law enforcement that kept vice in operation.

As hypocritical as Nevadans can be, we have faced still more hypocritical criticism, especially from federal officials. Sen. Estes Kefauver attacked the mob, at times justifiably, but mainly to aid his political ambitions. J. Edgar Hoover allowed illegal wiretaps of casinos, managing to give lawbreakers something in common with Martin Luther King. Bobby Kennedy targeted Las Vegas casino owners as gangsters--after they worked in bootlegging with his dad.

Picking on Nevada was easy. So, is The Rug really different in proposing to take back a few hundred million that Nevada could really use, given some of his fellow compassionate conservatives whose idea of good policy is to give people refunds for registering their cars?

No, but he's a good politician, and good politicians know how to do unto others. So, forgive a suspicion. The Republicans in Nevada's congressional delegation are minor cogs on Capitol Hill. But Sen. Harry Reid's position as Democratic leader makes him one of Bush's highest-profile critics. Could the White House be sending a message?

In the 1950s, President Harry Truman despised Nevada's Sen. Pat McCarran, a fellow Democrat, and held up one of his appointments to toy with him. In the 1960s, despite his ties to Nevada Sens. Alan Bible and Howard Cannon, President Lyndon Johnson apparently mulled vetoing the Southern Nevada Water Project to punish Nevada's Rep. Walter Baring, whom he hated.

Does it matter to Bush that Sen. John Ensign, a fellow Republican facing re-election, co-sponsored the law he would gut? Maybe he figures if Ensign will endorse him after he lied about nuclear waste, $700 million will be no big deal.

Besides, we owe the government. In 1902, Rep. Francis Newlands pushed through a reclamation act. His goal was to reclaim federal land for irrigation projects, thereby helping the Western economy. Selling federal land, he reasoned, would pay for dams and canals. Actually, he was wrong. The Newlands Act didn't pay for itself. It cost the federal government money, just as critics from the East claimed it would.

But he also was right. It helped the West to grow. For example, dams and canals near Fallon turned that area into a major alfalfa producer, among other crops. Other dam and irrigation projects help build up the Sun Belt and attract population from the eastern Rust Belt. He also set the stage for future construction. The government kept building bigger dams and eventually stuck one in the middle of the Colorado River.

Perhaps Nevadans would be forgiven right now for suggesting that they know a new place for it to be stuck.