November 4, 2003
Well, the Republican lunatic fringe is at it again.
Last week, a dude by the name of George Harris, representing a fake group called Nevadans for Sound Government, "launched" two statewide ballot initiative signature drives. One would repeal the $836 million in taxes the Legislature just passed to fund things such as schools; the other would make it unconstitutional for public employees to hold office.
Now, I know George Harris, and in a lot of ways, I like George Harris. But lately, he's been acting more and more like he's getting orders from a mothership staffed by aliens with bad fashion sense from a planet where common sense is nonexistent. First, he led an anti-Kenny Guinn movement during the 2002 election, for no good reason. Then, he announced he was going to get the Nevada Supreme Court recalled because a vote during the marathon 2003 legislative session to override a constitutional requirement that all tax increases must be OK'd by two-thirds of each house.
Well, we know both of those efforts were wildly successful. Guinn was elected in a squeaker, winning by only 42 percentage points, getting more than 68 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court recall effort was so successful that a bodybuilder with an accent thicker than Tony Armstrong's flannel collection is now the Nevada Supreme Court chief justice-elect.
Oops. My bad. Wrong recall effort. Oh, that's right: Harris ABANDONED the recall effort when it realized it had about as much of a chance of succeeding as a poodle trying to mate with a Peterbilt.
Now, he's launching these twin efforts. Let's look at these efforts:
-- Without explaining how he'd keep schools open or roads fixed, Harris and his merry group of conspirators (including lawyers from the Independent American Party who stunningly have the last name "Hansen" say they'll repeal the new taxes just enacted. This makes so much sense that I think he should run for president, because his logic sounds a lot like George W. Bush's logic of: give tax breaks to the rich, spend billions on tenuous military actions and then fondle yourself while the country's deficit skyrockets.
-- Harris wants to keep state employees from holding state office. Stunningly, in some ways, this makes sense, as several recent high-profile cases show (most notably that of Assemblyman Wendell Williams, a city of :Las Vegas who put in timesheets for hours he didn't work while the Legislature was in session). It's worth discussing. But the way Harris talks, it makes it sound like legislators are sneaking around taking actions expressly to line their pockets. As the Las Vegas Review-Journal's Erin Neff wrote, "(Harris) said public employees were directly responsible for approving tax increases that benefited their programs or raised their own salaries. 'The nonsense has got to stop,' Harris said."
Yeah. This is the key problem facing politics today: legislators who work in low-level government jobs or teach at universities stacking the deck to raise their own salaries, in some cases by dollar amounts literally in the four digits!
Oh, and one more thing: Harris has decided that during these initiative efforts, he's NOT GOING TO FOLLOW THE LAW. This, from the Review-Journal's Steve Sebelius: "Harris says the group will not disclose its campaign contributions ($43,000 has been raised so far, he says) because he maintains the laws requiring disclosure are unconstitutional. 'We are not going to allow any retaliation against any of our donors,' Harris says, mentioning the case of a Carson City beer distributor who lost his contracts with several Lake Tahoe casinos earlier this year after he was prepared to speak out against the gambling industry-favored gross receipts tax."
Great! Talk about nonsense!
Whatever. If I may be serious for a moment … I am not sure what the motivation for Harris and his friends is these days, but it's clearly not the state, we the people or anything else that makes sense. The only thing I can figure out is that perhaps they're motivated by getting attention and feeling important by being major, throbbing pains in the ass.
And in those respects -- and ONLY those respects -- they're succeeding wildly.
Jimmy Boegle is a fifth-generation Nevadan in exile in Arizona who thinks George Harris needs some Ritalin. Jimmy's column appears here Tuesdays, and a column archive may be viewed at www.jimmyboegle.com.