July 22, 2003
Well, if the word coming out of Carson City as of Monday night is true, the great Legislative Impasse of 2003 is about to come to an end. There will "only" be $811 million in new taxes.
Break out the sparking cider and go crazy!
The last several weeks have proven the Nevada Legislature to be one of the weirdest, most dysfunctional political bodies this side of the House of Commons, except that the House of Commons actually gets things done, and they're funny on purpose. (If you've never seen British Prime Minister Tony Blair take questions from the House of Commons on C-SPAN, then you're missing the best comedy that TV has to offer.)
Let's review what the Legislature has managed to do recently:
-- For the second straight session, the Legislature has blatantly violated the Nevada Constitution. In the 2001 regular session, the Legislature was mandated to finish reapportionment, seeing as it was the first regular session after the census. Of course, they ran out of time, and the governor had to call a special session to finish reapportionment, making the whole damn thing technically unconstitutional. Then, this year, they passed a budget and then failed to pass a way to fund that budget before the fiscal year started, forcing the governor to sue them because they again violated the Constitution. Lovely.
-- Lost in all the chaos was the fact that a blue-ribbon panel of Nevadans met for a good chunk of last year to come up with recommendations on how to fix Nevada's notoriously out-of-balance tax system. The Governor's Task Force on Tax Policy was a rarity in politics: A truly nonpartisan group of people who assembled and kept open minds to carry out their assigned task, which was to make recommendations to the governor and the Legislature on what taxes to raise/add/decrease/etc. They, by all accounts, did a great job. Now, have you heard a damn thing about the task force's recommendations in the last month or two? NO. All we've heard is the wonderment of knowledge that is Lynn Hettrick, R-Gardnerville. Friggin' spiffy.
-- The Legislature did its job so poorly that it ended up dragging the other two branches of government into the pigsty right along with it. Poor Kenny Guinn, Nevada's chief executive, was boned by his own party, and found far more Democratic allies recently than GOP friends recently. And then the Nevada Supreme Court got involved when the governor was forced to sue the Legislature, forcing them to decide which chunk of the Nevada Constitution they liked better -- the part about funding schools, or the part about a two-thirds majority in the Legislature to pass tax increases? They chose the former, forcing the inevitable appeal to a befuddled U.S. Appeals Court, which was eventually denied. And now, a bunch of pissy right-wingers, led by the Republican Liberty Caucus, is vowing to recall the governor and the six (out of seven) Supreme Court justices who chose school funding over the two-thirds majority rule. While this effort has about as much of a chance as Carrot Top has becoming governor in 2006, it’s still disconcerting.
-- Then there's the fact that these fiscally conservative GOP Assembly 15 -- who, with all due respect, were the least compromising of all the various groups, and who are therefore most responsible for the delay -- have been costing the state $50,000 per day thanks to the two special sessions. That tally is well into the seven-figures range now. Morons.
But -- barring a last-minute collapse, which would not be surprising -- the idiocy may be over. And if it is indeed over, the Legislature deserves some credit -- a tiny, minute bit -- for finding a compromise that could pass with the two-thirds majority, as the Constitution demands.
Then, we can enter a quiet time in which the Legislature is unlikely to do anything stupid for a while.
That is, until they're scheduled to meet again in 2005.
Jimmy Boegle is a fifth-generation Nevadan in exile in Arizona who feels bad for the good legislators, who are getting a bad rap because of a few bad apples. Jimmy's column appears here Tuesdays, and a column archive may be viewed at www.jimmyboegle.com.