Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Jim, Dawn Gibbons have tax conflict

CARSON CITY -- Every lengthy marriage has its share of disagreements, but rarely do they enter the public eye the way Dawn and Jim Gibbons' 17-year bond has this week.

Dawn is a constituent of U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons -- the father of the state's required two-third majority vote on taxes, the initiative designed to limit approval of taxes.

Jim is a constituent of Dawn's, and she is one of just four Assembly Republicans committed to $869 million in new taxes.

"I haven't talked to him about it," Dawn Gibbons said.

The congressman said: "I'm not sure my wife is pro-tax."

When Jim Gibbons spoke to the Nevada Legislature during the regular session, he urged lawmakers to reign in spending instead of hiking taxes. As the father of the two-thirds initiative that was approved by voters twice and implemented in 1997, he takes credit for helping craft sound tax policy.

"The initiative stops bad tax policies from being enacted," the congressman said this week in a telephone interview from his Washington office. "The hodgepodge and bad policy happens when you have lobbyists dictating what's in a bill.

"The initiative makes it that good tax policy is crafted through a deliberative process."

Dawn Gibbons said her support for taxes does not fly in the face of her husband's initiative.

"The two-thirds majority is good," she said. "We are making the laws, not the good-old-boy lobbyists who run the state."

But Gibbons said she and her fiscally conservative husband don't see eye-to-eye on the state's need for new revenue.

"He's not here to hear all the testimony," the assemblywoman said. "I don't get into his business and he doesn't get into mine. He is my constituent after all."

Dawn Gibbons, 49, first took her husband's Assembly seat in 1991 when he was called to service in the first Gulf War. She has since won election to the seat in 1998, 2000 and 2002, serving a total of four regular sessions, and now her third special session.

Jim Gibbons, 58, was first elected to Congress in 1996 and has served as a key ally to President Bush on homeland security and military issues.

Dawn Gibbons donates congressional trinkets for charity auctions before legislative dinners and hands souvenir wooden White House Easter eggs to the children of parents who visit her in the legislative building.

She's a Georgia native who said that her upbringing couldn't be more different from that of her husband, a Sparks native, military veteran and law school grad.

"I grew up in a very poor family," Dawn Gibbons said. "And just the fact that I'm a woman, too, makes me see things differently."

The assemblywoman, for example, had to care for the couple's youngest son, Jimmy, during his recent bout with pneumonia. And, she notes, when her husband -- a member of the House Intelligence Committee -- is off in Africa on a fact-finding mission, she pays the bills and takes care of the house.

Then there's the matter of the congressman's political aspirations.

The wife would like her husband back in Nevada, possibly running for governor in 2006. The husband is considering running against Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., next year.

Whenever Rep. Gibbons does something that makes it appear as though he's establishing his run for Senate, Assemblywoman Gibbons says reporters just don't know her husband.

But she does admit: "We're just different people."

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