Lawmakers face much bigger tests than the deadline they just met

By Jon Ralston

Sunday, April 12, 2009 | 2 a.m.

As the Gang of 63 passed major legislation out of committee and entombed many other bills, it struck me as highly ironic that this putative deadline for final action came on Good Friday.

“I tell people that if you don’t believe in resurrection, all you need to do is come to Carson City,” one veteran lobbyist wryly observed.

Indeed, Friday in the capital was emblematic of this session, bereft of any sense of real urgency and draped in an illusion of progress. “They have to vote on all the bills today or they can’t be voted on any longer,” Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley explained to a rapt group of Reno first graders watching the floor action from the balcony.

I understand Buckley’s desire not to tell the complete truth to the impressionable youngsters who believed they were watching government in action, performing important, conclusive tasks. But those who have been here for some time know that the deadlines in the 120-day session — Friday’s was for measures to be out of committee in the house where they originated — are a sham, that bills nailed to the cross can still make it to heavenly passage in another form (amendments on the floor or the other house).

This was not the beginning of the end. It was, after slightly more than half the session is complete, a meaningless guidepost and an ominous sign that the real work will be horrifically compressed into a few weeks at the end. And although it is not listed among the key legislative measures to be processed, the most important document, yet to be produced, is The Bill of Particulars.

Although politically volatile issues such as medical malpractice legislation survived a first test — removing those damage caps passed an Assembly committee Friday — that and other issues surely will be caught up in the end-of-session horse-trading over a tax plan that has potential abomination written all over it. The so-called medmal bill surely will be on The Bill of Particulars, the list of measures to live or die that Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio presents as the session winds down to Majority Leader Steven Horsford.

The Bill of Particulars must be agreed to by Horsford (and presumably Buckley) or Raggio will not be willing to be part of any tax plan, which he probably could kill because two GOP votes (at least) will be needed to pass it. And if I know Sir Bill of Reno, his list will be like the process — unforgiving and yet malleable, a protean document that will change from day to day if not hour to hour as sine die approaches.

And as Raggio assembles his Bill of Particulars, tempus fugit. Consider: They have taken 68 days to get to this point Friday, with hand-wringing over bills on neighborhood gaming and the attorney general’s power over mergers and acquisitions. And they will have, by the time they receive the final numbers May 1 from the professional forecasters, about three weeks to come up with cuts and a tax plan to fill a $3 billion budget hole — in addition to addressing all these thorny issues that supposedly were resolved Friday.

Isn’t that special?

Process matters, folks. And the process here inexorably leads to poor decisions as rules are suspended in the compressed 120-day time frame. That process’ constraints will never be more destructive as lawmakers finally deal with the elephant in the building controlled by donkeys: The budget hole.

If lawmakers deserve credit for solving — or at least seeming to solve — major policy issues before the deadline so there was no crunch Friday, similar kudos may not be forthcoming for resolving the session’s most vexing problem. You could convene a council of economic geniuses and it would take them longer than three weeks to figure the best way to tax and cut your way out of a $3 billion hole. The Gang of 63 will never be confused with such a convocation, so the result is likely to resemble the illogical pastiche of taxes passed in 2003 combined with a series of cuts that would never have been necessary if past Legislatures had broadened the tax base.

Friday may have been good — committee chairmen generally proved efficient in passing bills before the deadline and without many partisan imbroglios. But the resurrection that seems poised to recur in its biennial pattern involves a Rush to Close that will make a mockery of public policy and the notion of a deliberative process, while crucifying thoughtful public policy and, thus, the public.

Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program “Face to Face With Jon Ralston” on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the daily e-mail newsletter “RalstonFlash.com.” His column for the Las Vegas Sun appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.