Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

J. Patrick Coolican:

Days of backroom compromise are gone for those in Carson City

Open budget debate may shed light on what we need

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J. Patrick Coolican

Things got a little ugly on the floor of the Nevada Assembly this week as legislators debated Gov. Brian Sandoval’s proposed deep cuts to education. On a party-line vote, the Assembly voted down the governor’s recommended budget.

The debate began at 5 Tuesday afternoon and went until midnight, and by the end, the discussion had devolved into name-calling, with each side questioning the other’s motives.

As several observers noted, there was an unfortunate irony: On the same day as the partisan brawling, former state Sen. Bill Raggio, he of legislative comity, probity and compromise, had been elected into the Nevada Senate Hall of Fame.

And so you could hear the hand-wringing from here: Partisanship! Anger! Name-calling! Train wreck!

To which I say: Who cares?

There’s an instinct to fetishize bipartisanship, which shows an ignorance about how politics and policy actually work now.

John Harris, editor of Politico and one-time chronicler of the Clinton White House, once summed up Beltway journalism nicely: “I sometimes think that if Washington political reporters ran the government, their ideal would be to have a blue-ribbon commission go into seclusion at Andrews Air Force Base for a week and solve all problems ... They would not come back until they had come up with sober, centrist solutions ...”

For decades, this is actually how things went in Nevada. Except, it wasn’t sober, centrist solutions. It was a tiny group of legislators and lobbyists that came out of private legislative conference rooms (and sometimes barrooms) with a unique, only-in-Nevada hybrid: slow but steady progress on social and health spending and education, and a legal protection racket for the state’s most powerful industries. As the saying went, we didn’t have two parties, we had one — the Gaming Party. Although it was also the Utility Party and the Insurance Party and the Developer Party.

And you can sense the pining for the good old days, which seemed to end last legislative session. If only we could bring back Raggio. And maybe we could take up a collection and persuade former Democratic Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins to quit taking lobbying checks from every entity — some legal, or, in the case of PokerStars, maybe not legal — to come back and hammer out a deal. Actually, who cares? In the grand Nevada tradition, Perkins can be a lobbyist and come up with the deal!

But times have changed. We have 2.7 million people; we’re not South Dakota anymore, even if our tax structure resembles that fine state’s.

And although the old system had its benefits, including an admirable civility, it’s finished, and we should remind ourselves what it all wrought. We’ve just experienced a period of unchecked growth, like a sports car going down the highway too fast and picking up passengers along the way, until finally we hit the ditch. We’re the country’s economic basket case, with sky-high unemployment, foreclosures and bankruptcies, plus the social problems we’ve always dealt with — crime, dropouts, divorce, suicide, etc.

So we’re in crisis, and the two parties — comprising a few real, honest-to-goodness ideologues — have divergent views on the solution.

Republicans, led by Sandoval, aren’t budging on new taxes, and after months the negotiations have been going nowhere. So Democrats brought the matter to the floor of each house of the Legislature.

Good. It’s long past time this state had an open debate about the proper role of government. Will it be an angry debate? Yes. Will it extend the legislative session? Possibly. The republic has endured far worse.

Now, let me boil that debate down: Even if the teachers union makes contract concessions, the Clark County School District could be forced to lay off 1,000 teachers, or 5.5 percent of the teacher corps, according to Superintendent Dwight Jones, who has developed a reputation for candor thus far during his brief tenure. Higher education would be hit even harder — 17 percent cut from its funding if the governor’s budget is adopted.

To prevent that calamity, we need money. Tax money that will likely come out of businesses that hire and fire based on hardheaded economics.

There’s your two warring worldviews; this time, there are no wise men or women to work it out behind closed doors, and that’s not such a bad thing.

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