When deciding which leaders will move Nevada forward, competence matters

“All for our Country.” That is the official motto of the state of Nevada.

It’s our declaration to our fellow Nevadans and our nation that we are willing to do whatever it takes to preserve the union.

This year, Nevada voters will have a chance to stand behind the commitment in our motto in ways never imagined in the almost 160-year history of this state. We are now being asked to prove whether we value competency and fairness over incompetence and political extremism bent on tearing the state apart.

Reasonable minds can disagree about how to best govern the state of Nevada and the nation as a whole. But we must all agree that a well-functioning democratic society requires competent elected officials. We must all agree that the safety, stability and progress of our nation requires people who understand the responsibilities of governance, and have some combination of knowledge, skills and experience to tackle the challenges faced by our society. Those who govern also need a sense of restraint and must know that you can’t use vengeance as a governing principle.

In other words, we must all agree that the long-term success of the great American experiment cannot rest on a personality contest, hatred of your fellow Americans or a desire to throw a Molotov cocktail into the system and blow it up with no plans for what comes next.

Competence matters. And yet, across the country, candidates offered up by the Republican Party do not meet any reasonable standard of competence.

At the Constitutional Convention, George Mason, the originator of many of the ideas now enshrined in the Bill of Rights, described competence as the ability to accept that many of the ideas he once held to be true were “too crude and erroneous to merit an influence on public measures.”

In Federalist 62, James Madison described competency among U.S. senators as “requiring greater extent of information and stability of character.”

Compare these standards, written by the Founding Fathers themselves, with the current platform of the Republican Party.

Can ignoring scientific data on vaccines, gun violence and climate change be considered anything other than “erroneous?”

Can conspiracy theorists really be said to have “stability of character?”

And can election deniers who have failed, on dozens of occasions, to present any credible evidence of large-scale election fraud, be said to have a “greater extent of information?”

The answer to all of these questions is no.

But to be fair, policy platforms don’t run for office, people do. So let’s look at the candidates instead.

As we explain numerous times in this edition of the Sun, the Republican candidates for office include:

• A candidate for treasurer (Michele Fiore) who quite literally doesn’t know what the responsibilities of her office would be should she be elected.

• A candidate for secretary of state (Jim Marchant) whose stated policy platform is to willfully and knowingly refuse to fulfill the responsibilities of his office.

• A candidate for lieutenant governor (Stavros Anthony) whose entire policy platform is 40 words long and contains absolutely no specifics.

• A candidate for governor (Joe Lombardo) whose policy positions have changed so radically on so many different occasions that we’re not sure he actually knows what his policy positions are anymore.

And multiple candidates whose policies on public education are simply to eliminate the Department of Education and the public education system as whole.

As a group, this collection of GOP bunglers is driven not by any philosophy of how to effectively and fairly govern. Not by a set of articulate and well-conceived policies. Instead, they offer to divide us into camps in Nevada and they promise that, if in power, their camp will torment their opponents. This is a formula for a failed state.

These are not competent candidates for public office. They are agitators, and agitation is not the same as governance.

Economies suffer when government is not run well. People suffer when government is not run well. And sometimes, people die when government is not run well.

Meanwhile, in this election cycle, the Democrats have offered a slate of accomplished, thoughtful and fair candidates to hold office. And each of them has sworn to represent and treat fairly all Nevadans, no matter their ideology.

So it is up to us, the sane and measured and reasonable among us, to step up and reject incompetence.

Declaring a candidate to be incompetent or unfit for public office is not something we take lightly. We’ve advocated for decades for greater participation in the electoral process and a greater diversity of voices in the halls of our government. That’s why we’ve repeatedly endorsed Republican candidates whom we disagree with on policy but whom we believe to be competent and effective leaders. But those are not the candidates being presented to us today by the GOP.

Instead, we have been given a slate of candidates with no specific policies, no substance to their arguments, and no plans for actually governing.

So Nevada, it’s time to decide if we’re “All for our Country” or just all for ourselves. The choices are clear, even for registered Republicans: Democrats who you might disagree with or even dislike, but who have detailed, concrete plans for moving our state and country forward, or Republicans, who just want to blow it all up and walk away.