Jon Ralston notes, sadly, special session

By Jon Ralston

Sunday, June 29, 2008 | 2:01 a.m.

It didn’t take long. Not much unexpected happened. Nothing especially noteworthy occurred.

And yet the 12-hour special session Friday provided a microcosm of the state of political play in Nevada and a glimpse of a very depressing future. It also presages a 2009 session that could make the raw ugliness of the 2003 Legislature, which required two overtimes to enact a billion-dollar tax increase, look like a night out at the Reno Rodeo.

Nearly every legislative session is about the money — how the Gang of 63 will spend it and who will receive it — and usually features intermittently dramatic confrontations about matters large and small. But the 24th special session was about how not to spend money, with a preordained solution to a simple math problem — cutting $275 million from the budget.

There essentially were no arguments between Republicans and Democrats, who had negotiated a solution beforehand that wasn’t especially creative. The only sticking point — and it didn’t stick for long — was a clumsy Senate Democratic caucus attempt to save money for textbooks.

There was no need for this special session, which featured a reshuffling of money that could have been accomplished by Gov. Jim Gibbons and the Interim Finance Committee. This was a session born out of politics, driven by politics and cut short by politics. Never has a legislative session been about so little and yet done so much symbolic damage.

The session, despite its brevity, perfectly encapsulated the state’s political leadership:

An irrelevant governor who won’t even sign the budget fix because lawmakers encased it in a concurrent resolution that does not go to his desk, a man who took a dizzying number of positions on suspending state worker raises, who managed to alienate the one man who had tried to help him (Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio) and a faux leader who is marching toward the 2009 session like a Pied Piper taking the state off a fiscal cliff.

An ambitious speaker, Barbara Buckley, who sounded more gubernatorial than Gibbons in her Thursday night rebuttal to the governor and who seemed genuinely torn between having to make short-term, painful cuts and wanting to look to the long term for a solution to the state’s harebrained tax system.

A cautious Senate majority leader, facing a challenge from the right in a primary election, who wanted to get in and get out, show he could still lead and who, as a prisoner and defender of tradition, could not contain his disgust with the governor and anger at the late-game partisanship by the Democrats in his house.

And a rookie Senate minority leader, Steven Horsford, whose ham-handed ambush late in the day to try to put education under the purview of a cost-cutting commission, among other maneuvers, showed he is not quite ready for prime time as prime time approaches next February.

What happened Friday was an overture to an extended piece — 120 days or more — that begins playing in February. The scenario is stark: State leaders have gutted the budget, taking $1.2 billion from a $7 billion biennial package. And with Gibbons now locked into promising what he calls a no-growth budget, with the economy still awful and with hundreds of millions in mandated spending for education and social services, that means massive cuts in 2009.

Unless.

Unless Buckley really does what she promised — find a long-term-solution. Unless Horsford can mature — and maybe pick up another vote in the election — and be a reliable ally for the speaker. Unless business and gaming leaders put the state’s health ahead of their bottom lines. And unless Gibbons either sees the light and illuminates a real vision or is pushed out of the way by a political and private sector elite who will never let this happen again.