Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

jon ralston:

Governor’s givebacks show political mastery

I hate what Gov. Brian Sandoval is doing.

But I love how he is doing it.

Sandoval’s intransigence on taxes, be they sunrise of new ones or sunsets of old, is infuriating because of the potential consequences to crucial state services. His refusal to listen, while he claims to be listening, and his preternatural affability, as he refuses to budge, only makes any criticism seem futile.

But after another beautifully choreographed maneuver Tuesday, a near-perfect synergy of politics and policy, the administration has served notice to some apparently overmatched legislative opponents that he is playing in a different league. After adding back nearly

$50 million in social service programs Tuesday, Sandoval will announce next week that an estimated $100 million-plus of additional funding from renewed economic projections will pour into education.

And then, five weeks from the end of the regular session, the governor will essentially smile, look across the courtyard and say, “I have been beneficent. I have salvaged social service programs and diminished the education cuts. For you, my dear Democratic friends, it’s either take that or show the world all you care about is raising taxes.”

It is beautifully horrific, like the Peckinpah ballet of violence at the end of “The Wild Bunch.” You stand back and admire the skill and craftsmanship, trying to forget the carnage left in its wake.

Team Sandoval gathered reporters Tuesday afternoon to take us through a panoply of programs being restored because of found money, mostly in Medicaid, that came from reduced caseloads and federal changes. The inestimable Mike Willden, the Health and Human Services boss, checked off the programs being restored, showing clear satisfaction that what he called “core services” were being resurrected.

But as he went through the list, I smiled knowingly as I saw that key rural programs were in the mix — programs certain GOP lawmakers who might be pressured to raise taxes to preserve them needed to have returned to the budget. If you believe this is a coincidence, you also think Donald Trump is a serious man.

I wanted to applaud, but it seemed inappropriate.

I asked Willden how the decision was made, and he talked about surveying his subordinates, creating an “add back list” and then, he said wryly, sitting down “in the inner chamber” with the governor to finalize the restorations. Ah, the secret sanctum where politics cannot intrude …

I am sure there will be Democrats sniping that “this is a good start but it’s not enough” or some such retorts. But what the administration did Tuesday was not insignificant, either as policy or politics.

After their thoroughly failed Committees of the Whole, in which they hoped to pressure Republicans to see the light but found them blinded by their gubernatorial allegiance, the Democrats must be disheartened. I don’t see what their next move might be.

You can’t argue with rubber stamps, and that is what the GOP legislators, massaged by the governor and feeling emboldened in their conservative cocoons, are displaying.

As much as I despair at the Democratic mismanagement of the budget/tax issue, many of the GOP legislators are worthy of contempt for not doing any independent thinking and simply bleating, “I support the governor.”

I get the politics, folks. But we could have elected automatons to do that.

But the GOP sheep do not diminish my admiration for the shepherd, even as he leads the flock toward a cliff. Sandoval has known all along the economy would improve and that the draconian cuts of winter would give way to the sunny optimism of spring.

And when the Economic Forum, as expected, projects more money for the biennium — a technical committee has forecast $72 million more and that is just the smaller revenue streams — he will announce with great fanfare that nearly all of that cash is going into education.

Message: He cares.

What are the Democrats going to say that will change the trajectory of the debate at this point? Are they going to threaten to hold up the budget, as awful as it may be?

Sandoval only needs one Democrat in the Senate to switch and he can get his budget though. The Assembly is a different, perhaps impossible story — he would need six Democrats to stand with the Republican robots.

But the optics of this are looking worse and worse for the Democrats. They will need to find a way to dramatically change the debate to force Republicans to lift the tax sunsets — almost $700 million — and that is about the best they can do. A ballot question with taxes seems likely. The Democrats may be right on the policy but they have been outmaneuvered at every turn.

I love what they are trying to do. But I hate how they are doing it.

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