Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

EDITORIAL:

If only more Republican leaders were like our governor

During his recent trip to Washington, D.C., Gov. Brian Sandoval showed why the Republican Party should encourage him to come back for an extended stay.

Like six years in the Senate. Or maybe even four years in the White House.

Sandoval went to the nation’s capital in an awkward position, as a moderate and results-oriented governor meeting with Cabinet members of a hard-line extremist presidential administration. On two of the main issues that prompted his visit — supporting last November’s successful ballot question legalizing recreational marijuana and opposing the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste dump — he was completely out of step with the president.

But in sticking to his guns and characteristically placing the interests of Nevadans above political ideology, Sandoval showed his fellow GOP members in D.C. how a Republican can and should lead.

Here’s hoping Republican leaders in Washington learned a little from him.

He’s a reasonable, articulate, inclusive and dignified politician with a broad support base and a track record that includes successes across the political spectrum, from job-creation initiatives that excite Republicans to a massive tax increase for public education that was hailed by Democrats.

In many ways, Sandoval is a throwback to an era before the GOP went down a hyperpartisan, take-no-prisoners rat hole that started with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly and later veered into the more Steve Bannon/Breitbart lunatic fringe.

Unlike many Republicans, Sandoval doesn’t trade in provoking fear, spouting vitriol on social issues and especially vilifying “the other” — immigrants, Democrats, Muslims, etc.

Instead, he takes independent and measured stances on third-rail issues like abortion (he’s pro-choice but opposes partial-birth and late-term abortions), same-sex marriage (he dropped the state’s legal fight against it) and immigration (he’s rejected the idea of using the Nevada National Guard to round up undocumented immigrants and said, “I’ve always believed in gates versus fences.”)

But as he proved during his meetings in Washington, he’s not afraid to take a stance when it comes to fighting for Nevada.

President Donald Trump had recommended funding to resurrect the nuclear waste dump; Sandoval stressed to Energy Secretary Rick Perry that he would fight the project with every available means. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had vowed to bring back the War on Drugs and had infamously said that “good people don’t smoke marijuana”; Sandoval stuck up for voters who approved last November’s ballot measure to legalize recreational use of marijuana even though he didn’t support the measure.

That’s responsible leadership, and sadly it’s all too rare among Republicans.

As far too many of them have shown, it’s easy to be a party robot. Vote no on anything resembling a compromise, crank up the rhetoric machine to 11 on abortion, immigration, gun control and other issues, wrap yourself in the flag and convince voters that they’re under attack on every conceivable front — drug cartels, terrorists, the government, Hollywood, people who say “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas,” and the list goes on and on.

But there was a time when the GOP didn’t play to the lowest common denominator. It was more dignified, more patriotic, more results-driven.

Sandoval reflects that past and shows the way for Republicans to get out of the hate-filled, xenophobic swamp they’ve created for themselves.

We don’t agree with Sandoval on everything. His support of school vouchers is a blotch on his record, for instance, given the damage they would inflict on the state’s public schools by drawing funding away from them.

But Sandoval’s pluses far outweigh his minuses. He should be the model for Republicans nationwide.

His focus on policy, his old-school approach and his determination to represent the interests of the state make him the best GOP governor in the nation, and one we should all appreciate.

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