Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: Assembly kooky time

Friday, May 4, 2001 | 9:38 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is the Las Vegas Sun executive editor.

MANY TIMES, as a student of government, I have thought seriously about Nevada having a unicameral legislature like Nebraska. The one-house legislative body in Nebraska appears to work very efficiently. Then this year along comes a Nevada bill in the Assembly that passes with only three negative votes and is dropped in the lap of the Senate. Wisely, the upper house kills it on the spot, and Nevada is saved further embarrassment. That ended any belief in a single-house legislature.

This was Assembly Bill 391 promoted by the Nevada Committee for Full Statehood, which is a collection of people who want to interpret Supreme Court decisions and the U.S. Constitution to suit their own philosophy. They show up every legislative session and waste taxpayer money and the time of legislators trying to lay claim to, and/or power over, federal land within the state's boundaries. It's not a matter of retaking the land because under law it has never belonged to Nevada since achieving statehood.

Assemblyman Bob Price, D-North Las Vegas, the kind of guy who you would want for a neighbor, always finds time to appear before a committee and support the group. Of course, you have to understand that Bob is the legislator who gave birth to the infamous Bullfrog County fiasco several years ago and he hasn't changed much.

I asked an assemblyman how AB391 was passed out with such an overwhelming majority. "We just wanted to get rid of it," was the answer given. It's evident that only three legislators had the good sense to save the Senate's time and kill it in the house. Assemblywomen Chris Giunchigliani, D-Las Vegas, Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, and Sheila Leslie, D-Reno, were the only no votes. If a person only read the testimony given and letters written by the Committee for Full Statehood, he or she could easily conclude that 38 members of the Assembly had lost contact with reality or had been in Carson City too long.

The proposed bill was full of constitutional holes and even went so far as giving district attorneys and county commissions powers retained by the state attorney general and federal agencies. Both the Nevada attorney general and the Legislative Counsel Bureau pointed out these legal problems to the legislators.

Senior Deputy Attorney General C. Wayne Howle wrote a letter listing the constitutional problems in the bill and finished by writing: "Lastly, this office objects to language in Sec. 8 which authorizes district attorneys to represent the state's interests in civil actions. The section provides that the attorney general may initiate or defend an action to 'seek appropriate judicial relief to protect the interests of the state or the people of the state in the public lands.' It then allows a district attorney to 'initiate or defend such an action' if the attorney general does not do so.

"This office does not object if counties wish to litigate federal ownership of public lands. However, if they do so, then their attorneys must speak for the counties, not the state. The state's attorney is an elected constitutional officer, whose exclusive authority to litigate for the state is constitutionally grounded."

Legislative Counsel Brenda J. Erdoes listed many of the same problems and continued writing: "Based on these authorities, it is the opinion of this office that the amendments set forth in A.B. 391 would likely not withstand a constitutional challenge because those amendments propose to amend the provisions of NRS 321.596 to 321.599, inclusive, which have been declared unconstitutional, and because the amendments do not propose to ameliorate any of the declared constitutional infirmities relating to those sections of NRS but instead expand the provisions of those sections in certain instances."

Despite such warnings only three assemblywomen had the common sense and courage to stop all of the nonsense and kill the bill. You may ask how did it even get out of committee? Well, Democrats John Lee, Tom Collins, Harry Mortenson and Republican David Brown, all from Clark County, helped bring it to the floor with a favorable vote.

Oh well, just another legislative session that proves a two-house system is better than a one-house legislature. Maybe the unicameral system works in Nebraska because they have fewer kooky groups like the Nevada Committee for Full Statehood.