Columnist Jon Ralston: Surreal politics at Legislature as end nears

Wednesday, May 30, 2001 | 8:37 a.m.

Jon Ralston hosts the public affairs program "Face to Face" on Las Vegas ONE and also publishes the Ralston Report. His column for the Sun appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or through e-mail at ralston@ vegas.com

CARSON CITY -- Imagine a world where death is only temporary, where rules are meant to be broken (or at least suspended) and where almost nothing is as it seems.

It is also a world where Republicans are the party of tax and spend -- or at least of fee and spend -- and where the GOP goes out of its way to protect a Democratic congresswoman. It is a world where the minority has almost as much power as the majority. And it is a world where fortitude is a vice, where silence is golden (literally, as it is often rewarded come campaign time) and where the cover of darkness is preferred to the light of day.

Welcome to the netherworld that is the Nevada Legislature's endgame. Only a few days before sine die, and the usual shenanigans are afoot. Consider a couple of examples:

* This one is wired: No one could have possibly thought that the gaming industry, which has spent millions of dollars quietly preparing for cyberspace casinos, would just allow that open-up-the-Internet-only-for-us bill to simply fade away. So as the deadline for bills getting out of both houses passed Monday -- you know the final, final deadline that can't be changed -- the gamers were plotting their victory, which surely will be achieved.

First, they killed their own bill. The industry was worried about a series of amendments in the Senate, one to raise the gross gaming tax, one for state Sen. Mike Schneider to help his friends in the time-share business get slots, and another that would have opened up cyberspace beyond the barriers erected by the major gaming companies. Can't have votes on those, the gamers figured, especially the taxing one.

So watch what happens now: The plan is to sneak the measure into another gaming bill, even though it has nothing to do with the Internet and even though most people will hardly know what they are voting on when they rubber-stamp it in the waning hours. Ah, the legislative Cuisinart never grinds so well as it does in the final days, when lobbyists push the envelope of creativity and ethics.

* Educating the Gang of 63: After state Sen. Mark James scaled back his fee proposal from $130 million to just over a third of that amount, and then allowed it to be appropriated by Gov. Kenny Guinn, the Democrats in the Assembly now are charged with approving what the GOP Senate has done. So these same Democrats, who have not presented Idea One all session to fund education, now are making noises about entombing the Guinn-James-Bill Raggio (why not add the Senate majority leader to the New Friends of Education list)?

Yes, these folks have chutzpah. And, ironically, they are being assisted by the trial lawyers, who are upset about the James-penned provision that would limit the liability of corporate directors as a way to induce businesses to set up shop in Nevada and thus increase the revenue from boosted fees.

So now the New Friends of Education are daring the Old Friends of Education (that would be the Democrats) to try to make substantive changes to the measure, thus dooming it when it returns to the Senate for concurrence. The teachers are standing, as they have, on the sidelines, praying the Democrats will leave intact the paltry sums the New Friends have offered them, caring not a whit about whether the liability provisions are, as Democrats say, tort reform on the cheap, or as the Republicans say, an incentive to locate here.

Democrats in a box on education funding, Republicans taking credit for helping teachers. Yes, this is a netherworld, all right.