Columnist Jon Ralston: The day the final screw turned

Friday, July 12, 2002 | 4:51 a.m.

A few minutes after 11 a.m. on Tuesday, The Day The Final Screw Turned, Sen. Harry Reid stood up on the floor of the U.S. Senate and explained that he and fellow Nevadan John Ensign believed that "it is important that members have the benefit of some debate prior to this most important vote" on Yucca Mountain.

As the majority whip spoke, only four other senators were in the chamber -- Ensign, and Yucca Mountain proponents Frank Murkowski, Larry Craig and Minority Leader Trent Lott. Other than them, only the empty chairs were listening.

Almost exactly seven hours later, when the fateful vote was taken, only a handful of the senators had taken the time to listen to any of the faux debate, which generally rehashed familiar issues. Important vote? Only to Reid, Ensign, a few dump advocates and the nuclear industry, which will use the 60-39 approval (actually 61 because an absent Jesse Helms by proxy was an affirmative vote) as a license to get new plants and remove a crushing financial liability from its ledgers (perhaps Arthur Andersen could help).

As senators consoled Harry Ensign in the Senate's well as the vote was being taken, it was obvious that they felt sorry for their colleagues -- no schadenfreude in this collegial chamber -- but that they also felt, as Murkowski would acknowledge in an interview later, that better that Western wasteland than their home states.

That was true in 1987, when the first screw turned, and it was true on July 9, 2002, a day that will live in infamy in Nevada. But this was no Pearl Harbor -- many have seen this coming for 15 or 20 years -- and the question is whether, despite all the John Paul Jones imitations by the Nevada political elite, the fight is at an end.

By the morning of the vote, Reid and Ensign knew only the chairs would be listening. But it almost didn't happen that way. What is little known is how dicey this became for the proponents in the days leading up to the vote, as Ensign was convinced he had both Utah senators and a few others may have been wavering. Helms couldn't be there, no one is ever sure if near-centagenarian Strom Thurmond of South Carolina will vote and another Republican, Ohio's George Voinovich, might have been absent for a family funeral.

Do the math -- the Republican dump adherents don't have Utah's Orrin Hatch and Robert Bennett, Thurmond, Helms and Voinovich and suddenly it's a ballgame. Reid and Majority Leader Tom Daschle turn their own screws to a few caucus members and this is the equivalent of gaming losing an important vote in Carson City.

But then the White House roped Hatch and Bennett back into the corral and it was over. Momentum dead. Ensign, in the end, was able to get zero new Republicans, and Reid and Daschle, seeing what had occurred with the Utahans, decided not to hammer any of the caucus members to cast potentially risky votes. End of story.

Moments before the vote, Reid put the entire dump fight, a parochial battle most of the Club of 100 couldn't care less about, into national perspective:

"Corporate interests are pushing this ... The only person who could have stopped this corporate abuse today, it appears, is the president of the Untied States. He misled the people of Nevada. That is the reason he is president of the United States, I am sorry to say. If he had told the truth about Yucca Mountain, he would not be president."

Only the chairs were listening -- most senators had not come to the floor for the vote yet -- but Reid was right. If Bush had not delivered that big lie during the campaign -- via fax, no less -- that he would let science not politics determine this, he might well have lost Nevada and thus the White House.

Reid did all he could. As for Ensign, he truly looked despondent afterward. How humiliating for him to garner no new Republicans. It's hard to say that he should have been expected to do so -- a freshman senator vs. a president of the same party is no contest. But Ensign set himself up for criticism by running two Senate campaigns saying Nevada needed a voice in the GOP caucus. His voice might have been heard if the same election that delivered Ensign to Washington had not given George W. Bush the presidency and thus sealed this vote.

So what now? Is this the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning? Does the kitchen sink of legal cases have any chance, can the dump be slowed and killed by the time the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is slated to license it? Will dump advocates, emboldened by this victory, try to accelerate the timetable by resurrecting Nevada as an interim storage site?

All those questions will be answered -- and probably sooner than later. But if I were a Nevada politician imploring voters to put away their white flags, I would worry that this issue has reached a critical mass in Nevada and that the nuclear political reaction could be for voters to explode in fury after two decades of rhetoric has produced a political dud.

What do the politicians say then? They might find as they talk to their constituents that only the chairs are listening.