Tuesday, July 1, 2003 | 9:01 a.m.
On Sunday and Monday, as the clock was running out before the new fiscal year began today, Democratic Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins reached out to Assembly Republicans. Perkins hoped a compromise could end the budget-and-taxes impasse and avert a constitutional crisis. But Assembly Republicans refused to make meaningful concessions that would raise taxes in a fair way to balance the state's budget, a budget that 71 percent of Nevada's lawmakers already had approved. More than two-thirds of the Republican-controlled Senate passed a tax plan to balance the budget, but 15 of 19 Republicans in the Assembly formed an anti-tax bloc to prevent -- by one vote -- the passage of a balanced budget in the 42-member Assembly. So Gov. Kenny Guinn last night had to take the unprecedented step of seeking the Nevada Supreme Court's intervention. The governor hopes that the judicial branch can force the legislative branch -- or at least a minority of it -- to carry out its constitutional res! ponsibility to pass a balanced budget.
Unfortunately, too many Assembly Republicans are obsessed with laying the groundwork for the 2004 elections. To them the real job of being a representative, ensuring that our state provides quality public schools and offers a minimum level of social services, can wait. They would rather try to score partisan political points, even if it means using schoolchildren as pawns. They avoid the real world of responsibility inhabited by fellow Republicans, including fiscal conservatives such as Guinn and Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, who want more businesses to pay their fair share of taxes. It was Raggio who said Monday that while voters in 1996 had approved the referendum requiring a two-thirds majority vote on taxes, they didn't want "a minority to be able to say, 'It's our way or no way.' " But that, sad to say, is what we have now: a tyranny of the mino rity.
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