Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: Cleaning up the mess

Tuesday, July 1, 2003 | 9:08 a.m.

TELL IT TO THE judge.

On Monday there were still some 11th hour negotiations -- we should call them shenanigans -- that were taking place to save face by getting egg on every legislator in Carson City.

But the train wreck we have been hearing so much about from Jon Ralston's very sad but most entertaining e-mail Flash Reports actually happened late last night. The question remains: What happens next?

Hara-kiri is a thought but if none of our legislative geniuses had the courage to step up to the plate and do the job the people hired them to do through an entire legislative session and two not-so-special ones, then it is clear that the determination for that ancient ritual is non-existent. So hara-kiri is out.

The next best thing and perhaps the only avenue available is through the courts. Ain't that a kick? The executive branch, through the governor, and the legislative branch, through the Gang of 63 whiz kids and their toys, couldn't do their constitutionally mandated duty so the people have to turn to the courts for salvation.

No big deal. For good or bad, we have been living with the results of the U.S. Supreme Court's getting involved in a national presidential election when it figured the people couldn't handle their own affairs properly, so it should be a cakewalk to turn over a simple budgetary problem to the Nevada Supreme Court when the people's representatives have taken a walk on their legal obligations.

The question is: What will the court do?

Courts deal with facts and they deal with the law. They figure out what is truth and they apply what they believe is the law to that truth to come up with a solution that is fair, just and equitable.

In this case the Supreme Court will be able to take judicial notice of the fact that the Legislature didn't do its job and that, as a result, the state of Nevada has a multibillion dollar budget to fund and no money with which to do it. It will also realize that there is a constitutional mandate that the budget be balanced, which means that the money will have to be raised to pay for what the legislators already agreed to spend.

So how to do it appropriately becomes the problem.

Here comes the great irony as I see it. In 2001 both the Legislature and the governor passed the buck to eight citizens -- the Governor's Task Force on Tax Policy -- in the hopes that a group of well-meaning, well-intentioned and intelligent people, unencumbered by politics and big donor dollars, would come up with a tax plan that would fairly reflect the economy of this state and would fairly impose the burden of such a plan against the broadest number of citizens and taxpayers.

By the way, I was on that Task Force and I can tell you we did our jobs. Too well, it seems, because we hit everybody just a little bit and, while most people have accepted the need to pay their fair share, some of the larger, greedier companies in and out of this state have been squealing ever since.

Those screaming the loudest include the largest retailers, car dealers, most of the banks, the Review-Journal and a few other companies -- each of them poorly represented by the Las Vegas Star Chamber of Commerce -- who are comfortable letting the rest of the people pay more than their fair share.

Well, when the court looks for facts, which include the legislative intent -- such as it has been -- they will have to turn to the creation of both the legislative and executive branches to determine what to do. That would be the governor's task force and the 1,100 page document we submitted according to our legal mandate. Since that may be the closest thing the court has to the real intent of the Legislature, it is likely that the Supreme Court will adopt our recommendations and force the Legislature to pass them verbatim and the governor to sign it into law.

Once that is done, the people will have to determine just how they want to clean up the mess they have made by electing the wrong people to the Legislature and by handcuffing the right ones by imposing the so-called Jim Gibbons Tax Restraint Initiative upon them. That's an argument, though, for another day.

You might ask: What if the Legislature doesn't do what the court orders?

The answer is simple. Hold them all in contempt which would coincide, I would think, with the way the vast majority of Nevadans think of them already.