Editorial: Obstinate legislators don’t care

Thursday, July 17, 2003 | 9:13 a.m.

The obstructionist tactics by Assembly Republicans have taken their toll. Their efforts led to a state budget impasse, which in turn has imperiled our public schools' ability to hire enough qualified teachers for the upcoming school year. Their continued refusal to raise taxes to balance the budget led to last week's unprecedented intervention by the Nevada Supreme Court, which found that a constitutional right to a public education overrode a competing constitutional provision that required a two-thirds vote to raise taxes. Therefore, the Supreme Court ruled, only a simply majority was required to pass taxes. The situation became even more surreal when 28 Republican lawmakers, business groups and conservative organizations -- individuals and groups that usually decry federal intervention -- filed a lawsuit in federal court to overturn the state Supreme Co urt's decision and restore the two-thirds requirement to raise taxes. A ruling by Nevada's federal judges on that lawsuit w! as expected today.

These Assembly Republicans actually have become more emboldened as the turmoil they've caused has escalated. Democrats have come to believe that compromise isn't in the vocabulary of enough Republicans, so Democrats could give up on passing a broad-based business tax. We can understand that many of the part-time lawmakers -- not just Democrats but a good number of Republicans, too -- have tired of the juvenile antics by the Assembly Republican holdouts and that they want to get home to their businesses and families. Yet no one should let this pass without noting that a tyrannical minority is on the verge of victory. It's possible we'll have a Band-Aid tax package that only raises taxes on existing sources of revenues and won't offer any of the fairness and long-term stability provided a broad-based tax, such as a gross receipts tax. Instead of doing what's right -- raising enough taxes to properly fund schools that we can be proud of -- these Assembly Republicans only care abo! ut pandering to their right-wing base. How pathetic.