Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: Democracy interrupted

Saturday, June 7, 2003 | 3:55 a.m.

YOU ARE PROUD of what?

The State of Nevada has made itself the laughingstock of the country by failing to solve its financial crisis. The people of this state are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they agreed to pay for the privilege of letting the Legislature weasel its way in and out of the job it signed on to do. Business groups are fighting with other business groups over which one will pay the other one's taxes. Republican governors across the country are bewildered at the antics of a Republican state Senate telling the state's very popular Republican governor to, basically, go somewhere a lot hotter than Las Vegas. And parents, at the end of this school year, are already wondering whether or not they should prepare their children for school as they know it or how it might be three months later without any money.

No one should be proud of the mess Nevada has put itself in. No one.

But the man who would be governor or senator or a next-term congressman is proud. And pleased.

As this is being written, Nevada's legislators are in special session trying to do in three days what they couldn't get done in 120 days. With any luck, by the time you read this, they will have found a way to fund the budgets they have passed with a tax plan that places the burden fairly on all segments of Nevada's burgeoning economic machine. Hey, we can all hope, can't we?

Regardless of the outcome, though, there is no reason to take pride in the ugliness, pettiness, selfishness and greediness that got us here.

So why is Congressman Jim Gibbons, a former member of the Legislature, taking credit for the mess? He is responsible for pushing the Gibbons Tax Restraint Initiative back in 1994. (The initiative took effect after voters passed it a second time in 1996.) To be completely fair, Gibbons is not solely responsible for what has turned out to be a ridiculous piece of anti-democratic lawmaking. For that, he needed the willing complicity of the voters of this state to pass his bill during the good times of the 1990s when money was more plentiful and anti-government passion was running very hot.

By the way, when the tax restraint bills were being pushed on naive and unsuspecting voters, so too were term limits and other anti-democratic ideas, so we weren't the only people who fell for the snake oil. But fall we did. So now we are paying the price that cooler heads predicted we would pay.

Even though an overwhelming majority of Nevada voters want the governor's budget passed and the governor's tax plan adopted, a small minority of Nevadans have been able to stop the majority's will from being done. That is not democracy. It may be protective of wealthy people's short-term business interests and the status quo, but it is not democracy.

Democracy did, however, give us this very bad tax restraint law, so we must live with our mistake until we fix it. Now, in the light of day, we can see the harm that we have done to our future and our state by falling for the Gibbon's Plan, and we don't have to be proud of what we did.

That brings me back to Jim Gibbons. He is proud.

Is that because he feels he is so tapped into the mood of the base voters in his party and his congressional district that he can take pride in dashing the dreams of the vast majority of other Nevadans who want their kids to play in parks, have up-to-date school books and be taught by teachers who are at the top of the game rather than the bottom? Is that because he thinks by playing to the greedier side of people's natures that he will stand tall with seniors and retirees who need more services from the state as they age and will get far less because of the inability of the Legislature to set a course for the future by majority rule?

I hope that isn't what he thinks, because he will learn differently if he tries to run for statewide office. Republican children go to public schools, too. Republican seniors need medical attention, too. And Republican-owned small businesses want a chance for the brass wheel, just like all the others.

The tax debate in Nevada was not about Republicans and Democrats. We all gain or lose when the Legislature fails to do the right thing. It was about a majority deciding what the needs of the people of this state are and what must be met, and a minority of the same people deciding to stop democracy from happening.

That's the way it worked in Carson City this year.

As far as I know, only Congressman Jim Gibbons and a handful of greedy Nevadans are proud.