Las Vegas Sun

March 18, 2024

Colulmnist Jon Ralston: No clean exit for Augustine

In that play, three people are stuck in a room from which there is No Exit (the title's translation), consigned to afflict each other for eternity. On that January day, Augustine began to feel the walls close around her as she heard her Miranda rights read to her by representatives of the attorney general's office.

And now, having dodged criminal charges by admitting she willfully violated state ethics laws in allowing employees to do campaign work on state time, Augustine is scheduled to be stuck in a couple of rooms in the Legislative Building next month. She may think exit strategies exist; but for her, there is no exit.

People can talk about potential deals being negotiated by various brokers, but it's all nonsense. This is binary: Either she resigns or she will be impeached. She is in an inescapable box, just as the characters were in Sartre's play.

Nor is there any way out for the Gang of 63. Lawmakers want to return for yet another special session about as much as they want to talk about taxes in their campaigns. Augustine's advocates -- she has lawyers and a hired PR gun -- are whispering that lawmakers and others should worry that she can expose other elected officials for improper conduct. But other politicians may have campaigned while they should have been doing their elected duties; few treat their employees like slaves and create an atmosphere of fear.

If Augustine presents a pathetic "everybody does it defense," it will be ruled out of order. One of her attorneys, Dominic Gentile, may be as good as they get before a jury of Augustine's impressionable peers. But in this kangaroo court, where none of these putative peers will risk their political credibility to save her hide, he will be performing to a deaf audience.

The evidence against Augustine is devastating, as laid out in the attorney general's investigation that began more than a year ago. The controller lamely is arguing that she never coerced the workers to do the campaign tasks, just that she should have known they were doing the campaign work. They volunteered to do the work, she insists, as if they gathered around the water cooler every day and decided, "Let's go do some of Kathy's campaign work today."

The evidence laid out through lengthy interviews with her band of supposed volunteers suggests otherwise, painting a picture of an office where, as her deputy put it, the "wrath of Kath" could surface at any time and these employees clearly thought they had no choice:

Augustine all but contradicts her already unbelievable story of mass staff volunteerism in her response to the ethics panel: "The perception that Controller Augustine was forcing employees to work on her campaign on state time is belied by the fact that two employees she asked to assist on the campaign refused ... without repercussion." But why was she asking them in the first place, especially since it is against not just the written policies of her office but state ethics laws?

So either her entire office conspired to discredit her or she is a witch with a capital B. Witches may not be burned at the stake anymore. But I wonder what another playwright who had a concept of punishment fitting the crime would have concocted for a woman who has exploited racism, anti-Semitism and jingoism to prop up her political career, who thought nothing of smearing political opponents but now tries to play the victim? The first constitutional officer in history to be impeached, revealed as the tyrannical, petty, vicious human being she is during a protracted trial for all to see? Dante would have approved of that inferno for Augustine.

No one -- the governor or the Gang of 63 -- actually wants to experience that political conflagration because if anyone would pursue a scorched-earth exit strategy, trying to immolate everyone if she must ensure a modern version of stake-burning, it is Augustine.

The most famous line from "Huis Clos" comes when one character declares, "Hell is other people." For Kathy Augustine, who has no exit, her Hell is 63 other people. For the Gang of 63, who have no escape from their duty, Hell is Kathy Augustine. And for the rest of us, trapped in a psychodrama with a woman in denial and a Legislature in session, Hell is Carson City in November.

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