Columnist Jeff German: GOP lacks courage to fight Yucca

Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2004 | 10:40 a.m.

Have they no shame? No fortitude to stand up to the president of the United States?

For weeks now, with Nevada considered a battleground state in the race for president, top Republican leaders here, from the governor on down, have had a rare opportunity to put political pressure on President Bush to halt the Yucca Mountain Project.

Polls show the race is a dead heat.

And Bush, in all likelihood, needs Nevada's five electoral votes if he wants to defeat Democratic challenger John Kerry, who has promised to kill the nuclear waste dump.

If Nevada Republicans had any political courage, they would do what they should have done weeks ago -- tell the president they won't support his re-election unless he does something about Yucca Mountain.

Courage, however, isn't part of the state GOP creed. Elected Republicans here have chosen to be good party soldiers and back Bush's re-election unconditionally. They have chosen to put the president's future over our own.

And they don't even care that they're letting us down -- or worse, our children.

On Thursday, the same day Kerry will be in Las Vegas, Republicans are holding a campaign rally for Bush at the Thomas & Mack Center. The man who wants to send the nation's deadliest nuclear waste our way will be on hand to pat his party loyalists on the back and tell them how rosy things are here. And nobody will come close to pressing the president on Yucca Mountain.

Even as the spin pours out of the president's mouth, his Energy Department in Washington will be moving forward with its license application for the multibillion-dollar project, making those loyalists look like fools -- again.

"This is the guy who stabbed Nevada in the back," says former Democratic Sen. Richard Bryan, a member of the state's Nuclear Waste Projects Commission. "He made commitments to us on Yucca Mountain and no sooner does he get elected than he turns on us."

If anyone is going to have leverage with Bush at this critical stage in the election, it's going to be the Republicans, the members of his own party, Bryan says.

The leverage, however, in true Yucca Mountain tradition, is being wasted.

"The Bush administration," Bryan says, "could be doing so much more for us, but it really has done everything it possibly can to accelerate the placement of high-level waste in Nevada."

This is why it's so troubling watching the Republicans demonstrate their blind allegiance to the president.

At a time when the fight against Yucca Mountain is starting to go our way in the courts, we continue to send mixed signals about our desire to stop the waste from coming here.

Republicans are putting on a public lovefest for a president who doesn't care about the well-being of this state.

You can almost see Karl Rove and company laughing back at Bush/Cheney headquarters.

They sure are spineless in Nevada, the president's handlers must be saying.