Wednesday, May 25, 2005 | 11 a.m.
Now that the "nuclear option" is dead in the U.S. Senate, Nevada can breathe easier in its fight to stop nuclear waste from coming to Yucca Mountain.
An 11th-hour agreement has averted a constitutional crisis over changing the Senate's filibuster rules during the debate over President Bush's judicial nominees.
Had the Senate weakened the minority party's right to filibuster (prolong debate) in this instance, there's no telling what impact it would have had on other debates in Congress, including the Yucca Mountain debate down the line.
In a statement released by e-mail Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada described the historic compromise as a "significant victory for our country, for democracy and for all Americans."
Reid easily could have added "for all Nevadans," too, because we clearly are among the winners here.
"This is a major victory for us," said former Sen. Richard Bryan. "The filibuster has been our salvation in the fight against Yucca Mountain."
Bryan said that he and Reid were able to use the threat of a filibuster on several occasions over the years to hold the pro-Yucca Mountain forces at bay.
"Because the threat of a filibuster was present, they knew they had to get the required votes to stop it, and they would abandon their efforts," Bryan said.
Preserving the time-honored rules of the Senate, it seems, has kept us in the Yucca Mountain fight on Capitol Hill.
"In a small state like Nevada, where you don't have many permanent friends on Capitol Hill, the rules are everything," one congressional insider says.
There are no guarantees that power-hungry ideologues won't look to undermine the filibuster -- and the checks and balances it brings to Congress -- in the future.
But that shouldn't stop us from feeling like winners today.
--
Lt Gov. Lorraine Hunt should know by now where she stands with the Bush administration -- about as far away as possible.
Two months have passed and the underdog Republican candidate for governor has yet to receive a response to the letter she sent President Bush urging him to re-evaluate his decision to recommend Yucca Mountain.
That's too bad because Hunt is the only top Nevada Republican with the backbone these days to take the fight against the nuclear waste dump directly to the Republican president.
According to her aides, Hunt hasn't even gotten an acknowledgement of receipt of her March 23 letter.
Nevada Rep. Shelley Berkley, a Democrat, got such an acknowledgment on May 2 in response to her April 19 correspondence asking Bush to halt the Yucca Mountain licensing process amid allegations that scientific evidence was rigged.
A White House aide told Berkley in the canned response that her letter was being shared with the president's advisors "for their careful review."
I'll bet they're carefully reviewing the quickest way to file it in the trash can.
But Hunt, who polls show is trailing Rep. Jim Gibbons (a Bush apologist) in the Republican primary for governor, can't even get a formal brush-off from White House.
Her aides, however, say the ever-optimistic lieutenant governor is still hoping for some kind of response.
And I'm still waiting for my Megabucks check to arrive in the mail.
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