Jon Ralston on why nothing ever seems to get done in a timely or acceptable fashion at the end of the Legislature

Sunday, June 3, 2007 | 7:13 a.m.

CARSON CITY - Here in the capital, there is this terror device known as The Table.

Every session, business and gaming lobbyists reluctantly gather around The Table. But by sine die, the chairs are empty as some have fled, others have slipped away and still others have been tortured into submission.

This method of inflicting pain by the extraction of money is more frighteningly medieval than The Rack and yet crushingly ineffective as those conducting the inquisition - i.e., lawmakers - never finish the job. That's because legislators who bring all manner of grotesque methods to The Table, with the horror of 2003 and its terrifying, illogical mix of taxes still the nadir, are scared to invite the one group that could help relegate The Table to history: those who can vote for them.

And so it happens again as Session '07 winds down as the Gang of 63 has pulled out The Table to try to solve the transportation infrastructure problems, just as they used it four years ago to supposedly fix the tax system's structural deficit and just as they have nearly every session to find money without hurting themselves politically.

It is painful to watch, and the results are nearly always disappointing, with the gamers and business types either pretending to have succumbed to the torture or successfully having escaped these tax Torquemadas.

No one put this biennial debacle better than state Sen. Mike Schneider, who said during a Friday hearing on a dramatically scaled-back transportation package that will have short-term impact and fails to address long-term problems.

"We do Band-Aids on everything," he lamented. "It appears there's no real thought put into this (except) 'let's hurry up and go.' "

But the prospect of a special session and the desire to get home as politically unscathed as possible, as Schneider pointed out, are the imperatives at this time in the Legislature. This infuriating scenario, galvanized by cravenness, is all too familiar.

The need is always there in this growing state and the tortured and torturers - although sometimes indistinguishable in this animal farm - are always the same.

The gamers never want to bear the entire burden and have their golden goose arguments at the ready. Other businesses, as they did in '03, have their arsenal of arguments, too - tax them and companies will run for the border (to California, presumably?).

Lawmakers, under pressure from the potent gaming lobby, offer up lame rhetoric about how they will force everyone to come to The Table. No one will escape the pain, they insist. They are the people's inquisitors and will do their painful jobs.

And then by session's end, The Table is bare, the chairs all but empty. And lawmakers, rushing to finish and get home, try to put the best face on some tortured m lange of taxes that often have little nexus to paying for roads. For instance, where are the truckers and taxis in this current mix? And where are the users of the roads - the locals? For saying that, I am sure to be tried as a heretic in this torture chamber.

The only difference this session is that Gov. Jim Gibbons has affected the gathering at The Table with his no-new-taxes mantra, which has reduced the number of participants. As Sen. Bob Coffin put it to the governor at Saturday's continuation of Friday's hearing, "Everyone has been allowed to flee behind you."

So we were left with the gamers doing their best Brer Rabbit and lawmakers only able to put together some jerryrigged scheme with a car rental tax diversion (that the governor's tortured logic to say was not a tax) and a property tax diversion from local governments (that I bet they see as a tax).

State Sen. Maggie Carlton summed up some lawmakers' frustration when she told the governor: "This policy of letting people run away from the table and say they don't want to play anymore is going to defeat the purpose of good policy in this state."

Too true. And yet this is not just about Gibbons and his blunt no-taxing instrument. It is about a culture here of Democrats wanting to tax at all costs and Republicans desirous of cuts they cannot produce that has left us here.

And that is nowhere, which is where Legislatures will always arrive until they relegate The Table to history and adopt a simple policy of "no more torture" because, quite simply, it does not work.