Sunday, March 25, 2007 | 7:15 a.m.
WASHINGTON - Last week was not one for bipartisanship among Nevada's congressional delegation.
Fresh off winning passage of his bill on Monday to help Lake Mead fight the invasive quagga mussel, Republican Rep. Jon Porter set his sights on a bigger prize: Stopping Yucca Mountain.
Within days Porter made a last-minute decision to go after President Bush's proposed $494.5 million Yucca Mountain budget. By Wednesday the congressman was sitting through a House Budget Committee meeting that ran well past midnight for the chance to offer a surprise amendment that would have cut Bush's Yucca budget to zero.
Not surprisingly, the amendment didn't pass. But rather than celebrate the stealth move that garnered 12 votes, all from Republicans, Porter railed against committee Democrats for keeping Yucca Mountain "very much alive."
That argument runs counter to opinions voiced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Nevadans that Yucca is dead, even if the Bush administration is trying to put the project on sound footing before leaving office.
Porter has branched out on his own on Yucca before, when his committee investigated allegedly falsified e-mails and unsuccessfully subpoenaed the White House to release documents last year. But last week's go-it-alone venture potentially left the delegation exposed to partisanship, said David Cherry, a spokesman for Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley.
"I don't think it came across as something important to Nevadans," Cherry said. "It came across as a Republican member offering an amendment to change a Democratic bill."
He added, "It's better to work as a delegation, to work together to try to kill it, rather than to have someone say , 'Hey, look at me .'"
Porter says he had no choice but to keep the plan hush-hush lest it be killed before he could bring it to a committee vote.
Spokesman Matt Leffingwell says winning 12 votes against Yucca was a "huge success" and shows "members are recognizing this is a fiscally irresponsible project."
"This is a reckless waste of taxpayer funds. People are starting to get it. The message is starting to resonate."
Over in the Senate, Nevadans weren't getting along much better.
Reid told Nevada reporters in a conference call about the benefits of the Democrats' 2008 budget: Cut middle-class taxes by $180 billion, fund children's health insurance and produce a budget surplus by 2012. A short time later Republican Sen. John Ensign had reporters on the line to badmouth the spending plan as nothing more than gimmicks that will raise taxes by letting existing tax cuts expire.
Perhaps the only Nevadan not slugging it out with another member of the delegation last week was Republican Rep. Dean Heller - he decided to pick a fight with his neighbors instead.
Heller took to the House floor to denounce the District of Columbia voting rights bill, which would give residents of the district a full-fledged member of Congress.
Because district residents probably would elect a Democrat, the bill also would shift a House seat to a presumably Republican district in Utah.
But Heller said it would not be fair to Nevada, where population growth is much greater than Utah's. Nevada is expected to get another seat after the 2010 Census.
The bill was sent back to committee.
This week, keep an eye out for news about a new top prosecutor for Nevada from Ensign's office: Justice Department spokesman Tory Mazzola said Friday they had started meetings with candidates to succeed ousted U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden.
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