Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

An error Ensign was doomed to repeat

Those who fail to correct bloviating senators when they mangle history are doomed to enable such grievous misdeeds.

Nevada’s own John Ensign has been a high-profile figure in the run-up to Thursday’s floor debate over the stimulus bill, appearing on various national cable programs to make the case that the president’s legislation is a “so-called stimulus bill.” Ensign, to his credit, has helped push provisions that would help homeowners with mortgage assistance — although it is with a sadistic eye that I view his rhetorical contortions to reconcile his historical free-market zeal with his proposal for an expensive, massive government intervention to mandate rewritten mortgages.

On Tuesday, Ensign gave a long floor speech, lecturing his colleagues on the realities of FDR’s New Deal policies and insisting there are lessons to be learned. Sayeth Ensign: “Winston Churchill once said, ‘Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’ ”

When I first read Ensign’s attempt, as so many politicians have done before him, to reach for Churchillian credibility, I was puzzled. Churchill has contributed many memorable quotes to the lexicon, but that, I told myself, was not one of them. Surely, that was George Santayana’s most famous utterance — or at least a paraphrase of him.

I thought little of it until Ensign repeated the attribution with relish as he made his case again on “Face to Face” on Wednesday. I thought about correcting him on the air but, as with many other things, certitude declines with age. So I did something quite out of character: I kept my mouth shut.

But, later, I checked. And double-checked. And triple-checked.

The quote Ensign brandished on the floor, on “Face to Face” and surely elsewhere to make his case about historical lessons evolved from what Santayana wrote on Page 284 of his “Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense” in 1905 — 35 years before Churchill became prime minister.

Santayana’s quote is, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It has been adapted over time to the common form Ensign used, and I suppose Churchill may have employed it (many blogospheric geniuses repeat Ensign’s error, or perhaps, are the source of it), although Churchill hardly needed to be derivative considering his gift for language.

So the quote is not Churchill’s, although it may be easier and have more resonance to attribute it to the best known and most-quoted European leader in history than to an obscure philosopher.

Ensign gave another speech Thursday on the Senate floor during the debate on the stimulus bill. He did not quote anyone.

So perhaps we will never, never, never again hear such attribution from the junior senator. Let’s hope this is the beginning of the end of such mistakes, not the end of the beginning.

• • •

Much as the two-week, conclusive analyses of the Obama administration don’t mean much, a first-week look at the Gang of 63 may not be predictive, either. But I was struck during my brief capital sojourn this week by the rave reviews Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford is receiving in his pre-session and initial performance.

“The kid is doing a great job,” one veteran Republican said of the youngest majority leader in history, who is only 35. But, the GOP insider added, “I don’t think he has any idea what’s in store for him.”

The observer suggested that Horsford would eventually be tested by a potentially aggressive agenda coming over from the Assembly and by special interests, especially public employees unions, which will have great expectations now that Democrats control the Legislature.

• • •

Horsford’s success may well be determined not by how well he holds his own obstreperous caucus but by whether he can maintain his collegial relationship with Minority Leader Bill Raggio. Raggio knows how much Horsford needs him and his caucus to pass any tax package at session’s end, but 120 days is a long time to hold together a relationship in that capital crucible.

Raggio can be prickly if he thinks tradition has been upset or partisanship gets too intense. The minority leader, who seems as healthy as at any time in years, has privately told folks that if Democrats push anything he abhors — collective bargaining for state employees, for example — he will not be so friendly. And Horsford knows that with Sir Bill of Reno, the alliance could go South at any time.

That relationship — how much Horsford gives and how much Raggio takes — will be the key to the session and critical to how many special sessions occur this summer.

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