The Republican majority in the state Senate is a myth, Mr. Roberson

State Senate Majority Leader Michael Roberson should just end the charade right now, cross the aisle and caucus with the Democrats. He might have run for office under the Republican banner but now he talks like a Democrat and votes like a Democrat.

Monday’s forum on legislative issues put on by the Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce and the Las Vegas Review-Journal ended any doubts.

Michael Roberson (R-J photo)

Roberson did not make so much as a hat tip to conservative values. He said, according to the R-J account, that the state must raise our taxes to fund public education and pay for “essential services” because the bureaucrats claim the budget is running a $175 million deficit.

“Many of us, Republicans and Democrats, have come to the realization that we are not funding education adequately in this state,” Roberson was quoted as saying. “We cannot continue to be near the bottom of most rankings.”

After the forum, Roberson told the R-J reporter that the Modified Business Tax on business payrolls is here to stay and might be “tweaked,” whatever that means. The MBT tax rate is scheduled to be cut in half on June 30.

Even worse, in a sidebar that doesn’t appear to be anywhere online, Roberson said he had no interest in engaging in a “perceived war on public employees.”

“We are not going to gut collective bargaining,” he was quoted as saying. “We are not going to gut PERS. What we need to look at are the excesses that we identify in the system.”

Collective bargaining and PERS are the excesses in the system and are driving up costs and taxes, but Roberson has no interest in addressing them? Is this the same Roberson who in 2011 introduced a bill that would have ended binding arbitration in collective bargaining, because it was “bankrupting the state”? That bill went nowhere.

Give this guy the bum’s rush.

The Republicans may hold an 11-10 majority in the state Senate, but that is on paper only.

The 2015 session of the Nevada Legislature is only a couple of weeks away — 120 days during which our lives, liberties and property, especially our property, will be in jeopardy, as Mark Twain once opined.