Newspaper column: These statewide candidates worthy of your vote

The statewide elective offices on the November ballot are of doubly vital concern to rural Nevadans this year, primarily because the urban counties are likely to stack the Legislature with tax-and-spend Democrats beholding to public employee unions and eager to throw more of our money into the bureaucratic maw.

Topping the list is the race for governor, pitting Republican Adam Laxalt against Democrat Steve Sisolak. During his term as attorney general Laxalt has proven himself to be a staunch defender of Nevada’s rights in the face of federal encroachment and displayed conservative bona fides. The voters need to hand the veto pen to Laxalt so he can protect us from a likely left-leaning collective of lawmakers. Sisolak would be a rubber stamp.

Republican lieutenant governor candidate Michael Roberson, who backed Gov. Brian Sandoval’s record-breaking tax hikes, might not be our first choice for the office or even second or third, but letting Democrat Kate Marshall preside over the state Senate in 2019 and cast tie-breaking votes would not bode well either. Roberson as the Senate minority leader has tried to rein in lobbyist and special interest influence in Carson City and advocated for economic development and school choice. Roberson is the better choice.

During her first term as secretary of state, Republican Barbara Cegavske has worked tirelessly to assure the integrity of Nevada’s elections and record keeping. She has worked to increase voter registration and turnout.

Cegavske says that during a second term she will work with county officials to increase cyber security of county registration databases, improve audits and physical security of voting equipment. She is the obvious choice, because her 30-year-old Democratic opponent Nelson Araujo lacks the experience and credentials.

In the race for state treasurer, Republican Bob Beers — a certified public accountant, former legislator and Las Vegas city councilman — is the clear choice over Democrat Zach Conine. The treasurer is the state’s chief financial officer and is responsible for investing state funds, maintaining the state budget, managing college savings plans, keeping records of unclaimed property and maintaining records of the state’s accounts.

Beers has experience managing public money because of his five sessions on the Legislature’s Finance Committee and five years on the city council, plus many years in private business. His integrity is unquestioned.

In his first term as the state’s controller, Republican Ron Knecht has introduced cost-savings and increased transparency in the handling of the state’s funds. The controller is essentially the state’s chief fiscal officer, responsible for the state’s accounting system, settling claims against the state and collecting debts. The office protects the citizens’ money by ensuring that it is properly accounted for and spent in the most efficient and cost effective manner at all times.

Knecht boasts that he has cut the controller’s office spending by more than 13 percent, returning more than $1 million to the treasury and increased debt collection by $1.3 million a year. As a legislator he was a staunch opponent of higher taxes in general and still favors a repeal of the complicated and burdensome commerce tax. Knecht also published the state’s first annual report on the fiscal management of state funds, put the state checkbook online for direct inspection by citizens and has worked to improve data security.

Knecht has the credentials and experience that his Democratic opponent Catherine Byrne lacks.

The major party contenders to be the state’s next attorney general are Republican Wes Duncan and Democrat Aaron Ford. The attorney general is the state’s top lawyer, representing citizens of Nevada in civil and criminal matters. The attorney general also serves as legal counsel to state officials, providing opinions on how to interpret the law.

Duncan has been Attorney General Laxalt’s assistant attorney general and has served as an assemblyman and a county prosecutor and Air Force judge advocate. Ford is an attorney and former state senator who has advocated for higher taxes, though the IRS has filed liens against him for unpaid taxes. Duncan has the experience and conservative philosophy fitting for our next attorney general.

There are two contested Nevada Supreme Court seats on the ballot. The nonpartisan contests pit Nevada Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Tao against Clark County District Judge Elissa Cadish and Supreme Court Judge Lidia Stiglich, appointed to the court two years ago, against Clark County District Judge Mathew Harter.

Both Tao and Harter have vowed to be conservative arbiters of the law and have been rated well by lawyers appearing before them and are worthy of support. Stiglich also dissented from a recent decision strengthening access to public records.

A version of this column appeared this week in many of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel and the Lincoln County Record — and the Elko Daily Free Press.

Editorial: Primary candidates we recommend

Early voting begins Saturday for Nevada’s party primaries, so we take this opportunity to offer our two cents worth.

Since none of the candidates for major statewide offices on the Democratic slate would get our backing come November, so we will address only the GOP primary.

For governor the choice is easy and obvious, Republican Attorney General Adam Laxalt has proven himself a thorough conservative, fighting for states’ rights while attorney general with principled litigation. He has promised to work to repeal the burdensome Commerce Tax passed by lawmakers in 2015.

Laxalt says he will work to reduce state spending to keep the tax burden bearable.

For U.S. Senate, Republican incumbent Dean Heller has a proven track record. He helped write the tax reform bill and has worked to undo the ObamaCare debacle. He has for years pressed for legislation that would deny members of Congress pay checks until they pass a budget.

Heller has also pushed for a Balanced Budget Amendment that would ultimately force Washington to live within its means instead of running up billions in deficits and trillions in debt.

As a senior member of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee he has worked to eliminate the VA disability claims backlog.

In the 2nd Congressional District — which includes northern Lyon county and all of Douglas, Carson City, Storey, Washoe, Humboldt, Pershing, Churchill, Lander, Eureka and Elko counties — Republican incumbent Mark Amodei deserves to be returned to Washington, where he has faithfully stood up for Nevadans by working to keep taxes low and regulations less burdensome.

Amodei has fought the efforts of past administrations to limit economic and recreational access to public lands.

In the 4th Congressional District — which includes part of northern Clark County, southern part of Lyon County and all of White Pine, Nye, Mineral, Esmeralda, and Lincoln counties — former Republican Rep. Cresent Hardy deserves another chance to represent the residents of Southern Nevada.

After serving one term in Congress, the Mesquite native was narrowly defeated by North Las Vegas Democrat Ruben Kihuen, who is not running for re-election after facing sexual harassment allegations.

Hardy will continue to fight for lower taxes and the creation of an economic environment that is conducive to the growth of job-creating businesses. He also promises to work toward balancing the federal budget for a change.

Though state Senate Majority Leader Michael Roberson did vote with the Republican majority to raise taxes, his experience and otherwise conservative bona fides make him the choice for lieutenant governor, a job that includes presiding over the state Senate. He has been endorsed by Laxalt.

Roberson has worked to provide Nevadans with school choice, consolidated government agencies and regulations and worked to save money by reforming  collective bargaining and public employee pensions.

Republican Wes Duncan, formerly Laxalt’s first assistant attorney general, deserves a promotion to attorney general, the state’s lawyer. Duncan helped Laxalt in his many lawsuits defending the rights of Nevada against federal encroachment. He left the Assembly to join Laxalt’s office and left the office upon filing for election.

Duncan promised to make Nevada a safer place to raise a family, including working toward better handling of mental health issues. He once proposed repealing the state’s renewable portfolio standard that has driven up power bills. He has been endorsed by a number of police chiefs and district attorneys.

Barbara Cegavske deserves to be re-elected secretary of state, a job she has handled well — maintaining election integrity, streamlining business licensing and maintaining official records of the state. She has worked to improve the existing electronic voting system. Republican Cegavske has also worked to assure Nevada’s military members who are stationed overseas may vote.

Nevada’s next state treasurer should be Republican Bob Beers, a CPA  who has served in five sessions of the Nevada Legislature and is a former Las Vegas City Councilman. He was one of the “Fearless Fifteen” who stopped Gov. Kenny Guinn from placing a gross receipts tax.

The treasurer’s job is to hold the states purse strings. Beers knows how to do that.

A version of this editorial appeared this week in some of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel,  Sparks Tribune and the Lincoln County Record.

Senate bill would emasculate political parties in Nevada

A bill has been introduced in Carson City that would jettison the current Democrat and Republican primaries in favor of an open primary system, in which anyone could sign up as a candidate and anyone could vote for anyone of any party or no party. The top two vote getters would advance to the General Election, even if both are affiliated with the same party or no party.

The bill would make the two major political parties irrelevant in actually selecting their own candidates and reduce them to the role of merely endorsing candidates.

Senate Bill 103 was introduced by Republican state Sen. James Settelmeyer of Minden.

Settelmeyer told the media that some of his constituents were upset that they could not vote in the primary because they were nonpartisan.

As of December, 39 percent of active Nevada voters were Democrats, 33 percent Republicans and 28 percent nonpartisan or members of some other minor party.

The whole concept of partisan party politics is to facilitate persons of like-minded political persuasions to organize and select candidates that promise to advance a given philosophy of governance — though in recent years the efficacy of this proposition has been suspect in Nevada with self-styled conservatives voting for history making tax hikes.

Now, I’ve never been in favor of forcing all taxpayers, including nonpartisans and members of other parties, to pay for the primaries the state puts on for the Democrat and Republican parties. Let those parties pay for their primaries or caucuses or smoke-filled backrooms.

But the open primary system makes it more difficult to weigh the various candidates based on past allegiances and opens the opportunity for Fifth Column candidates to claim to be what they are not. Faux Democrats or Republicans could flood the ballot and split the vote for a party’s real selection.

In Louisiana in the 1970s Democratic Gov. Edwin Edwards hatched a foolproof plan to end the Republican Party in that state. He pushed through an open primary under the assumption Republicans would not make it to the General Election, due to heavy Democratic majorities in the urban areas of the state, meaning two Democrats would face off in November.

But the best laid plans oft gang awry. In the next election there were seven Democrats on the gubernatorial ballot, one nonpartisan and one Republican. When the smoke cleared, Republican Dave Treen was elected governor, leading the way for the state to transition to Republican domination.

At least the open primary is better than letting anyone and everyone decide on Election Day in which primary they will vote.

Think of it this way. Political parties are like brands. Without brands who knows what adulterated product you are getting.

Politics is messy. Open primaries just make it messier.

At the turn of the previous century Baltimore’s notoriously curmudgeonly newspaper columnist, H.L. Mencken, pined for more realism in politics:

“I can imagine a political campaign purged of all the current false assumptions and false pretenses — a campaign in which, on election day, the voters went to the polls clearly informed that the choice between them was not between an angel and a devil, a good man and a bad man, but between two frank go-getters, the one perhaps excelling at beautiful and nonsensical words and the other at silent and prehensile deeds — the one a chautauqua orator and the other the porch-climber. There would be, in that choice, something free, candid and exhilarating. The Buncome would be adjourned. The voter would make his selection in the full knowledge of all the facts, as he makes his selection between two heads of cabbage, or two evening papers, or two brands of chewing tobacco. Today he chooses his rulers as he buys bootleg whiskey, never knowing precisely what he is getting, only certain that it is not what it pretends to be. The Scotch may turn out to be wood alcohol or it may turn out to be gasoline; in either case it is not Scotch. How much better if it were plainly labeled, for wood alcohol and gasoline both have their uses — higher uses, indeed that Scotch. The danger is that the swindled and poisoned consumer, despairing of ever avoiding them when he doesn’t want them, and actually enforce his own prohibition. The danger is that the hopeless voters, forever victimized by his false assumption about politicians, may in the end gather such ferocious indignation that he will abolish them teetotally and at one insane sweep, and so cause government by the people, for the people and with the people to perish from this earth.”

In 2014, only 59 percent of those eligible to vote in Nevada even bothered to register. Of those who registered, only 46 percent went to the polls in November, meaning 73 percent of those eligible to vote did not choose any brand of bootleg whiskey.

 

Orwell was right: Control the words, control the thoughts

When you control the language, you are closer to controlling the argument.

The press lexicon all across the state of Nevada has settled on calling Republicans who voted in the 2015 legislative session for Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval’s $1.5 billion tax hike — at least it now $1.5 billion instead of $1.1 billion as it was wrongly called for so long — “moderate” and “traditional” Republicans, while those who are challenging them in the GOP primary in June are “conservative” Republicans, which I thought was a redundancy.

What is moderate or traditional about passing the largest tax increase in state history, while doing absolutely nothing to rein in spending, not even repealing the prevailing wage law that jacks up the price of every public works project in the state by as much as 40 percent, as well as no public pension or collective bargaining reforms?

George Orwell wrote in 1946:

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous …

Sadly, the mislabeling is not the only problem, as one of the “moderate” Republicans notes in today’s newspaper account of this issue, “But when you go knock on doors, few souls even know that there was a tax vote or that taxes had been increased at any level.”

Both sides of the GOP split are predicting primary victories, but the Democrats are claiming they will regain a majority of the Assembly in November, making it all for naught.

Republican Assemblyman Brent Jones, said to be leading a group of primary challenges to Republicans who supported tax hikes. (R-J file photo)

Newspaper column: Holding the line on taxation will take only 15 Assembly members

At this point, perhaps the best we can hope for is gridlock.

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

In the November election, nearly 80 percent of the state’s penurious voters defeated a proposal to increase business taxes to fund education and for the first time in 85 years elected Republican majorities to both the Assembly and state Senate. This will complement the Republican governor, as well as all other statewide constitutional offices. The Assembly has 25 Republicans and 17 Democrats. The Senate has 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats.

It shouldn’t take a reading of the tea leaves to figure out what the voters want, but nonetheless broad hints are being bandied about that Nevadans simply aren’t taxed enough already and surely we can afford to fork over another billion dollars or so.

Nevada Legislative building (R-J photo)

Even Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval has flatly refused to rule out the possibility of floating a tax hike.

State agencies have submitted budgets that total $7.7 billion in spending in the next biennium, while the Economic Forum has projected the current taxes will raise only $6.3 billion.

“Today’s Economic Forum report reminds us yet again that our revenue structure is not built to meet the demands of our changing economy nor our continued increase in statewide population,” Sandoval said in a statement when the projection was made.

Since the election that Republican majority has turned on itself in what can best be described as a circular firing squad.

First, the Republican caucus’ newly elected speaker, Ira Hansen of Sparks, was hoisted on his own petard — a series of two-decade old newspaper columns that did not mince words while mincing Democrats. But his criticism of how the Democrats treated blacks was misconstrued as being offensive to blacks, so Hansen stepped down as speaker.

Up stepped John Hambrick of Las Vegas as speaker. When old reports about Republican majority leader and Taxation Committee chair Michele Fiore’s troubles with the IRS resurfaced, Hambrick removed her from both jobs, only to reinstate her the next day, only to remove her again a few days later after Fiore explained her situation on the radio.

Fiore, a fiscal conservative who has pledged to not raise taxes, blamed her tax woes on a former employee and said she is making payments to the IRS. But she also claimed she was targeted by a Republican fund-raiser and two paid political consultants, one of whom has worked for Hambrick.

At this point, I’m not sure the Republican caucus can put together a foursome for a game of Bridge, much less a coherent, fiscally conservative collation that can cut spending and hold the line on taxation.

And there are still rumors that a few renegade Republicans could join with the 17 Democrats when the Legislature opens and elect someone other than Hambrick as speaker of the Assembly.

The saving grace may lie in former Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons’ constitutional amendment that requires a two-thirds vote of both the Assembly and Senate to increase taxes.

That means 15 members of the Assembly can block any tax hike proposal.

The Assembly Republicans appear to be almost evenly split between fiscal conservatives and moderates.

Gridlock may be our best hope.

This column is available online at The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News and Elko Daily Free Press.