Sunday, December 28, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

THOMAS MITCHELL: 'It means just what I choose it to mean'

From the first broadsheet, to the copy of the Review-Journal you are holding now, one of the chief roles of the newspaper has been to distill volumes of information into digestible bits, to make sense from a jumble of facts, to decipher and explain for busy readers on the run.

Newspaper reporters attend the meetings, pore over the reams of documents, interview the experts so you won't have to. We translate jargon and obfuscated legalese into plain language, using common sense.

In modern-day Nevada, plain language and common sense are for naught.

First, there was that bizarre ruling this past summer by the state Supreme Court, basically suspending the constitutional amendment requiring tax hikes to be passed by a two-thirds majority of the Legislature. The court "reasoned" that the only way to get around a supposed impasse and give public education a huge hike in funding was to give greater weight to an old constitutional requirement to fund a single school in each county, and thereby ignore the more recent Gibbons Tax Restraint Initiative approved by 70 percent of the voters. Precedent would usually give greater weight to the more recent enactment.

Then the court compounded the felony in a follow-up ruling, saying essentially the public was just not smart enough to know what it was doing when it approved the Gibbons initiative -- twice -- because the government-sanctioned ballot arguments were not sufficiently frightening to shoo the voters away from this inconvenience for those at the public trough.

Now comes a legal opinion from Legislative Counsel Brenda Erdoes that further confounds common sense, though it seems to accurately parse the language of the law.

We'd thought that if a petition to repeal most of those aforementioned taxes makes it on the ballot and gets approved by the voters, the vote would tie the hands of lawmakers and prevent them ever imposing or raising those specific taxes without first getting authorization from the voters who had overruled them.

Not so, Erdoes opines.

You see, the Nevada Constitution says: "If a majority of the voters voting upon the proposal submitted at such election votes approval of such statute or resolution or any part thereof, such statute or resolution or any part thereof shall stand as the law of the state and shall not be amended, annulled, repealed, set aside, suspended or in any way made inoperative except by the direct vote of the people. If a majority of such voters votes disapproval of such statute or resolution or any part thereof, such statute or resolution or any part thereof shall be void and of no effect." (I wonder how those six members of the Nevada Supreme Court overlooked that "set aside, suspended or in any way made inoperative" plain language?)

It seems, as Erdoes discovered, our detail-obsessive legislators have crafted our statutes in such a way as to require a referendum ballot question to be phrased in the affirmative. The ballot question must read: "Shall the statute (in this case the taxes) be approved?"

Thus, a yes vote approves the taxes and a no vote repeals.

So, if the voters approve the taxes, they cannot be changed without another vote of the people. But if the voters say no to the taxes, Erdoes says "there would be no legal impediment to the Legislature enacting a new statute with the same provisions as the disapproved statute -- thereby, in effect, re-enacting the disapproved statute."

So, a yes vote leaves the higher taxes in place but hobbles the Legislature, while a no vote repeals the taxes but leaves the lawmakers free to immediately go into special session and do it all over again. What a Hobson's choice.

Makes our job to explain this stuff pretty difficult.

Thomas Mitchell, editor of the Review-Journal, writes a column on the newspaper's functions and role in the community. He may be reached at 383-0261 or via e-mail at tmitchell@reviewjournal.com.