Raggio Titus Rhoads Mathews Coffin The five Nevada state senators who killed spending restraint are Raggio, Titus, Rhoads, Mathews and Coffin.

Two years after imposing the largest tax increase in state history, Nevada lawmakers are tripping all over themselves to feign support for tax relief. Property tax reform dominated the first month of the ongoing legislative session. Both houses have embraced the concept of a sales tax holiday. Automobile registration rebates remain on the table. A recently imposed "live entertainment" levy will likely be narrowed.

But on Tuesday -- in the Republican-dominated state Senate, no less -- taxpayers discovered the true depth of the devotion many of their representatives now express for fiscal restraint.

Senate Joint Resolution 5, sponsored by state Sen. Bob Beers, R-Las Vegas, would have limited the growth of state spending to inflation and population growth combined. Modeled after the Colorado Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), it represented a modest effort to handcuff the metastasizing Nevada bureaucracy at a time when lawmakers routinely approve budgets that increase state spending by more than 20 percent every two years.

The usual suspects flocked to Carson City to decry the proposal's humanity. And in the end, the mewling of the mendicant class carried the day as the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday voted 5-2 to kill SJR5.

Predictably, the three Democrats on the committee -- Dina Titus and Bob Coffin of Las Vegas and Bernice Mathews of Reno -- voted against imposing limits on state spending, realizing any such restriction hampers their ability to cement the dependency of their party's core constituency. But with four Republicans on the panel -- representing a party ostensibly devoted to limited government and minimal taxation -- how could SJR5 fail?

Although Sens. Beers and Barbara Cegavske, R-Las Vegas, embraced the resolution, their GOP brethren on the committee did not. They are Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio of Reno, who chairs Finance, and Dean Rhoads, a Tuscarora rancher with 20 years in the Legislature.

Make no mistake, had Sen. Raggio forcefully lined up behind SJR5, the measure would have cleared his panel and the upper house. In fact, though, Sen. Raggio has for years preferred coddling the bureaucracy and manipulating the levers of power to defending core GOP principles. It's amazing that the more fiscally conservative Southern Nevada Republican majority in the state Senate continues to tolerate his leadership.

TABOR isn't dead yet in the Silver State. The measure became law in Colorado only after citizens approved it through the initiative process. Backers of the Nevada proposal should now embark upon the same route. Without this straightjacket on state spending, all the tax relief proposals circulating in Carson City don't amount to a handful of pennies on the railroad track.