Democrats are own worst enemy

No compromise. No deals. No reforms. No remorse.

Just show them the money.

And they’ll have everyone believe that if Republican lawmakers won’t fall in line and vote for an inflated spending plan — with the monster tax hikes needed to fund it — it will be their fault when schoolchildren, superb teachers, the poor and public employees go tumbling into the ravine.

The suggestion that Republicans and their opposition to tax increases are to blame for the Legislature’s budget impasse is the most flawed narrative of the session.

Party leaders are talking behind closed doors about how to pass a two-year state spending plan.

Minority Republicans are behind Gov. Brian Sandoval’s $6.1 billion, no-new-taxes general fund for 2011-13, which they can’t pass on their own. Democrats have said they’ll never vote for Sandoval’s plan, favoring their own $7 billion budget, a record figure that requires record tax increases. But Democrats need Republican defectors in both the Assembly and Senate to get the two-thirds support required by the constitution to raise taxes.

The onus is on Democrats to bargain. It has been since their November election losses. They’ll have to offer the GOP some big policy victories to pick up the votes they need.

But thus far, only one person has made an effort to negotiate: Assembly Minority Leader Pete Goicoechea, R-Eureka. He has said his caucus would support extending the 2009 tax increases set to expire June 30 in exchange for major reforms to education, collective bargaining and other areas.

For his good-faith effort at achieving a pragmatic solution and bringing Carson City’s most secretive talks into the open, Goicoechea has been ripped as a rube. Assembly Speaker John Oceguera, D-Las Vegas, cemented that impression by denying hearings for most of the GOP legislation that could have been part of a tax compromise.

Goicoechea should have known. Democrats don’t deal, they demagogue.

Over in the Senate, Majority Leader Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas, has ruled like a tin-pot dictator instead of a practical statesman. As a result, Republicans in the upper chamber wouldn’t support $1 in tax increases, let alone the $1.2 billion he wants.

And so every core Democratic constituency is about to be pummeled with cutbacks and job losses.

The consequences of the Democrats’ bullheaded adherence to the status quo are everywhere.

Layoff notices have been distributed to hundreds of Clark County School District teachers, many of them the finest instructors at their schools. Such is life when seniority, not performance, decides who gets cut loose. But teachers unions have demanded that Democrats keep “last in, first out,” among other job protections that Republicans want changed or eliminated.

Meanwhile, local governments passed slashed budgets last week. Handcuffed by sky-high personnel costs set through collective bargaining, Clark County is poised to lay off 82 workers. North Las Vegas, Nevada’s strongest candidate for municipal bankruptcy, will let go of 258 workers without major employee compensation concessions. Las Vegas and Henderson, having already shed hundreds of positions, are seeking more employee buyouts.

Collective bargaining reforms that could help local governments get a firmer grip on their payrolls remain nonstarters in Carson City. No transparency in contract negotiations. No getting rid of binding arbitration. Nothing that scuttles the ability of unions to get the gravy train rolling again once the economy bounces back. Fiscal restraint just doesn’t buy as many votes.

Yet Sandoval and Republicans lawmakers are being accused of lacking leadership and courage.

Leadership is manifested in consistency and trust. And few things are more courageous than being honest about what you believe in.

Sandoval and GOP lawmakers are doing exactly what they said they’d do. They ran for office opposing tax increases. They are fulfilling that mandate.

Most of Carson City’s Democrats, including Horsford and Oceguera, also campaigned as fiscal conservatives. They portrayed themselves as champions of limited government. Heck, most of them didn’t even put the word “Democrat” on their 2010 campaign fliers and mailers. They were too scared to run on their party name and what they believed in. They’re doing the opposite of what they said they’d do.

If lying to get elected represents leadership and courage, then I’ve been reading the wrong books all these years.

One of the more amusing developments of the budget standoff has been the brewing anger of far-left outfits like the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. They don’t want majority Democrats to fashion a compromise that produces conservative reforms, a position that effectively dooms their demands for higher taxes.

But they’ll have Democrats believe that if they can’t come through with tax increases, those lawmakers will suffer political consequences in 2012.

What’s PLAN going to do? Find candidates to the left of the Democrats currently serving in the capital? And have them run honest campaigns, promising billions of dollars in tax increases? Good luck with that.

And so the advance to oblivion continues. One Democratic cause after another is heading for the ledge: class-size reduction, low-cost college tuition, union wage scales and on and on. If no deal is reached within a week — allowing the Legislature enough time to override a Sandoval veto before adjournment — the march turns into a sprint.

Leadership? Oceguera and Horsford, the men who control the agenda in the Legislature, are about to get a fresh lesson in the first rule of leadership: Everything is your fault.

Glenn Cook (gcook@reviewjournal.com) is a Review-Journal editorial writer.