CARSON CITY — Privately, Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio has clearly had enough. He’s been heard in meetings and in hallways in the legislative building to say flatly that Gov. Jim Gibbons is trying to destroy what he and other lawmakers have spent 30 years building, namely the state’s education system.
The comment is uncharacteristic of Raggio, a stalwart Republican known for defending the system, the legislative process and the office of the governor, even when he disagrees with its occupant. In fact, Raggio has been known to chastise less circumspect politicians who he feels aren’t showing the appropriate respect for the institutions of state government.
But these days, an obviously angry Raggio is clearly getting fed up with Gibbons, who claimed on a television program on Tuesday that Raggio had skipped budget meetings leading up to the special session. This morning, Raggio took to the Senate floor to strike back — and asked that his comments be included in the Senate’s daily journal.
“I am both puzzled and amazed the governor’s statement … indicating that I did not ‘show up’ at most of the meetings the governor’s office held concerning the budget process prior to the start of the special session,” Raggio began. “Either the governor’s memory is failing or he has been misinformed, or he is intentionally distorting the facts.”
For some lawmakers, tossing bombs isn’t noteworthy. But for Raggio, the dean of the Senate, it’s a major sign his anger and frustration has reached unprecedented levels. How did we get to the point where Raggio would call an incumbent governor a liar from his desk on the Senate floor?
It started during the 2009 session, in which Gibbons indicated he’d support an increase in hotel room taxes. Raggio signed on as well. And then Gibbons pulled a fast one: He allowed the room tax to become law without his signature, which allowed the governor to say he hadn’t raised taxes but left Raggio (and other Republicans in the Senate) looking like tax-and-spenders.
Furthermore, the governor’s proposed cuts to education strike at the heart of Raggio’s legacy. He’s well known for his support for state schools, especially in higher education. But Gibbons’s approach — including a line in his state of the state speech in which he said the economic crisis was an opportunity to remake state government — threaten that legacy. Raggio, in fact, called the address ,” something he’s well known to dislike.
Raggio is not a member of the slash-and-burn conservative movement, the types of people who, as anti-taxer Grover Norquist once so memorably put it, want to shrink government to the size where it can be drowned in a bathtub. For Raggio, government is a vital and necessary thing, something to be preserved and promoted, not denigrated. During the infamous tax standoff of 2003, Raggio referred to just-say-no conservatives in the Assembly as “John Birchers,” quite an epithet from a man who is old enough to remember the actual radical John Birch movement of the 1960s.
Now, in his final term with one legislative session to go, Raggio finds himself navigating between Assembly Republicans who are agitating for budget cuts without much of any increase in revenue; a governor who appears to respect his office less than does Raggio, and trying to balance the state’s budget without destroying its vital services. It’s certainly true that tensions rose between Raggio and Gibbons when Raggio endorsed former judge Brian Sandoval — a fellow member of the Jones Vargas law school — for governor over Gibbons. But that doesn’t excuse Gibbons broadcasting lies about Raggio’s record.
“My commitment has been at all times to have the Legislature work together with the executive branch to reach a consensus, if at all possible, on how to deal with the excessive shortfall of $890 million,” Raggio said, in wrapping up his floor statement. He noted he’s worked under six governors, and that he’s always respected the office.
But it’s clear — more clear than it’s ever been to longtime legislative observers — which of those six governors is his least favorite.
Tags: Bill Raggio, Jim Gibbons
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Hey Steve ~
The problem is that public employees’ compensation package is so exorbitant these days. The average nevadan (taxpayer), for example, only earned less that $37,000 annually BUTis expected to faithfully support a $100,000 annual total compensation package of the average greedy nevada public servant per year. The so-called public servants are now the “masters of the plantation”. Average Nevadans are now the new “American slaves”.