Gov. Sandoval’s shift on budget shows he’s a statesman

CARSON CITY -- We've reached the point in the legislative session that Tom Petty could have been referring to (but wasn't) when he sang, "The waiting is the hardest part."

Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval is meeting frequently with Democratic Assembly Speaker John Oceguera and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, along with their staffs. As of Monday afternoon, those meetings continue, and progress is slow.

So while those leaders work out the details of the budget -- still arguing over how much to spend and how much to tax -- let's examine a few truths that undergird the closing days of the 2011 Legislature.

First, Gov. Brian Sandoval is no Gov. Jim Gibbons. Although the two men seemed to be singing from the same careworn page of the same Republican hymnal when it came to taxes, Sandoval demonstrated something we rarely saw from Gibbons: The ability to change his mind when circumstances change.

Initially, Sandoval showed no signs of moving from his campaign-trail anti-tax pledge, not when his budget proposed deep cuts in education and social services, not when Democrats lambasted him as cold-hearted and cruel, not when students camped out in the legislative courtyard, not even when the state teacher union deployed children in a televised attack on the governor's policies.

But when the Nevada Supreme Court ruled the Legislature's 2010 money grab from the Clark County Clean Water Coalition was unconstitutional, and leaders realized that other funds built into the governor's budget could also be susceptible to legal challenge, Sandoval did something Gibbons hardly ever did: He changed his stance to adapt to the new reality.

Spokesman Dale Erquiaga said almost immediately that certain expiring "sunset" taxes the governor had previously said he'd let vanish were back in play. (The next day, Erquiaga would amend that remark to say some, but not all, could be extended and only in exchange for concessions on unrelated issues.) But Sandoval's anti-tax campaign-trail promise was no longer 100 percent operative.

The significance of this shift can't be understated.

First, it underscores the foolishness of making a promise that you have no idea you'll be able to keep. Not only does this make you irrelevant in politics, unable to negotiate a reasonable deal for the people who elected you, but it leaves you at the mercy of events.

Sandoval had no idea a court ruling would leave his budget with a $657 million hole, and he made no caveat to allow himself an out in the event that it did. Consequently, he was subjected to charges of flip-flopping and even lying by conservatives disappointed in his forced acceptance of taxes that he clearly abhors. And it must be said: Sandoval did flip-flop on his promise. But in the end, we'll be the better for it.

Second, Sandoval's shift shows he's more statesman than politician. Some conservatives argue the governor could still balance the budget without extending any of the $679 million in estimated sunset taxes, and mathematically, it surely could be done. Sandoval would most certainly have burnished his political credentials had he done so, saying he stood by his promise no matter the last-minute budget disaster visited upon him by the court.

But Sandoval couldn't do that, any more than he could have built the state's budget upon the $5.3 billion the Economic Forum predicted in December would be available. The cuts would have been too much for the state to bear. That's why the governor resorted to the budget gimmicks the court threw into question in the first place, and why he agreed to extend the sunset taxes as his final resort.

"To take $656 million from those budgets is not acceptable to the governor," Erquiaga said. "It can't be $656 million lower."

Third, Sandoval still kept the state's tax burden from increasing. On July 1, the start of the new fiscal year, no person or business in Nevada will pay a penny more in taxes than they're paying right now. True, their tax bills won't go down as they otherwise would have. But neither will their tax burden increase.

Although Democrats had proposed more taxes -- a sales tax on services and a margins tax on corporate profits -- Sandoval's opposition doomed those levies from the start. Democrats didn't present their ideas until the final month of the session, and even with the unanticipated court ruling, they likely never have become law, almost entirely due to the governor's opposition.

And that points up the final hard truth of this session: No matter how much those on the right seek to cut budgets and eliminate taxes, no matter how much those on the left seek to add taxes to protect public institutions, reality nearly always intrudes on ideology. Politicians argue positions, while statesmen lead the way to the compromises that keep the system moving, balanced between the parsimony of the right and the largess of the left. The former get the headlines, but we couldn't survive without the latter.

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal columnist and author of the blog SlashPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/SteveSebelius or reach him at 387-5276 or at SSebelius@reviewjournal.com.