Winners in the legislative game of endurance

The Nevada Legislature is a game of endurance, with long hours, complicated rules and often-shifting alliances standing in the way of any idea actually becoming law. And the 2015 session was no different.

Of course, Gov. Brian Sandoval refused to back down when he got pushback from members of his own party with respect to the business revenue tax component of his Nevada Revenue Plan. His relentless lobbying won him a supermajority of support for that measure. Freshmen state Sens. Becky Harris and Patricia Farley kept up with causes like homeowner-initiated foreclosure mediation and a compromise settlement on rooftop solar power, respectively. And of course the powerhouse that is Assemblywoman Marilyn Kirkpatrick, D-North Las Vegas, spent all session working on her pet project, a live-entertainment tax reform plan that failed in 2013, but passed this year.

But a few lawmakers stood out for their endurance, their relentlessly and their sheer indefatigability, regardless of the merits of the ideas they pursued (commitment in this regard occasionally being a morally neutral virtue).

For example, Sparks Republican Assemblyman Ira Hansen refused to give up on a bill that would have required parental notification before a minor could get an abortion. Although the bill did not require parental consent, it was clearly aimed at dissuading young women from seeking abortions. And it was not at all popular with establishment Republicans or the pro-choice Sandoval.

Hansen not only hijacked the bill from Speaker John Hambrick, R-Las Vegas (something that would be unheard of in the days of strong Democratic leadership in the Assembly), he got it to a hearing in his Assembly Judiciary Committee and passed on the Assembly floor on a party-line vote. It was entombed in the Senate Finance Committee — a legislative maneuver that usually spells death for a bill — before it was finally freed and had a hearing in the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, thanks in part to pressure from activists who badly wanted the measure.

Ultimately, they were unsuccessful, and the bill died in committee. But it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

Then there’s Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, R-Las Vegas, who saw her bill to allow people to carry guns on college campuses in Nevada endure a roller-coaster ride before finally dying in the Senate. But Fiore and her allies (including, again, Hansen) refused to give up, regardless of strong opposition from the university system.

The original bill, Assembly Bill 148, sailed out of the Judiciary Committee, but spent some time in limbo (laid upon the chief clerk’s desk while waiting to be amended on the floor) before finally getting out the Assembly on a party-line vote. The bill arrived as a dead-letter in the Senate, however, as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Greg Brower, R-Reno, declined to hear it, saying there was no support for the bill in the upper house.

Undaunted, Hansen took the ideas of AB 148 and tried to amend them into Senate Bill 175, an omnibus gun bill authored by Senate Majority Leader Michael Roberson, R-Henderson. That amendment was voted down, however, and campus carry once more appeared doomed. (Roberson’s bill, by contrast, went on to be signed by the governor.)

But the outrage from pro-gun rights groups against the Republicans who’d voted down the campus carry amendment was fierce, so much so that most of them signed on to a second, “clean” campus carry bill that, once again, passed the Assembly and ended up in the Senate. But, big surprise, Brower still didn’t hold a hearing, his reasoning unchanged from when Fiore’s first bill arrived.

It was a bitter defeat for Fiore, who’s been trying to get a version of this bill passed since she was first elected in 2012. She’s the very definition of relentless, if not effective.

But perhaps the most relentless lawmaker of the entire 2015 session was freshman Assemblyman David Gardner, R-Las Vegas, whose bill to break up the Clark County School District spent literally the entire session in the Assembly, only to be rushed into law in the closing minutes of the session in the state Senate.

Gardner patiently answered each criticism of his bill with amendments as it wound its was through the Assembly’s Education and Ways and Means Committee, but refused to compromise on one key point: Passage of the bill would trigger the breakup plan. It was not whether the district would be broken up, but how precisely that will be done. And while the 2017 Legislature can still kill the idea, it will take an affirmative vote to do so. That kept the Clark County School District a committed opponent of the measure throughout the entire process.

After getting a hearty bipartisan vote of 35-5 in the Assembly, was more controversial in the Senate, where Democrats on the session’s final minutes wanted to use the rapidly ticking clock to kill the bill. Sens. Kelvin Atkinson and Aaron Ford, both D-Las Vegas, in particular, were outraged at the lack of debate on the measure; it was approved 13-7 exactly 90 minutes after it had been passed by the Assembly earlier in the evening on the session’s final day.

Sandoval said last week he’d sign it, which ends Gardner’s whirlwind ride through the process, and caps a session where his endurance may have been the greatest of all.