Op-Ed: Mining Tax Bill Crowds Out Coverage of Cannizzaro’s Big Blunder

TL;DR. As the 81st Legislative Session is now over, I wanted to share this op-ed I wrote with a friend who requested to be anonymous about a major blunder committed by Nevada’s Democrat legislative leadership. This will conclude the UNFILTERED Series for this year. Thanks for reading and watching!

AB495, the shiny mining tax compromise that is being widely covered as some bipartisan, momentous achievement was not only the brainchild of the Clark County Education Association to put pressure on gaming, but also a sleight of hand that is crowding out coverage of a huge blunder by Nevada’s trifecta (Governorship, State Senate, and State Assembly) Democrat leadership: their loss in the Nevada Supreme Court regarding their unconstitutional tax increase from the 2019 Session.

In mid-May, the Nevada Supreme Court delivered a victory to Republicans in the battle over our state’s Constitutional requirement that a supermajority in both Houses of the Legislature is required to impose taxes on its citizens. This Court battle fought by Republican State Senator James Settelmeyer, Keystone Corporation, Nevada Policy Research Institute and other citizen-watch groups was costly, but it protected over 23,000 business owners and all Nevada drivers from seeing their taxes and fees increased at the whim of our needlessly tax hungry Democrat elected officials.

For nearly two years Democrats assured stakeholders that their actions were legal and hid behind this lawsuit as a way to not engage with Republican legislators who have shown a willingness to negotiate since day one. Republicans, of course, were shut out at every turn and endured a brutal 81st Session as Democrats did their best to listen to the big businesses and the well-connected unions who fund them and basically no one else.

Now, because of their recklessness and refusal to abide by the rule of law in our Constitution, taxpayers are owed as much as $5 million in illegally collected DMV fees. One Assemblyperson estimated that the folks responsible for this blunder will cost the state over $8 million just to issue the refund of those fees to Nevada taxpayers. The person responsible for this? Nevada’s Senate Majority Leader, Nicole Cannizzaro.

While her time as Majority Leader has been fraught with controversy, missteps, and absolute silence on other serious issues, her pièce de resistance has been her blatantly unconstitutional and self-serving actions surrounding the two bills that would extend sunsetting taxes that brought on this lawsuit.

Even though Republicans won this fight, it was terrible governance that Sen. Cannizzaro, her colleagues in the Democrat majorities in both houses, Attorney General Aaron Ford, Governor Steve Sisolak, and the bureaucrat lawyers that she helped elevate to leadership in the LCB all were unified in backing a clearly unconstitutional method of governance because it supported their political ideology.

It gets better (or much worse, depending on your perspective)! Sen. Cannizzaro and Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson then had the audacity to blame the Republicans for this mess, calling for bipartisanship, largely ignoring the fact that they were the ones who pushed unconstitutional bills without even attempting to negotiate with their Republican colleagues in the minority.

Sen. Cannizzaro and Speaker Frierson shamelessly released a joint statement that said they would call on their Republican colleagues to work on "meaningful revenue legislation this session,” yet claimed immediately after that Republicans did this to "protect the bottom lines of some of the state’s largest corporations at the expense of Nevada schools." I’m assuming this is some of the “unity” that President Biden is calling for!

In a time when Nevada needs competent leaders that can help it emerge from the disastrous lockdowns and restrictions imposed during the pandemic, we get self-serving, belligerent, tone deaf politicians who want Nevada to become a high-tax, low-innovation, population-losing state like California.

So, while most the state’s media can fawn over the mining tax compromise all it wants, it doesn’t take away from the fact that Republicans were able to stop another tax from being levied on Nevadans amidst a still lagging economy and forced Majority Leader Cannizzaro to actually follow the state’s Constitution.

It is time for Nevadans, and especially our independent, non-partisan neighbors and friends, to show these folks the door and elect new leadership in our state that will listen and work with the minority party and fight for small business owners -- a minority that forms the backbone of Nevada’s economy. I hope everyday Nevadans punish this terrible behavior at the polls by bringing Republicans out of minority status in 2022.

An earlier version of this op-ed ran in Keystone Corporation’s monthly newsletter sent on June 3, 2021.

This op-ed was sent for publishing consideration to various news publications in Nevada on June 7, 2021 and was published in the Reno Gazette Journal on June 14, 2021.