The Nevada Legislature Building getting some touch-ups last month for what – who knows? – may be the last ever legit session of the Nevada Legislature. (Photo: Richard Bednarski/Nevada Current)
On Monday the Nevada Legislature will start its general session, which is a thing the Nevada Legislature does every other year for 120 days (+1 or more, on occasion).
People often give scant attention to what state legislatures do, unless some hot-button outrageous proposal is championed by a governor or lawmakers.
Judging from pronouncements so far from Nevada’s Republican governor and from Nevada’s Democrats who control both houses of the Legislature, hot-button outrageousness designed to animate the passions of the general public is not on either’s menu.
But whether the governor and legislators like it or not, the most pressing issue looming ominously over the session this year is how they confront — or fail to confront — the malignancy of Donald Trump and his administration.
Among a variety of positions Gov. Joe Lombardo has taken on Trump’s mass deportation fever dreams, one includes putting his name on a letter with other Republican governors promising to call out the National Guard for the effort if and when Trump tells them to.
Lombardo is also showing an early willingness to ignore or even apologize for Trump’s actions to deprive Nevada of federal services and federal funding. The leader of the state Senate Republicans is similarly singing don’t worry be happy.
To our west, California’s Democratic governor and legislators have passed legislation to “Trump-proof” their state, including allocating money to support the many lawsuits their Democratic attorney general will necessarily have to file against Trump’s edicts.
Nevada Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford has already signed on to two suits challenging Trump’s lawlessness since Trump was inaugurated.
The California Trump-proofing plan also includes financial support for legal aid to help people avoid deportation (although that component of the legislation has hit a snag).
In California Democrats control both the governor’s office and legislature, whereas in Nevada Democrats control only the legislature. So Trump-proofing would be more difficult here.
I emailed the Nevada state Democratic Senate Caucus the other day asking what if any specific budgetary or statutory measures the caucus is considering to protect Nevada and Nevadans from Trump’s malevolent reign of lawless chaos. No one responded.
But legislative Democrats earlier in the week perhaps offered a glimpse of what we might expect from them when they yelled at Lombardo to get his head in the game and find out what the hell that Trump freeze on oodles of federal financial assistance was all about.
So that was nice.
A federal court has since blocked the freeze. Trump’s actions, the judge observed, “violate the Constitution and statutes of the United States.”
But that ruling only sets up Trump and his henchmen to take Trump’s power grab to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has indicated a fondness for Trump power grabs.
And there are many other decrees, edicts, commands, and bellowing of “off with their heads” from Trump, with many more to come.
Lombardo and legislative Democrats have both telegraphed they would prefer to have a stalemate legislative session in which they try to score painfully parochial political points against each other while ladling out cash and prizes to special interests and pretending to argue passionately over two- or three-tenths of a percentage point of the state budget.
It’s understandable why Lombardo would prefer a banal legislative session. The less attention people pay to it, the better his prospects for reelection in 2026. Ask voters about governors, you see, and often as not the most common response is “yeah, we should probably have one.” And Lombardo is one. In Nevada gubernatorial politics, obscurity combined with incumbency tends to get results at the ballot box.
It’s less understandable why Democrats would want to let the session settle into standard operating procedure, i.e., tunnel vision focused on dreary arcana in a Reno exurb.
Trump and his circle are trying to establish an autocracy in the United States.
Granted, many of Trump’s actions may seem well above Nevada legislative leaders’ pay grade. For example, Trump appears to have handed control of the U.S. Treasury to Elon Musk, not only the world’s richest man, but arguably also its creepiest. (Barring evidence to the contrary, by the way, everyone should assume Lombardo, something of a Musk fanboy himself, is fine with that).
But as the past two weeks have demonstrated, Nevada legislative Democrats will be presented with multiple opportunities to confront Trump’s lawlessness.
They have a responsibility to seize those opportunities and do everything they can to frustrate Trump and his enablers like Lombardo whenever possible.
Everything moves faster in these our techy-techy times. The U.S. is devolving into a corrupt autocratic kleptocracy perhaps more quickly than than any nation in the history of the world — “like nobody has ever seen before,” as Trump would say.
It’s not outlandish to suggest Nevada legislators (of both parties) have one last best chance to do their part, however small, to help thwart Trump’s quest for absolute power. Starting Monday, that chance will last for 120 days (maybe +1 or more). If they, along with the rest of the nation, fail to confront Trump’s autocratic designs, when (if) they meet for their next general session in 2027, it probably won’t be as a legitimate legislative body, but as a Trump White House rubber stamp.
A version of this commentary was originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.