Deregulator: Alive since '85!

Not yet ... Nevada's federal district courts reject the lawsuit brought by 24 GOP lawmakers and a group of state taxpayers. (Read the decision here .) I'll be fascinated by the legal pros' take on this, but the ruling appears sound to me. The judges said they lack jurisdiction to deal with the complaint of the lawmaker plaintiffs, who should have gone to the U.S. Supreme Court first. In the second part of the ruling, the judges say the non-legislator plaintiffs "state no claim" against the defendants (the Legislature, Gov. Kenny Guinn, etc.), because there's nothing to claim. The Legislature has enacted no tax law; Guinn has signed nothing. The implication I take from this is that the judges were suggesting that if Guinn signs any bill that was passed with less than a two-thirds majority, the non-legislator plaintiffs may have grounds to sue after all. An appeal to the 9th Circuit is imminent ... and the Legislature keeps working on a tax-and-spend deal. D...

'Tax hater' shoots fish in a barrel Eugene Volokh eviscerates Brian Greenspun, editor of the Las Vegas Sun (and graduate of Georgetown's School of Law, where he was a classmate of one Wm. J. Clinton) for today's column , which argues that the Nevada Supremes' decision was peachy keen. Consider this gem from the erudite editor: Regardless how many "experts" the tax-hating Review-Journal could drag out to intimidate the jurists [referring in part to Eugene, who was quoted in several news stories],the fact remains that their reasoning was sound, however unusual it may have been. And, it did what most clear-thinking Nevadans wanted to be done. It ordered the Legislature to do its job and do it by majority rule, a concept that has served this republic remarkably well and Nevada extraordinarily so for the past 139 years. And then there's this Greenspun classic: Whoever heard of a minority of people telling the majority of the citizens in any state how they ...

Ding dong? The gross receipts tax is dead. Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio notified Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins (for the umpteenth time) there's no way the Senate can pass a broad, revenue- or profit-based business tax this session. Perkins conceded, "At this point in time, the funding of education is so important that we need to get our work done. The folks who are holding things up have successfully protected business to the detriment of our children." Meaning? Gaming Inc. and its minions in the Legislature lost. But so did the state's burgeoning financial services industry, not to mention Nevada's taxpayers and the state's favorable climate for business and capital formation (up 'til now). It appears that some form of revenue-based "franchise fee" on banks will be in the final package, which overall will raise more than $800 million ... more than doubling the previous record tax increase. Still waiting The hearing before seven federa...

Do two wrongs make a right? Two dozen Nevada legislators and a group of state taxpayers file federal lawsuits alleging that the state Supreme Court's decision violated their federal due process rights. (The brief filed by the plaintiffs is here ; other legal info, provided by the Claremont Institute, which is working on behalf of the plaintiffs, is here .) An en banc hearing of all eight federal district judges in Nevada will take place Wednesday morning by teleconference, a procedure Eugene Volokh believes may be unprecedented. The plaintiffs' brief cites Coleman v. Miller, a 1939 Supreme Court decision which ruled that, in a legislative vote to ratify a federal constitutional amendment, when the vote to ratify ended in a tie, the lieutenant governor was qualified (as the state constitution allowed) to cast the tie-breaking vote. The court said: Had the LG's vote been disallowed, the votes of the representatives who sided with him would have been diluted, violating their...