GOING TO COURT

No surprise here: The anti-smoking and marijuana legalization initiative
petitions are headed to court.

A pair of measures to regulate smoking and one to legalize marijuana got
enough signatures to be sent to the 2005 Legislature for consideration --
or so we thought. Because the petitions were turned in after the Nov. 2
election, and because Nevada computes the number of signatures needed to
qualify initiatives based on the most recent general election, Secretary of
State Dean Heller subsequently decided that all three petitions actually
failed.

It was a controversial ruling, but one that was backed by at least one
state Supreme Court ruling in Nevada and a nearly identical case in Arizona.

But the groups circulating measures aren't going quietly into that good
night. With Heller's blessing, they're going to court for a hearing in
early February that will seek to overturn Heller's decision and send the
measures to lawmakers. (There's a stopwatch running, because the law says
the Legislature has 40 days from the day it convenes to either enact or
reject an initiative; if it's rejected, the original measure goes to the
ballot.)

One initiative would ban smoking nearly everywhere; another would
essentially retain the status quo, allowing smoking in restaurants, grocery
and convenience stores and bars. The marijuana measure would legalize up to
an ounce of marijuana.

"We are hoping Secretary Heller will recognize that his previous action
changes the rules after the game has ended, violates our right to due
process and simply doesn't pass the straight-face test," says Neal Levine
of the Marijuana Policy Project, which has filed its own appeal.

Straight-face test? This is Nevada, where ever-more-ornate casinos are
built based on the notion that you might be the one-in-a-million lucky
winner. There's no such thing as a straight-face test here.

But the groups do have a point. All through the signature-collection
process, they were told that they needed to collect 51,337 signatures to
qualify their initiative, or 10 percent of the votes cast in the 2002
general election. Heller even used that number in mid-November, when making
an initial ruling that the petitions were valid.

Then, we're asked to believe, an "anonymous caller" revealed some case law
that suggested the petitions really needed to get 83,156, or 10 percent of
the votes cast in the 2004 general election, because all three documents
were turned in after polls closed Nov. 2. That's where the "straight-face"
test thing comes in.

But who cares who put the handkerchief over the pay phone and called in; is
the decision correct under the law? It certainly appears that it is, and as
such, it should be able to survive a court challenge.

Meanwhile, Heller is irked that he's facing criticism once again, and he
agreed to join the anti-smoking group in a "non-adversarial" proceeding in
court in Carson City. "I find the accusations lodged by some, including
media sources, that I have unfairly disqualified these three initiative
petitions perplexing," Heller said in a statement. Buck up, old boy. If you
can't take a few pokes from "media sources," what's going to happen when
somebody decides to hire Johnnie Cochran to challenge your rulings?

*My Sunday predictions column was a bit incomplete with respect to the
Republican nomination for governor. U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons is most
definitely the GOP's front-runner for the post, but I neglected to mention
Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt, who has said she will run for the top job
regardless of Gibbons' intentions.

That may not affect the final outcome of the race. Gibbons won Northern and
rural Nevada with impressive percentages, and did well in those portions of
Clark County that lie inside his congressional district. But Hunt is well
known and liked, and like Gibbons, has run multiple times statewide. Her
candidacy will undoubtedly have an effect on the race. At the very least,
it will force Gibbons to campaign and spend money, just like his Democratic
opponents will have to do.

Can you picture a Hunt-Titus face-off to determine who gets to be Nevada's
first female governor? Now that would be something to watch.

*And speaking of firsts and females, plenty of people are mourning the
death of Shirley Chisholm, the nation's first black female member of
Congress, who died Saturday at age 80. Chisholm broke many barriers in her
life: fighting discrimination by starting her own social club at Brooklyn
College when she was denied entry into the mainstream one; creating the
Unity Democratic Club in New York to encourage black and Hispanic residents
to get involved in politics, and running for Congress in 1968 as "Fighting
Shirley Chisholm: Unbought and Unbossed."

She even ran for president in 1972, garnering 151 delegate votes at the
Democratic Party's convention in Miami. She lost that nomination to George
McGovern, who in turn lost the election to Richard Nixon. And we all know
how that turned out.