A LONG LOOK BACK

At least the lawyers didn't starve.

The most memorable thing about the 2004 election was the lawsuits.
Initiative petition circulators were being harassed, and thus went to
court to get extra time to collect signatures. The wording of a
medical malpractice tort reform measure was misleading, and thus
opponents went to court to demand it be rewritten.

Some voter registration forms may have been intentionally destroyed in
a dirty-tricks effort to keep Democrats from the polls, and thus the
party went to court to get voters counted. Ralph Nader made the
ballot, but Democrats went to court to accuse Republicans of
conspiracy to make it happen.

It was a good year to be a barrister.

On the initiative front, Nevada continued its trend toward becoming
Ron Knecht's worst nightmare, East California. (Actually, make that
his second-worst nightmare, as he woke up from the Nov. 2 election to
discover he was a former assemblyman.) But this was a banner year as
special interests, particularly members of the bar, tried to hijack
the process for their own ends.

While doctors were busy baking the other half a loaf that the
Legislature had not already granted them in terms of California-style
tort reform, lawyers were busy writing initiatives that sounded good
(Lower your insurance! Stop frivolous lawsuits!) but would have had
the effect of gutting all tort reform in the state.

Toward the end, lawyers rushed to the state Supreme Court in a naked
attempt to kill the doctors' measure. The public found its way through
the labyrinthine legal lingo and said yes to the healers and no to the
lawyers.

Give the attorneys credit, however: They kept a stiff upper lip and
didn't start whining about having to leave the state in droves.

Those evil taxes passed at the end of a second ignominious special
session in 2003? The members of a ragtag group that tried to repeal
them ended up only embarrassing themselves by failing to get the
required 51,337 valid signatures. Either taxes weren't that big of an
issue after all, or the public couldn't find a petition to sign. Must
have been all the harassment.

The most startling petition ruling didn't come until the end of the
year. Groups that wanted to ban smoking and enshrine the status quo in
state law (not to mention those diehard, legalize-an-ounce-of-marijuana
people) had gathered more than the 51,337 signatures. But they made
the mistake of turning in their papers after the Nov. 2 election,
which raised the bar for qualifying initiatives to 83,156 valid
signatures. (In Nevada, you've got to collect the names of at least 10
percent of the people who voted in the "last preceding general
election," which is now the record-setting contest of Nov. 2.)

Of course, the anti-smoking group -- which had been told the standard
was 51,337 -- vowed to appeal. Does anybody know a good lawyer?

The 2004 elections produced few surprises, but some important changes
nonetheless. Veteran state Sens. Ann O'Connell and Ray Rawson were
both defeated, and both because of taxes. Assemblyman Bob Beers
slammed Rawson for voting for the $833 million tax package in 2003,
and a gaming industry group slammed O'Connell for signing onto a
separate doomed tax package that would have raised more than $1
billion. (It was the first nice thing O'Connell ever had to say about
taxes, and she paid for it with her seat.)

Oddball state Sen. Ray Shaffer, who switched parties from Democrat to
Republican in a Democratic district before shirking his tax-session
duties to play in the Hawaii sunshine, also lost his seat. Perhaps
he'll take MGM Mirage Chairman Terry Lanni's unsolicited, pre-election
advice and become a surf instructor? If so, he might want to treat his
students with a little more respect than he showed his successful
opponent, John Lee.

And while she never appeared on the ballot, it's undeniable that state
Supreme Court Justice Deborah Agosti decided not to run for
re-election because of the fallout of the Guinn v. Legislature
decision, which she authored in 2003.

The nihilistic ruling simply set aside the voter-approved requirement
that the Legislature muster two-thirds of its members to create or
raise a new tax. And while the public generally doesn't care that much
about court rulings, this was one they could sink their teeth into.
The justices' reasoning was clearly wrong, and the effects were
clearly pernicious (though not so much that the U.S. Supreme Court
would step in).

The saddest story of 2004 was the death of former Gov. Mike
O'Callaghan. Although he left office in 1978, O'Callaghan was still
the state's most popular and beloved ex-governor. After his career in
the military (during which he lost part of a leg to enemy fire in
Korea) and public office, he became executive editor of the Las Vegas
Sun newspaper, where his common-sense columns always stood up for the
little guy.

It was a cliche, oft-repeated but nonetheless true, that he was among
the last of a dying breed, and that we will all be poorer for his absence.

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist. His column
runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.