The Westside Slugger by John L. Smith

Author:John L. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948908047
Publisher: Chicago Distribution Center (CDC Presses)

By the 1979 session, conservative Jim Gibson was still stinging from the embarrassment Neal had helped cause him in the ERA vote. He pushed to change a rule of order, making it more difficult for the Neal-Rose maneuver to succeed. Neal, becoming one of the more experienced members of his caucus, couldn’t reasonably be denied a committee chairmanship. He had been given the Natural Resources Committee position, and the vice chairmanship of the Human Resources Committee. Gibson made sure his fellow religious and political conservatives maintained their control of key committees. The state’s so-called citizen Legislature had long fit comfortably in the pocket of the state’s powerful business interests. So when Neal and Senator Hernstadt defied the status quo and pushed for transparency in internal legislative proceedings, including releasing the recordings of meetings that hadn’t taken place in public view, some of their colleagues vilified them. The Legislative Counsel Bureau sealed lawmakers’ travel and expense vouchers from public view. Citizens were also not allowed to know what elected officials were making use of the State Highway Department’s airplane, which was regularly available to Senate leaders Raggio and Gibson.

At the Legislature, the easiest way to impress voters and reporters is to propose a law that increases the sentence for a crime. The offense can be great or small. In fact, the offense itself is secondary to the political importance of making the punishment more draconian. So it was with Nevada’s drunken-driving law.

Improvements were needed in the law, and eventually the legal limit of alcohol impairment would be reduced to .08. For his part, Neal had no problem with getting tough on those who drive drunk. His beef was with the inconsistency with which such laws were enforced in Nevada. Although alcohol consumption was conspicuous and crossed social, economic, and racial lines, the local drunk tanks were full of brown and black offenders.

And so when the Assembly passed a bill calling for two days of jail time for first-time offenders, Neal noted the social and racial disparities—and was immediately pummeled for being soft on crime. He managed to gather support from three of his Senate colleagues, who opposed the bill for their own personal reasons, and set about to slow the legislation. Drawing on his knowledge of parliamentary procedure, he sought a delay by requesting a written interpretation of the rules. Newspaper editorial pages snorted their disapproval.

“Lowering the limits and adding mandatory jail time sounds fine, but it would have had a disproportionate impact on the district I represented,” he said. “In a mostly black district, knowing that those jail cells weren’t full of white folks, I was very much concerned about the people it would impact. Getting arrested and being forced to go to jail had a greater impact on the lives and livelihoods of the poor. They would often lose their jobs as a result of a mistake. It definitely had a greater impact on the poor and minorities. It’s the way the system worked.”

But who was going to speak

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