(Sam Brown campaign photo)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

After weeks of taking heat from opponents and critics Democrat and Republican alike for expressing a willingness to bring nuclear waste to Nevada, Republican Senate candidate Sam Brown on Saturday said that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project should not be considered.

“Over the past month, I’ve invested time speaking with engineers and experts on Yucca Mountain. It is abundantly clear that the project is dead,” Brown said on social media Saturday.

“As I’ve said before, it should not, and will not, be revived as a nuclear waste repository,” Brown added. 

Brown’s campaign did not respond Saturday to a request to identify where and when he has said that before.

His statement Saturday is in stark contrast to remarks he made in 2022 but that only came to light last month, in which Brown said not allowing nuclear waste in Nevada was “an incredible loss of revenue for our state.”

In a 2022 recording obtained and reported by the Los Angeles Times last month, when asked about Yucca Mountain at a campaign event, Brown said “one of the things I’m afraid of is a lack of understanding and the fearmongering that Harry Reid and others have spread,” and “that we could miss an incredible opportunity for revenue for our state in the future.”

“If we don’t act soon,” Brown added in those 2022 remarks, “other states like Texas and New Mexico, right now, are assessing whether or not they can essentially steal that opportunity from us. And at the end of the day, we all know Nevada could use another great source of revenue and it sure would be a shame if we didn’t monopolize on that and become a central hub of new development that we can do at Yucca.”

In a statement issued by Brown in response to the Times story, he did not specifically reassert support for bringing nuclear waste to Nevada, but said “I’m always interested in economic opportunities for Nevada that better diversify our economy.”

Ever since the so-called “Screw Nevada” bill passed by Congress in 1987 singling out the Yucca Mountain site northwest of Las Vegas to be studied as the nation’s nuclear waste facility, opposition from the Nevada public and the state’s politicians of both parties has been overwhelming.

Since Brown’s 2022 statements became public, Sen. Jacky Rosen and multiple other Democrats have hammered Brown for expressing willingness to bring nuclear waste to Nevada.

And Jeff Gunter, Brown’s chief challenger for the Republican nomination to challenge Rosen in the general election, is airing an ad promising to block the Yucca project if elected to the Senate and blasting Brown’s willingness to “dump toxic nuclear waste here.”

Less than three weeks ago Brown responded to Rosen and Gunter’s attacks over Yucca by telling The Hill he is “not committed to supporting the opening of Yucca Mountain.

“However,” Brown added in that May 14 statement to The Hill, “I will consider all thoroughly vetted future proposals, with the safety of Nevadans being my top priority, while ensuring the proposals are substantially economically beneficial.” 

“Leadership means considering all economic opportunities that could better support the lives of Nevadans,” Brown added.

That too is in contrast to his statement on social media Saturday, in which Brown said, “As Nevada’s next US Senator, I’ll stand with President Trump to oppose it.”

Trump’s opposition to dumping nuclear waste in Nevada was itself a reversal of position on the former president’s part.

Yucca Mountain was officially designated as the nation’s nuclear waste “repository” during the administration of George W. Bush, in 2002. But the project was the subject of legal and regulatory proceedings for the next several years, until the administration of Barack Obama ordered the Department of Energy to discontinue its licensing application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and eliminated federal funding for the project.

While president, Trump attempted to restart funding for Yucca, but was thwarted by Congress. Trump reversed positions during the 2022 campaign cycle in an effort to help Adam Laxalt, the Republican who defeated Brown in the 2022 Senate primary but lost to Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in the general election. The Biden administration has never included funding for the Yucca Mountain project, and has assured Nevada officials that it has no plans to ever do so.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which includes a playbook for actions the influential organization suggests should be urgent priorities in a second Trump administration, calls for resuming and funding the Yucca Mountain licensing process.

The post Under pressure from all sides, Brown backtracks, says Yucca ‘should not be revived’ appeared first on Nevada Current.

This isn't the first time the Lombardo team has claimed credit for the results of Biden's policies. (Photo of Lombardo campaigning in 2022 by David Becker/Getty Images)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

“I’m pleased to announce the allocation of $250 million towards Middle Mile Infrastructure,” Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo said in a statement released by his office this week. “This significant investment will enhance internet connectivity in communities across Nevada that have struggled with inadequate internet access. By addressing these critical gaps, we are ensuring that all Nevadans have the opportunity to benefit from reliable and fast internet service.”

“We” are ensuring? Who’s the “we”?

In other words, where did the $250 million come from?

The press release from Lombardo’s office left that part out.

Later in the press release, Lombardo’s office notes that the middle mile infrastructure – thousands of miles of fiber optic lines, basically – is part of a larger investment, and “Over the next four years, over $900 million will be dedicated to broadband infrastructure and digital equity and adoption initiatives.”

Where’s the $900 million coming from?

The statement from Lombardo’s office neglected to say.

Perhaps because everyone already knows.

Or should.

A presentation from the Governor’s Office of Science, Innovation and Technology (OSIT) indicates that of the $250 million Lombardo was “pleased” to announce this week, $87 million is provided by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), more commonly known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill, introduced by the Biden administration and passed by Congress in November, 2021.

Despite the law’s bipartisan passage, only 13 members of the U.S. House of Representative who, like Lombardo, are Republicans, voted for the bill. Nevada’s Mark Amodei wasn’t one of them.

According to the U.S. Department of Treasury, another $74 million of the $250 million was also provided under the infrastructure bill. The OSIT presentation indicates that money was assigned to the capital projects fund under the American Rescue Plan Act. ARPA passed both houses of Congress in March, 2021 without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate.

Those two tranches of funding comprise about two-thirds of the $250 million. As for where the other third comes from, as of late Thursday neither the governor’s office nor OSIT could provide a detailed breakdown.

But during a legislative interim committee meeting last month, OSIT Director Brian Mitchell said there were several sources of broadband funding for Nevada – 12, to be exact, Mitchell said.

He provided legislators with a graphic to illustrate those 12 sources. 

Every one of them is federal:

As the size of the bubbles indicate, the overwhelming majority of broadband funding to be provided to Nevada is the result of either the bipartisan infrastructure bill or ARPA, one of which passed with only minority support from congressional Republicans and the other with no Republican support at all.

Lombardo must be torn.

It was only a few weeks ago Lombardo wrote Biden a letter demanding the president “embrace free market principles that rely on supply and demand and rein in excessive federal spending.”

So why doesn’t Lombardo reject all that federal spending provided – over Republican opposition – by the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress, and just let free market principles provide broadband to rural and other underserved communities? 

Yes, the free market has had decades to do that, and failed. But surely the free market will get around to it eventually, no matter how many more decades it takes, right? 

In the meantime, Lombardo could be at ease knowing he had adhered to his faith in free market principles.

But Lombardo contains multitudes.

Just a couple weeks after telling the president how to do his job and demanding that Biden rein in “excessive federal spending,” there Lombardo was, celebrating the groundbreaking of a high-speed train that has received $6.5 billion in federal grants and financing – again thanks to the bipartisan infrastructure bill that most members of Congress from Lombardo’s party opposed.

And this week he is “pleased to announce” all that federal funding for broadband.

For some reason Lombardo and his office did not feel obligated to tell the public where the broadband funding was coming from. Maybe his faith in free market solutions wouldn’t let him.

Nevada Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen’s office issued a statement noting she helped include the $74 million for middle mile funding when the infrastructure law passed.

The Nevada media largely acquiesced to the governor’s narrative, however, reporting the press release from Lombardo’s office under Lombardo-friendly headlines like “Gov. Lombardo allocates $250 million to improve state internet infrastructure,” and “Lombardo announces $250 million for better internet to 40,000 Nevadans,” and even “Governor Lombardo Providing $250 million for Internet Access.”

This isn’t the first time Lombardo has claimed credit for the results of Biden administration policies. 

His political action committee is fond of touting how many straight months of employment growth have occurred “under Joe Lombardo’s leadership.” Lombardo’s PAC always neglects to note that all of those consecutive months of employment growth, in addition to about twice as many more, have occurred under Joe Biden’s leadership.

Construction of fiber optic networks to underserved/unconnected Nevada communities is indeed a development worth celebrating. 

But Lombardo, Steve Sisolak, your last ride share driver… federal broadband funding would be coming to Nevada no matter who the governor was.

So Nevadans who applaud broadband funding may want to consider saying something Lombardo should but won’t: Thanks, Biden.

The post Lombardo tries to hog credit for Biden administration achievements (again) appeared first on Nevada Current.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sam Brown asks that you please pay no attention to the 2022 version of himself. (Sam Brown for Senate campaign photo)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Two years ago, when Republican Sam Brown was running for a U.S. Senate seat for the first time, he was debating Adam Laxalt and the topic turned to federal spending.

“One of the things that I’ve been proposing,” Brown said in that debate, “is that anywhere you have a duplication of a department or agency at the federal level that also has a state counterpart, that we don’t need that duplication.”

Brown, who this year is running for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen, identified the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Energy, and federal “environmental departments and agencies” as parts of the federal government “we don’t need.”

Immediately after Brown made those comments, one of the debate moderators asked if there is “anything you want to do with Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid?” 

“We can start with what I just described,” Brown said.

What Brown had just described was cutting federal funding by eliminating entire federal departments, and leaving states to fill the void. Nevadans may want to know how he thinks that approach would apply to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. How would that work?

Brown’s answer: Pay no attention to that 2022 version of Sam Brown.

“I will not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid,” Brown said Thursday in a statement provided by his campaign.

The statement did not address the question sent to him – what he meant when, in that 2022 debate, he responded to a question about the fate of those programs by referencing his “just described” yearning to take a meat cleaver to the federal government,

Brown’s statement Thursday also failed to even acknowledge a question asking whether Brown still wants to eliminate several entire federal departments and agencies, as he indicated in his 2022 remarks. Brown instead resorted to boilerplate Republican grumbling about “exorbitant spending” and “bloated bureaucracy.”

And scurrying back from boldly naming federal departments “we don’t need,” Brown Thursday merely called for “trimming the excessive waste within federal departments.”

The charitable view is that when Brown was musing about axing federal government departments and suggesting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid should be addressed in some similar if vaguely articulated manner, he was just riffing – idly filling the air with words during a campaign he had entered perhaps not to win, but to burnish his brand for future political opportunities (like his candidacy for another U.S. Senate seat this year). 

Now Brown, confronted with his own words, is pretending he never said them.

That’s an established pattern with Brown this campaign season, as illustrated when he recently refused to confirm or refute his declaration in 2022 that dumping tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste in Nevada would be a “great source of revenue” for the state.

In a similar example of evasion early this month, Brown did not answer questions posed by the Las Vegas Review-Journal about whether he believed the 2020 election won by Joe Biden was stolen.

Given Brown’s phobia of clarity, the most concrete statement there is regarding his position on eliminating federal departments remains his 2022 declaration that “we don’t need” the U.S. departments of Energy, Education, Transportation, and federal “environmental departments and agencies.” 

He’ll have one job

Brown’s call for gutting “duplication” federal departments or agencies if Nevada has one with the same name is likely a bit alarming to Nevadans who may have noticed over the years that adequately funding public programs, functions, and services has never been Nevada’s forte.

In his defense, Brown may not be one of those Nevadans. 

He has only been in the state since 2018, and spent almost all of that time laser-focused on launching a career in the U.S. Senate. It would be understandable if the barriers and hardships posed to Nevadans by threadbare public services and programs have escaped his attention.

Then again, perhaps Brown just doesn’t care.

In a radio interview in 2022, Brown acknowledged his vision vision of federal spending cuts will “take money out of programs that people like,” and promised it would “be painful.”

Let’s assume – only for the sake of discussion, hopefully – that Brown’s Washington dreams come true, and not only is he elected to the Senate, but Trump is returned to the White House. In that carnival of the macabre, individual initiatives and proposals and ideas put forth by Brown will be irrelevant. 

Brown will be just another interchangeable Republican cog in the Trump machine, his one job being to do whatever Trump says. 

The real risk Brown poses if elected to the Senate isn’t in the form of his juvenile calls for eliminating federal departments or any other fly-by-night ideas or positions that might flutter through his noggin and manifest as spoken word, only for him to later act like he never said it.

The real risk posed by Brown in the Senate is that he will be a rock solid lock to go along with whatever Trump decides he wants to do on any given day, from eliminating abortion rights nationally, to dumping nuclear waste in Nevada, to the binders full of authoritarian and unconstitutional measures and actions Trump and his minions are threatening to use to attack people who have displeased him and everyone his adoring fans love to hate.

Brown ran for a U.S. House seat in Texas and lost in the primary. Then he moved to Nevada and ran for a U.S. Senate seat and lost in the primary. Now he’s running for another Senate seat, and this time is expected to finally win a primary.

It’s obvious he hasn’t seriously thought through the ramifications of his facile talk-radio-ready pronouncements.

He does however seem laser-focused on how to become a career politician, even if the prerequisite is condoning Trump’s lawlessness and venality, and doing whatever Trump says. 

Meanwhile, there already exists a sprawling Trump administration-in-waiting plotting to concentrate power in an authoritarian White House, defund federal agencies, and brush aside the roles bestowed on those agencies by Congress and the courts.

As a U.S. senator, Brown’s role in that endeavor would be confined to cheering it on, something he sounds ready and willing to do.

The post Brown said he wants to ax multiple federal departments, promised spending cuts will ‘be painful’ appeared first on Nevada Current.

There is now and probably always will be a contingent of Nevada Democratic politicians who believe Nevada should remain a mining colony. (Photo credits: Jeniffer Solis/Nevada Current; Rosen campaign ad; Congresional Black Caucus)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Three-fifths of the Democrats in Nevada’s congressional delegation agree with the state’s only Republican in Congress, Rep. Mark Amodei: If there’s one thing the federal government should do, that thing is whatever mining wants.

Amodei got a bill passed on the floor of your United States House of Representatives this week. 

First, congratulations, Congressman. A representative getting the House to pass a bill was no small thing even back in what might be thought of as saner times. The good ship Saner Times having sailed, the current Republican-controlled House, despite recent life signs, remains on pace to be the least productive in decades.

And it looked like that stunning record of mayhem-enriched underachievement would likewise doom Amodei’s bill, which went belly up on the House floor last week when someone evidently forgot to tell a few Republican members of a narrowly divided House that there was work that day.

But there was a mining industry to protect, dadgummit, and Amodei, a former president of the Nevada Mining Association (while he was still in the state Senate ha ha is that the Nevada Way or what?), would not be denied.

If passed by the Senate and signed by the president, the bill would erase a 2022 federal court ruling that tried to impose a small measure of long-overdue sense on another law that was sponsored by a Nevadan on behalf of the mining industry 150 years earlier, the General Mining Law of 1872.

Background: A couple years ago in what is known as the Rosemont decision, a federal appeals court said when mining companies stake claims on federal land, and they find minerals on that land, mine away, as per usual, under ye olde 1872 law. But! The court also ruled – and this was new – that companies can’t use adjacent federal land on which no valuable minerals have been proven to exist as part of the mining operation. So no filthy slag heaps on the other side of the road, that sort of thing.

Amodei’s bill aims to overturn the Rosemont decision, and thus make filthy slag heaps on the other side of the road great again.

The vast majority of House Democrats, including Nevada’s Dina Titus and Susie Lee, voted against Amodei’s bill. But there were eight Democratic exceptions, one of whom was Nevada Rep. Steven Horsford, who is reliably eager to demonstrate fealty to Nevada’s mining industry.

Nevada Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto was predictably giddy over the House passing Amodei’s bill, her being a lead co-sponsor of companion legislation in the Senate. 

Nevada Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen is one of that measure’s co-sponsors, which won’t win her many votes in the rurals this year, but at least should help dissuade the mining industry from spending any money against her in her reelection campaign. 

A similar – and successful – safeguarding of the mining industry’s bottom line earned Cortez Masto a small assist from the industry in the rurals during her 2022 reelection campaign. 

Arizona independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is also a co-sponsor, so between her, both Nevada senators, and all Republicans, it’s conceivable the bill could pass the narrowly divided Senate. If Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer lets it come up.

Mining corporations and the politicians who love them have been urgently stressing how vital their industry is to national security. That emphasis, almost always accompanied by saying “China” a few times, helps put the “critical” in “critical minerals.”

After House passage of his bill this week, Amodei didn’t disappoint. “Securing our domestic mineral supply chain is not only critical to our nation’s economic success, but to our national security,” he said.

When touting the Senate version of the legislation last year, Cortez Masto said “we must produce minerals in the United States and not solely rely on foreign sources, some of whom threaten our national security…All of this means we must address the complications created by the Rosemont decision.”

And on multiple occasions, Cortez Masto has warned that the Rosemont decision will “upend” the mining industry.

Evidence suggests otherwise: The same mineral deposits at the heart of the terrible horrible no good very bad Rosemont decision – the example Cortez Masto refers to when she says the decision will “upend” mining – are included in an Arizona mining complex currently being developed by the same Canadian corporation that was developing the Rosemont mine. Except now the project is bigger. And instead of Rosemont, it’s called “Copper World.”

If enacted, the Amodei-Cortez Masto legislative effort to reverse the Rosemont decision, like a call from Cortez Masto and Rosen to allow lithium mining corporations to get tax credits against extraction costs, may help Nevada’s nascent lithium industry and other newly developing “critical mineral” mines save a buck or two and pass those savings on to shareholders the world over.

But whether the Rosemont decision is left intact will have no impact whatsoever on the certainty or scale of future mineral production. That will be determined by the price of the mineral. Period.

That doesn’t mean the legislation is meaningless. 

It could potentially enhance returns for mining corporation shareholders. 

It could provide Rosen yet another opportunity to make a campaign ad celebrating how much she loves to stand up to Democrats and vote with Republicans.

It confirms yet again that there is a contingent of Nevada Democratic politicians who believe Nevada should remain a mining colony.

And, most consequentially, it would assure massive hills of mining waste where they don’t belong, on public lands that aren’t even being mined, doing what massive hills of mining waste always do: contaminating soil, water, and air, far into the foreseeable future.

The post 3 out of 5 NV congressional Democrats want to let the mining industry party like it’s 1872 appeared first on Nevada Current.

Dang. Maybe he shouldn’t have spent the last several years screeching lies about how “crooked” mail voting is. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Donald Trump along with the Republican National Committee and the Nevada Republican Party, both wholly owned Trump subsidiaries, sued Nevada Friday saying any mail ballots that are not received by or on Election Day must not be counted.

Nevada law requires mail ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked no later than Election Day and received by county election officials within four days after Election Day.

The suit is almost identical to one Trump’s Republicans filed in Mississippi(!?) early this year. (Yet again Nevada is the Mississippi of the West, but this time in a different way.)

Yes, Republican advocacy of “state’s rights” has always been situational.

Other nearly identical suits to disenfranchise a segment of the mailing electorate have already been dismissed (by Trump-appointed judges by the way) in Illinois and North Dakota. 

Trump & Friends keep filing the suits anyway, and presumably more are on the way in the 19 states and territories that require ballots to be counted after Election Day provided they’re post-marked by or on Election Day. 

Even if Trump loses all the suits, they are a vehicle for casting aspersions on democracy and another means to try to dishonestly discredit election results in advance. (As Trump said this week, “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results.…If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” Everyone knows what that means.)

But an additional motive was at work in Trump’s suit in deep red Mississippi: Trump is shopping for a Trumpy federal judge who will make a Trump-friendly ruling that will trigger appeals, maybe go to the Trump-McConnell Supreme Court, and possibly set national precedent and, hence, national law.

In other words, nullify ballots that arrive after Election Day even if they’re postmarked before Election Day in Mississippi, and nullify them nationwide in the process.

Meanwhile, the suit filed in Nevada is only one of many that Trump and Republicans have promised/threatened to file this year in battleground states as part of a concerted and deliberate effort to harass election officials and their employees while maligning and attempting to discredit democracy.

At the very least, the suits will be a time-consuming nuisance for people working in state and local election offices in states across the nation.

At the very worst, given the Weltanschauung of the Trump-packed U.S. judicial system, there is always the possibility – in defiance of what thus far has been ruled to be logic, case law, and constitutional interpretation – that the Republicans could prevail and scrap all ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if those ballots were postmarked before it.

Trump and Republicans would genuinely welcome anything that curbs voting by mail – or more specifically, its impact.

Remember all the Nevada Republican howling and squealing in 2020 about how mail ballots were super vulnerable to fraud? And then remember how the only example of mail voting fraud that came to light was the MAGA guy who said somebody stole his deceased wife’s ballot and fraudulently voted on her behalf? And then it turned out the ballot stealer/fraudulent voter was none other than the MAGA guy himself?

That unsavory incident came after years of Trump, customarily without a shred of evidence, falsely asserting that voting by mail was intrinsically fraudulent.

He’s continued making those false claims in 2024. “We have to get rid of mail-in ballots because once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections,” Trump said earlier this year.

But last month Trump changed his tune, and now is encouraging voting by mail.

Why the flip-flop?

Probably for the same reason there is no repetition of 2020-style evidence-free blathering about mail voting being susceptible to fraud in the suit Trump, the RNC, and the Nevada Republican/Fake Electors Party filed Friday.

They’re not suing because voting by mail is, as Trump put it, “crooked.”

They’re suing to curb the number of mail votes that get counted for the simple reason that Democrats vote by mail more than Republicans do.

“In Nevada’s 2020 general election,” the suit says, “60.3% of Democratic voters voted by mail, compared to just 36.9% of Republican voters.”

Perhaps Trump and Republicans shouldn’t have spent the last several years screeching lies about how “crooked” mail voting is.

Dang. Hoist by their own petard. What to do?

Simple.

If you can’t beat ‘em, nullify their votes.

A version of this column was originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.

The post If you can’t beat ’em, nullify their votes: Trump’s latest suit against Nevada and its voters appeared first on Nevada Current.

Interesting public service comparison: As an Army captain, Sam Brown got blown up serving in Afghanistan; As ambassador to Iceland, Jeff Gunter deserted his post. (Dr. Jeff Gunter for Senate campaign photo)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Jeff Gunter’s self-financed Senate campaign has thus far earned him little chance of winning the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen in the general election.

But it has secured him a spot among the ranks of the most offensive office-seekers in Nevada political history.

Last month Gunter ran an attack ad on the Republican primary frontrunner, Sam Brown. The ad was ostensibly about a Federal Elections Commission complaint against Brown and the fact that Brown is backed by the Washington D.C insiders at the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

In an homage to Donald Trump’s false promise to “drain the swamp,” the ad called Brown “the newest creature to emerge from the swamp.” 

But the real point of the ad was to show graphically and disgustingly doctored images accentuating the scars on Brown’s face, the result of injuries inflicted on Brown by an improvised explosive device when Brown was serving in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan in 2008.

The Gunter ad then shows images of Mitch McConnell, Nikki Haley, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and other political figures, each of their faces similarly doctored to look like a gruesome “creature” from the “swamp.” The images are obviously intended to mimic – and remind the viewer – of Brown’s scars.

Showing grainy, unflattering, and manipulated images of one’s opponent is standard fare in political advertising. But Gunter’s ad was uniquely disgusting.

Or as a commenter on Gunter’s YouTube channel put it, “Pretty trashy to be mocking a wounded vet’s facial disfigurement like this.”

Gunter, who was registered to vote as a Democrat as recently as 2021 in California, is a dermatologist, and owns a chain of clinics. As it states on his campaign website, he is “Dr. Jeff Gunter.”

Doctors are people too, possessing both merits and faults. For instance, Gunter is the kind of doctor who ridicules a burn victim for their scars in the hope that doing so will boost his own implausible political aspirations.

Gunter was also an ambassador to Iceland during Trump’s administration. (Interesting public service comparison: As an Army captain, Brown got blown up serving in Afghanistan; As ambassador to Iceland, Gunter deserted his post.)

Judging from the caliber and character of both Gunter’s failed tenure as an ambassador and his Senate campaign, he wasn’t named an ambassador because he demonstrated tact, a mature regard for mutual respect, a capacity to grasp complex issues, or other characteristics befitting a diplomat, including basic human decency. 

Gunter’s key qualification must have been a not uncommon one for ambassadors: making a lot of very large campaign contributions. Because no one with anything approaching an ambassadorial temperament would run the sickening ad Gunter ran against Brown.

Ambassador Dr. Gunter may (or may not) be a reputable physician. But he’s a quack politician, and his only hope is and always was an endorsement from Trump. 

Trump is an impetuous clown, so anything could happen. But with less than six weeks before the June 11 primary, and with only about three weeks before mail and early voting starts, the chance of Gunter getting Trump’s nod in the Senate primary seems imperceptibly small. 

There are a lot of reasons not to want Brown to be a U.S. Senator, chief among them being that Nevada is one of the states that will decide not only whether Trump will be president, but whether there will be an obedient Trump-worshiping Republican-controlled Congress unquestioningly carrying out his every command, however pernicious and/or unconstitutional.

His recently revealed enthusiasm for bringing nuclear waste to Nevada, his opposition to a woman’s right to control her own body, his willingness to apologize for Trump’s thuggery and embrace Trump’s authoritarianism – Brown’s politics can be loathsome. 

But he was also forced to confront an adversity that thankfully few of us can fathom, and whatever else anyone may think of him, his personal success in addressing that adversity is undeniably impressive and admirable. Nobody, whatever their political party, can or should try to use the visible result of Brown’s military injuries against him.

And that’s what Jeff Gunter is: A nobody.

The post Calling Jeff Gunter a swamp creature would be an insult to swamp creatures appeared first on Nevada Current.

"It sure would be a shame if we didn’t...become a central hub of new development that we can do at Yucca," Sam Brown can be heard saying on previously unreported audio from 2022. (Sam Brown campaign photo)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

While campaigning for U.S. Senate in 2022, Sam Brown, now the Republican frontrunner for the U.S. Senate nomination in 2024, told a campaign gathering that he supported bringing nuclear waste from the nation’s nuclear power plants to Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

The Los Angeles Times Tuesday published audio of previously unreported remarks Brown made during a 2022 campaign event in Henderson, where Brown said that not allowing nuclear waste in Nevada represented “an incredible loss of revenue for our state.”

Ever since the so-called “Screw Nevada” bill passed by Congress in 1987 singling out the Yucca Mountain site northwest of Las Vegas to be studied as the nation’s nuclear waste facility, opposition from the Nevada public and the state’s politicians of both parties has been overwhelming.

In the 2022 recording obtained by the Times, asked his opinion about the Yucca Mountain project, Brown said “one of the things I’m afraid of is a lack of understanding and the fearmongering that Harry Reid and others have spread,” and “that we could miss an incredible opportunity for revenue for our state in the future.”

“If we don’t act soon,” Brown added, “other states like Texas and New Mexico, right now, are assessing whether or not they can essentially steal that opportunity from us. And at the end of the day, we all know Nevada could use another great source of revenue and it sure would be a shame if we didn’t monopolize on that and become a central hub of new development that we can do at Yucca.”

The Times story published Tuesday included a statement provided by Brown’s campaign in which he did not specifically reassert support for bringing nuclear waste to Nevada, but said “I’m always interested in economic opportunities for Nevada that better diversify our economy.”

Tuesday’s surfacing of Brown’s 2022 remarks comes on the heels of a U.S. House Energy and Commerce hearing earlier this month in which chair Cathy McMorris Rogers and other Republicans called for  restarting the licensing process for the Yucca Mountain project.

Days later, during a Senate Energy Committee hearing, Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto got reassurances from Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm that there is no funding in President Joe Biden’s budget for restarting the relicensing process, and no intention to ever include any.

Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen, who Brown hopes to challenge in the general election, issued a statement blasting Brown for his remarks obtained by the Times

“For decades, Nevadans across party lines have been clear that we will not allow our state to become the dumping ground for the rest of the nation’s nuclear waste,” Rosen said. “I’ve been fighting against Washington politicians trying to force nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain since Sam Brown was still living in Texas, and his extreme support for this dangerous and unpopular project underscores how little he understands the needs of our state.”

Rosen was first elected to the U.S. House in 2016. Brown moved to Nevada in 2018.

Yucca Mountain was officially designated as the nation’s nuclear waste “repository” during the administration of George W. Bush, in 2002. But the project was the subject of legal and regulatory proceedings for the next several years, until the administration of Barack Obama ordered the Department of Energy to discontinue its licensing application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and eliminated federal funding for the project.

While president, Donald Trump attempted to restart funding for Yucca, but was thwarted by Congress. Trump reversed positions during the 2022 campaign cycle in an effort to help Adam Laxalt, the Republican who defeated Brown in the 2022 Senate primary but lost to Cortez Masto in the general election. The Biden administration has never included funding for the Yucca Mountain project.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which includes a playbook for actions the influential organization suggests should be urgent priorities in a second Trump administration, calls for resuming and funding the Yucca Mountain licensing process.

The post Brown: Failure to bring nuclear waste to NV is an ‘incredible loss of revenue for our state’ appeared first on Nevada Current.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Nevada officials at this week's groundbreaking ceremony for somethat that at least is more productive than a baseball field. (Photo: Sen Jacky Rosen's office)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Both of the state’s U.S. Senators, three-fourths of Nevada’s delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, your governor, and several lesser mortals lined up together to get their pictures taken Monday at a groundbreaking ceremony for a high-speed train.

Scheduled to begin operating in 2028, the Brightline train is designed to carry people to Las Vegas from a parking lot in Rancho Cucamonga and safely carry them back again, preferably after they have spent a little more money than they had expected to but not so much more that they won’t come back to Las Vegas. 

The train will hopefully alleviate Friday/Sunday traffic congestion on I-15, and also mean fewer automobile emissions.

But the most important thing about the train might not be what it means for Southern Nevada, Southern California, and the whole lot of not very much in between, but its role as a demonstration project for the nation.

“This is just the start,” the aforementioned former mayor of South Bend, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, said at the groundbreaking. “I am firmly convinced that once the first customer buys that first ticket – to ride true high-speed rail on American soil, there will be no going back. People will demand and expect this everywhere and leaders will respond, and more high-speed rail lines are coming.”

Ray LaHood, who was Transportation secretary in the Obama years, also views the train from Rancho Cucamonga, in conjunction with California’s high speed rail program, as steps showing that the U.S., too, can have high-speed rail, just like a normal grown-up country.

If it spends on it.

“It’s time for the federal government to step up and provide much more funding — resources needed to bring two or three high-speed rail lines into service that can demonstrate this transformative technology to the American people,” Lahood recently wrote.

Like construction of its transcontinental ancestor in the 1860s, high-speed rail will not happen without federal spending. Under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Brightline is getting $3.5 billion in federally authorized private activity bonds – cheap financing – and the Nevada Department of Transportation got a $3 billion grant (the train tracks will be in the I-15 median).

And yes, it was in fact just earlier this month that Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo sent a letter to Joe Biden, telling the president he “must halt excessive federal spending.”

Mere days later, there Lombardo was, gripping and grinning at the Brightline groundbreaking ceremony. Evidently federal spending is okay if it happens in his state – and benefits the state’s most powerful industry.

High-speed more of the same?

Since the El Rancho opened on what was then Highway 91 in 1941, Southern California has been the biggest feeder market for the Las Vegas resort industry. Those who stand to benefit most from the train are those who were always the intended beneficiaries of every one of the multiple California-to-Las Vegas rail projects that have been on the drawing board over the decades, Nevada resort corporations and their shareholders.

Biden likes to say his policies are designed to grow the economy from the middle out and bottom up. And much of his economic agenda – empowering workers, investing in public programs and services, reviving a long-neglected fight against corporate consolidation and trusts – are examples of that. 

Biden has also done more than any president to shift the country, and the world, away from the conviction, so firmly established in the Reagan-Thatcher era, that government’s top priority is to help big business.

But the faith that everybody else will be helped by helping business is still rooted in portions of Biden administration economic policy, namely its commitment to making targeted public investments to attract private investment. 

Hence $6.5 billion in federal financing assistance and grants for the train from Rancho Cucamonga.

With a projected 10,000 workers employed to construct the high-speed rail line, and an estimated 1,000 permanent full-time employees once the train is running, the project’s direct impact on a 1.1 million strong Southern Nevada workforce is miniscule.

But the train’s economic impact in Nevada, like Southern Nevada’s economy, is predominantly tourism-based. The train, and its immediate purpose, is in keeping with something that Las Vegas is very good at: Attracting tourists and their money.

Which presents the prospect of even more of something that Las Vegas is very, very bad at: Distributing fair portions of that money to the working Nevadans who make everything else possible.

For as many years as Nevada politicians and industrialists have worked to get rail service from California, they have failed to address or often even acknowledge Nevada’s systemic barriers, skimpy public services, and economic inequities that make life harder for working households than it needs to be.

And for as many years as Nevada politicians and the industries for which they stand have preached about the importance of workforce development, they have neglected the general welfare and development of the workforce Nevada already has.

The football and baseball fields, the car race, the routine tax breaks for businesses that don’t need tax breaks – all come with promises that the money they generate will flow through the economy and benefit everyone.

Yet wage growth in Nevada is among the nation’s lowest and slowest, and has been for most of the current century. 

A new train isn’t going to fix that.

Multiple public services that would buttress and support the workforce  – including but certainly not limited to public transit – have never been backed by Nevada policymakers with anywhere near the enthusiasm – and juice – that was tapped for, say, a football field, or a battery plant.

The resort industry gets a multi-billion-dollar high-speed train to deposit customers at its doors. The people who work behind those doors get a couple new dedicated bus lanes on Maryland Parkway.

There are a lot of reasons to like a high-speed train, especially in a country that doesn’t do high-speed trains. But it isn’t, to borrow a phrase beloved by economic development evangelists everywhere, a “game changer” for the local economy or the people who work in it.

The U.S. is woefully behind other nations in the development of high-speed rail. Efforts to redress that grievance have to start somewhere. And Rancho Cucamonga is … somewhere.

So good luck, train?

And however negligible its impact on the lives and well-being of the Southern Nevada working class, if a high-speed rail demonstration project helps kick-start development of more high-speed rail in the U.S., that would be orders of magnitude more meaningful, productive and useful than, say, a publicly subsidized baseball field.

Of course, far more meaningful than both of them put together would be a metro area rapid mass transit system.

The post Cool. Now do transit for people who live here. appeared first on Nevada Current.

Workers at the Washoe County Registrar of Voters counting early ballots in 2020. The process was live-streamed online. (Screengrab via YouTube)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee on Friday announced a “100,000 person strong” program designed to harass election officials and their employees and discredit democracy in Nevada and a dozen other states.

In a statement announcing its Orwellian named “election integrity program,” the RNC said it is “establishing a robust network of monitoring, and protection against any violation or fraud.”

Neither the RNC, Trump, nor anyone else has ever provided any evidence of fraud that would have altered results of the 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden.

“We will aggressively take them to court,” declared Charlie Spies, the RNC’s lead lawyer in the program. 

Again? 

More than five dozen lawsuits filed by Trump and Republicans challenged the 2020 election results, including several suits in Nevada. To reiterate, the existence of significant fraud or illegal voting was not found in a single one of those cases.

“The Democrat tricks from 2020 won’t work this time,”  Spies said.

A few weeks after the Trump-instigated January 6 attempt to steal the election, Spies himself acknowledged lies launched by Trump and his allies about the 2020 election are “simply not true.”

The RNC’s announcement issued Friday is loaded with hyperbole and innuendo about “voter fraud,” and a “rigged” election, but refers to no evidence of either. That’s not surprising. To reiterate, the courts and election officials in state after state, including Nevada’s then-Secretary of State, Republican Barbara Cegavske, found no evidence that the 2020 election was “rigged.”

But the RNC isn’t promising to intimidate election officials and workers in Nevada because of evidence of wrongdoing in 2020. The RNC is launching its effort because Trump controls the RNC, and he told it to.

‘Democrat tricks from 2020’? Do tell.

With Friday’s RNC announcement, the de facto official position of the Republican Party in 2024 is that in 2020, in Nevada and several other states, every election official, including multiple Republican ones, along with thousands of poll workers and election staff in those states, were co-conspirators in an extravagant and sweeping conspiracy to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump.

Many of the federal judges rejecting suits from Trump and Republicans in 2020 had been appointed by Republican presidents. Several of them had been appointed by Trump. 

Yet for the “Democrat tricks from 2020” to have worked, dozens of state and federal judges would have also had to be in on the conspiracy. 

For the alleged plot – again, the existence of which is now a fundamental premise of the official Republican Party – to succeed, not just judges but thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people across the country would have had to have been in on it. It would have had to be an unprecedentedly sophisticated bipartisan conspiracy spanning all branches of local, state and federal government in multiple states.

And yet to this day, and despite multiple and ongoing efforts to prove election fraud by everyone from Trump’s ever-changing stable of quack lawyers to the RNC to Fox News to the My Pillow guy, not a single one of the thousands and thousands of people who would have had to participate in the “Democrat tricks” have confirmed any Republican allegations of the alleged vast conspiracy.

Because there was no conspiracy. 

There was an election. 

Trump lost.

Whether Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who co-chairs the RNC, or Sigal Chattah, who is Nevada’s Republican Committeewoman, or any of the other RNC’s leaders, members and/or staffers sincerely believe the fantasy of the “stolen” 2020 election – in other words, if they have genuinely been brainwashed into delusion – is irrelevant. The delusion is now official RNC policy. Their job is to act accordingly. And that job, specifically, is “a 100,000 person strong” effort to belittle and discredit democracy.

To belabor the obvious, the last thing Trump wants to do is protect the integrity of elections. He is dedicated to doing the opposite of that.

He relentlessly attacked the election process in the years leading up to the 2020 election in an attempt to discredit the results even before any votes had been cast, and lied about the process on election night, in an attempt to stop votes from being counted.

After all the votes had been counted he continued to tell lies about the election, and instigated the January 6 insurrection. 

When that failed, he started running for president again. He’s been lying about the 2020 election and, in a repeat of his behavior prior to the 2020 election, trying to discredit the 2024 results in advance.

The RNC’s announcement Friday is not an “election integrity program.” It’s just an extension of Trump’s attacks on democracy and penchant for cheating.

How ugly will it get in Nevada?

Trump’s adoring flock continues to be mesmerized by his schtick. Pandering to that flock, Republican elected officials and office-seekers, even those who did not deny the 2020 election results, have effectively condoned Trump’s war on democracy by citing “concerns” in some segments of the public about the 2020 election – concerns that were fabricated and spread by Trump.

Those Republican elected officials and office-seekers are implying, with no evidence, that somehow some vague something must have been wrong.

If not election deniers, they are election-denier-adjacent. They are irresponsibly enabling and lending credibility to Trump’s effort to end democracy. Their behavior is despicable, cowardly, and an ongoing threat to the nation and its people.

Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo is a good example of this (although most of the Nevada press doesn’t seem to care much).

If Lombardo shows the same blithe disregard when the RNC begins intimidating Nevada election workers, filing more nuisance Nevada lawsuits in which it compares apples to orangutans, and spreading lies to undermine his constituents’ faith in the same election system by which he obtained his job, he’ll be enabling and empowering all that as well.

By looking the other way, Lombardo would also be doing his bit to help Trump nullify the votes of Nevadans in 2024, as Trump tried to do after the 2020 election.

Lara Trump as co-chair of the RNC, Michael McDonald and fellow indicted election deniers in charge of the Republican Party in Nevada, Trump’s cavalcade of weirdo lawyers … given the chuckleheads who will be involved, it’s tempting, maybe even warranted, to speculate that Trump’s lawyers and the teams of people he enlists to harass election officials and undermine democracy in Nevada won’t be any more competent in 2024 than they in were 2020, and equally ineffective at overturning legitimate election results.

But even in failing, their efforts can be pernicious, as evidenced in multiple states, most notably the pain and suffering Trump and his minions cruelly inflicted on Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman.

How ugly will it get in Nevada? Especially if Lombardo, Rep. Mark Amodei, and other Nevada Republican elected officials and candidates go along to get along with Trump? We’re about to find out.

A version of this column originally appeared in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.

The post Trump, RNC promise ‘aggressive’ election interference in battleground states appeared first on Nevada Current.

He was for the waste dump before he was against it. He's also a tad untrustworthy. (Yucca Mountain photo via Department of Energy; Trump photo by Stew Milne for Alabama Reflector)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Some Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives went full-on blast-from-the-past last week, re-upping the idea of putting the nation’s nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

And so at a Senate Energy Committee hearing Tuesday, Nevada Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto had U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm confirm yet again that nope, the Biden administration has zero interest in or intention of reviving the waste dump siting process at any time or in any way shape or form, and not a single penny of Biden’s recently proposed budget is allocated to do that.

Well alrighty then, or words to that effect, said Cortez Masto, whose office then promptly issued a press release quoting her exchange with Granholm.

But there is the sinister possibility that voters in Nevada and other battleground states will elect an old, addled megalomaniac hell-bent on personal gratification via lawless authoritarian vengeance as president of the United States in 2024, because prices are higher now than they were in 2019. (Those voters will be extra-bummed later when 2019 prices still don’t come back.)

In other words, Trump, not Biden, might be president next year.

Trump was for the Yucca Mountain waste dump before he was against it. Fortunately, his administration, administratively, if you will, was in large part an exercise in incompetence and chaos. For the nation and its people, Trump “administration” blundering and ineffectiveness was probably, on balance, for the best.

As you may have heard there is now a sprawling Trump administration-in-waiting, sort of a shadow government, composed of lavishly funded organizations dedicated to avoiding a repeat of the administrative omnishambles that characterized Trump’s first occupation of the White House. 

Instead, this time, if there is one, they want to stack Trump’s administration with thousands of aspiring future federal employees currently being trained to be ready, willing – and maybe even able – to concentrate power in the White House, which will brush aside federal agencies and the authorities currently bestowed on those agencies by Congress and the courts.

The founders were so hot for “checks and balances” and “separation of powers” they entrenched those doctrines in the Constitution. But the groups hoping to write and carry out policy for a second Trump term feel that everything would be much better if Trump is allowed to rule as the all-powerful law unto himself he clearly already believes he is.

The army of right-wing ideologues who aspire to displace “deep state” expertise with expertise all their own are the product of dozens of groups, but the effort is spearheaded by the once-respectable (more or less) Heritage Foundation and its “Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project.”

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections,” reads a statement on the project’s homepage. “We need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.”

(For the record, Trump and his movement are a lot of things. “Conservative” isn’t one of them.) 

There is also a Project 2025 coloring book for Trumpy wonks. Just kidding. It’s an 887-page policy agenda outlining dozens and dozens of specific things a new Trump administration should start undertaking “on Day One” (aka the same day Trump says he will be “a dictator”).

One of those things: “Restart Yucca Mountain Licensing.” 

Maybe House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rogers (R-WA) had that part of the Project 2025 playbook in mind when she and her committee got whipped up about Yucca last week.

Along with restarting Yucca licensing, Project 2025’s to-do list includes making the Department of Energy “work with” the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on licensing the dump.

The NRC is – by design – an independent agency. A president appoints commissioners to fill vacancies, but the NRC’s decisions and rulings and practices are supposed to be based on science, not politics or ideology.

Project 2025 really, really dislikes independent regulatory agencies. Independent regulatory agencies making evidence-based decisions instead of ideologically driven ones aren’t what Trumpism is about. 

Trump also loathes independent regulatory agencies, and is vowing to bring them under his perfectly normal sized thumb.

When Trump’s very own deep state in the wings says “work with” – as in working with the NRC on Yucca licensing, for example – it means control.

(There is even concern that Trump would “work with” the Federal Reserve. And yes, the prospect of Trump setting interest rates gives the markets the willies.)

Low-hanging isotopes?

Despite the Biden administration’s push for more nuclear power as part of its all-of-the-above energy policy, the nuclear “renaissance” that has been promised so many times over the years remains a pipe dream. Nationally and globally, nuclear power today is the same it’s been for at least the last three decades, an energy source in decline.

The Yucca dump has been all but dead for most of the current century, thanks to a combination of the late Harry Reid’s clout and Nevada’s status as a presidential battleground state. For a lot of Nevada voters, especially ones who’ve moved here more recently, the waste dump might not be the political motivator it traditionally has been for the state’s electorate.

And bringing thousands of tons of radioactive waste from the nation’s nuclear power plants to Nevada is not the most dire consequence if Project 2025’s priorities were adopted and carried out in a second Trump administration. 

Laced with white Christian nationalism, misogyny, and hostility, other Project 2025 priorities include but are not limited to banning abortion nationally, and harshly discriminatory anti-LGBTQ policies. 

As sociologist and national treasure Theda Scocpol put it recently, the extremist would-be Trump administration in waiting would implement “detailed plans to take full control of various federal departments and agencies from the very start and to use every power available to implement radical ethnonationalist regulations and action plans.”

For Project 2025, architect of the extremist judicial system Leonard Leo, and the other powerful interests and people plotting policies for a second Trump term, forcing nuclear waste on Nevada is a second-tier priority, at best. 

But that’s a thing about lower-tier goals. They’re usually the easiest to achieve.

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