Let the games begin!
The We Decide Coalition officially hand-delivered a 50-page referendum petition to the Nevada Secretary of State’s office in Las Vegas this afternoon calling for an up-or-down vote by the people of Nevada on SB483.
That bill – passed by the 2015 Nevada Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Brian Sandoval – represents the largest tax hike in Nevada history and includes a new gross receipts tax similar to the one more than 80 percent of Nevadans rejected at the ballot box just last November.
THAT ought to irritate some liberals and RINOs!
OK, a couple of things you need to know about this effort…
1.) Each individual name of more than 800 Nevadans who signed the “We Decide Coalition” online petition sponsored by Citizen Outreach in support of this referendum is listed on the cover letter submitted with the petition today. CLICK HERE
Thank you all!
2.) The language used to file the petition with the Secretary of State is almost identical to the language used in successfully filing a separate referendum on a sales tax hike way back in 1955. CLICK HERE
If the language was good enough then, it certainly should be good enough now.
3.) The language of the petition itself is an EXACT REPLICATION of the language in Senate Bill 483, including the “Description of Effect.” We didn’t change a word. Not even a comma. CLICK HERE
This makes this referendum different from a challenge Citizen Outreach already has before the Nevada Supreme Court on what has become “dueling definitions” of the state’s single-subject rule.
In the past, courts have defined the meaning of “single subject” very broadly for legislation but very narrowly for citizen ballot initiatives.
The only way for the courts to reject this particular word-for-word referendum as a violation of the single subject rule is to tell the people of Nevada that they are held to a completely different, thoroughly discriminatory definition of “single subject” than the people we the people elect.
Good luck with that.
Still, there will undoubtedly be a legal challenge to this referendum. And there isn’t much sense in potentially wasting a lot of time, effort and money actually circulating this petition until the inevitable court challenges are resolved.
So in the meantime, we’re going to wait until a separate tax repeal referendum, originally proposed by conservative activist Theresa Catalani in Reno, is filed and urge our supporters to work to get that initiative qualified for the 2016 ballot.
Unlike ours, Catalani’s referendum – being drafted by, among others, Nevada State Controller Ron Knecht, former Assemblyman Ed Goedhart and Las Vegas City Councilman Bob Beers – will seek to repeal just the new gross receipts “Commerce Tax.”
As such, the language for their petition is considerably less black-and-white than ours, so they continue to consult with their legal beagles and the Legislative Counsel Bureau to get it just right before launching.
I’m told they expect to file sometime in the next two weeks.
When they do, I’m going to encourage everyone in the We Decide Coalition to work and help qualify their petition as quickly as possible while ours winds its way through the legal system.
As you know, the wheels of justice grind slowly, and our existing single subject lawsuit was filed in 2012 and has been awaiting a decision by the Nevada Supreme Court for well over a year now.
So IF we get a favorable ruling by the courts on this new referendum, and IF we get it in time to still gather enough signatures to try to repeal the whole $1.4 billion enchilada, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it as far as going out and gathering signatures.
The bottom line: Due to Citizen Outreach’s leading efforts on behalf of Nevada’s taxpayers, one or more referendums to repeal all or some of the outrageous tax hikes Sandoval and the Legislature shoved down our throats this year could well be put on the ballot next year so that we, the people, will have the final word.
And if you’d consider making a contribution to help us continue fighting these kinds of fights against the Dark Forces of Big Government on your behalf, please CLICK HERE.
