Best Promise Keeper

July 28th, 2011

Gov. Brian Sandoval had made his intentions quite clear: No new taxes. But this spring, simultaneously confronted by budgetary Armageddon and a Nevada Supreme Court ruling that the state couldn’t swipe money from cities, he accepted the extension of taxes that had been scheduled to “sunset.” Among his conservative comrades, this made him the poster-boy for promise-breaking. But if you want to get right down to it, continuing an old tax is not the same as creating a new one. Political promises are all in the parsing, and Sandoval, a former judge, knows how to keep his rear-end semantically covered.