Day 4 & 5 - All's Quiet on the Northern Front

Thursday saw very little action of any kind in the Senate, and as far as I can tell, it was no different in the Assembly. And Friday’s meetings were cancelled altogether. Although the COVID-19 pandemic and the lack of vaccine is still commanding the attention of the media, it seems the Legislature isn’t paying attention. Vaccine supplies are hard to find. And those that are have been sent to wealthy areas more than areas of the poor, or so we are told. We are also barraged by emails from people who never received the unemployment benefits they paid for, yet we’ve not even talked about it. No bills have been heard that address any of these problems or inequities.

More alarming to me is that we are a week in and neither have there been public discussions about the school closures and resulting child suicides and mental health crises, or even the partial-closure of businesses - and the Legislature itself - despite declining rates of infection and hospitalizations. It seems as if the closure of the legislative building and the moving of all meetings to a virtual space has little to do with public safety and everything to do with public silencing. We hear anecdotally that people are struggling to get in to the meetings by telephone to testify, and if they do, they are disconnected before they are allowed to speak.

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but this would be a perfect way to hide an agenda intended to squelch public opposition to the majority’s liberal agenda. Declaring a public safety hazard (whether or not it exists in other public settings, like restaurants, that are allowed to have at least some patrons, it appears that the virus is so smart it focuses its attention on legislators and lobbyists. Of course, that’s nonsense. But there is no apparent intent of the leadership to open the building to the people who own it.

For all the talk of “giving Nevadans a fair shot,” I see so much time being wasted on things of lesser importance while the real crises are left for another day. There is no sense of urgency at the top to address the suffering of ordinary Nevadans. It’s heart-wrenching to get hundreds of emails from people who are suffering and then watch the legislative agenda completely miss the point. I hope this changes, and soon.