A different Angle

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his puppet masters in the government unions have spent tens of millions of dollars over the past 2½ months droning with mind-numbing repetition that Republican Sharron Angle is "too extreme."

It was the theme of his subpar debate performance Thursday.

But is that really how Nevadans remember Ms. Angle’s eight years of service in the state Assembly, from 1998 to 2006?

In fact, Sharron Angle was minority whip of the Nevada Assembly when Democrats tried to force through a huge $800 million tax increase in 2003. Aided by a voter-enacted constitutional amendment that requires a two-thirds supermajority in both houses of the Legislature to pass tax hikes, the minority Republicans stood firm against those taxes, even after Gov. Kenny Guinn and others called them "irrelevant."

They weren’t "irrelevant." Democrats thought they could trap Republicans by enacting every big-spending measure they wanted, leaving the public school funding bill till last. Surely Republicans would cave in at that point, lest they be branded "anti-children"!

But with Sharron Angle providing the backbone in the Assembly, along with Bob Beers and other members of the so-called "Mean Fifteen," Republicans said, "No tax hike — trim spending."

Faced with defeat, the governor opted to ask the state Supreme Court to intervene.

Essentially adopting an amicus brief from the teachers union as "law," the Nevada Supreme Court stunningly ruled 6-1 that the Legislature could ignore the supermajority constitutional requirement, raising taxes by a simple majority vote.

Did Ms. Angle shrug and say, "Oh well, that’s the ball game"? She did not.

Using money out of her own pocket, she brought in John Eastman (currently running for attorney general in California) from the Claremont Institute to fight the Guinn v. Legislature decision all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court battle failed, but only one justice who supported that ridiculous decision was returned to the bench by voters — and he had to repudiate his own vote to win re-election. The high court has since renounced and reversed that ruling.

So in the end, Sharron Angle won. She prevailed on behalf of all Nevadans, and all Nevadans should be proud of her principled defense of their constitution.