If you’ve taken the time to digest the Various Things & Stuff legal briefings, you’re no doubt hungry for some good, old-fashioned Quick Hits. Let’s do this thing!

• Political pop quiz: Laurie Bisch, who came in third in the recent sheriff’s primary, is an employee of the Metro Police department. Is Bisch:

a.) a sergeant

b.) a lieutentant

c.) an officer

d.) a deputy inspector

e.) an assistant sheriff

Answer is at the bottom. No peeking!

• Where does Lynette live? We had to laugh just a little bit at the outrage over the residency of Clark County Commissioner Lynette Boggs McDonald that surfaced Friday. The Metro Police Protective Association and the Culinary Local 226 have filed a challenge to Boggs McDonald’s residency that accuses her of living in a home just outside her District F.

How do they know? A private investigator tailed her for six weeks, and saw her doing all sorts of I-live-here things at her out-of-district house, like getting the paper, taking out the trash, leaving in the morning and coming back at night. (Her home in District F is the subject of a dispute with husband Steven McDonald, whom Lynette Boggs McDonald is divorcing.)

First laugh: You’ve got to be careful when you take on the police union. They know private investigators, and they’re sticklers for people obeying the law. So it may not have been a good idea for Boggs McDonald to dis them back when the union endorsed her opponent, Democratic Susan Brager, by pointing out they’d also endorsed convicted bribe-takers like Erin Kenny and Dario Herrera.

Second laugh: The outraged rhetoric was a bit over-the-top for the issue. Some samples:

“The public should be outraged at the kind of facade Ms. Boggs McDonald has been trying to put on. She doesn’t live in her district, and our community is tired of ethically challenged hypocrites sitting in office,” said David Kallas, executive director of the police union.

“Perjury and fraud are not political issues. Under penalty of perjury she said she lived at an address that we don’t think she lived in,” said Pilar Weiss, political director for the Culinary Union Local 226.

“This is an obvious abuse of power, and a slap in the face to her constituents,” Clark County Commissioner Tom Collins, speaking about redistricting plans that would place Boggs McDonald’s out-of-district home in her new district next year, once the election is over.

We’re not laughing at the police union, or the Culinary. We just wonder how much people really care if Boggs McDonald actually lives in her district, and how many voters would reject her for that reason.

Don’t get us wrong: If she really does live in an adjacent district, she’s not a qualified elector in District F, and she should be kicked off the ballot, as the union groups say. And under a ruling issued by District Court Judge Lee Gates (husband of another Boggs McDonald colleague, Yvonne Atkinson Gates), a person’s residence is where he or she lives and intends to live.

Third laugh: Boggs McDonald is no shrinking violet, and while she stayed silent on Friday when the story broke, that silence won’t last for long. Something tells us that a few people may just find themselves thrown into the fire in the name of Jesus. Is it getting hot out there or what?

• It’s obvious why it’s simply ridiculous to think that Saddam Hussein would do business with al-Qaida, given that the terror group is comprised of theocratic fascists while he was a secular dictator. Al-Qaida and Saddam lusted for the same thing: Power. And there’s not enough to go around. So why would a tyrant desperate to strut on the world stage help — much less give his precious WMDs to — a rival power faction? He wouldn’t.

That must be why the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Saddam refused requests for help from al-Qaida and tried to arrest one of its officers. Gee, you could almost hear the disappointment in Cheney’s voice when Tim Russert got the veep to admit on Meet the Press Sunday that “we’ve never been able to confirm any connection” between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But not for a lack of trying, right Mr. Vice President? Or Mr. President, who said in 2002 that “you can’t distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.” Gee, it seems like you can connect them!

• Clark County Recorder Frances Deane had a Tupperware container filled with holy water in her office? Gee, we sure hope that didn’t spill while she was moving her stuff out, having been booted from office by a District Court judge who found enough evidence to suggest she’d improperly sold decades of county records for a personal profit.

Yeah, a spill could have been messy. Deane: “It burns! It burns!”

• We didn’t say much about the recent dustup involving Las Vegas Sun Editor Brian Greenspun and our corporate master, Sherm Frederick. Even after Greenspun’s bizarre, morally confused column discussing when he’d disclose one of his many conflicts of interest, we figured readers just don’t care.

Well they might care about this: Greenspun just screwed over one of his own guys, right there in the paper.

Poor Las Vegas Sun reporter Sam Skolnik found himself the subject of Greenspun’s Sunday column, which took issue with a perfectly newsworthy, legitimate story Skolnik penned on District Court Judge Michael Cherry’s massive fundraising for a race for state Supreme Court. (After raising the bulk of a $500,000 war chest, Cherry discovered he’d be running unopposed.)

Greenspun’s meandering piece lamented that the noble Sun had given in to cynicism in the story. But after the Los Angeles Times’ recent series of stories on judicial misconduct, Skolnik’s piece was timely and quite fair.

But then Cherry apparently confronted Greenspun at a gathering, forcing Brian into the only crisis of conscience that matters for him: Saving one of his friends from negative scrutiny.

“The best [answer] I could think of was that we, too, had succumbed to the idea that money and politics was inherently bad. And to do that, we had to lose our trust in elected leadership,” Greenspun wrote.

“I am not quarreling with the reporter’s effort to explain the high cost of a judge running for election to the Supreme Court, but I am concerned that we, too, have fallen prey to the disease of mistrusting, and, by doing so, misjudging those who deserve better. And if that is true, I bear responsibility.”

Oh, no, you’re not quarreling with the reporter’s story. You’re just stabbing him in the back for all to see, proving two very obvious things. One, no one who does journalism at the Sun — no matter how righteous — involving one of the boss’ friends can expect support from the boss. And two, the Sun will always be a Greenspun family plaything more than a newspaper.

Don’t get us wrong. We like Judge Cherry, too. He’s a fine man, and a good jurist. We’ve been in his courtroom, and seen him dispense justice in a few cases, and he’s done exceptionally well. His fellow judges turn to him when court issues need explaining to us media types. And when we heard he was running for the high court, we were elated. The top bench in the state could find no better a legal mind. If we gave political contributions — which we don’t — our check would have been in Cherry’s half-million-dollar pile.

But that doesn’t mean the story wasn’t legit. It was. And Greenspun, by writing what he did, undercut one of his own reporters. How many of the Sun’s other journalists are going to go out on a limb now, at least before checking whether the subject of their story is acquainted with anybody in the extended Greenspun family, including corporate partners? And how is the Sun ever going to be the competitor that the Review-Journal so desperately needs? (The boss has a lot of friends, after all.)

It’s like the old Army Ranger saying: Friendly fire … isn’t. And they weren’t even talking about fragging, which is what Greenspun did.

Full disclosure: The author worked at the Las Vegas Sun from 1993 to 1997. This blog, CityLife, and the Review-Journal are all owned by the Stephens Media Group, which distributes the Sun daily inside the R-J in a federally approved joint operating agreement.

• U.S. Rep. Jon Porter finally did it: He disagreed publicly with his campaign manager, Mike Slanker. We knew this day would someday come, but it’s still surprising when it does. It was Slanker, after all, who has done most of the dirty work in Porter’s previous campaigns, leaving the candidate free to remain positive.

But when Slanker alleged that Porter’s Democratic challenger, Tessa Hafen, had never paid a mortgage or held a job in Nevada, it was a bridge too far. (Hafen currently pays a mortgage with her husband, and she’s held a variety of jobs in Nevada.)

“There’s no question that he should have qualified it,” Porter told the Review-Journal. Um, you mean qualified it by saying something like this: “She’s never held a job or paid a mortgage in Nevada! No, wait, I’m totally wrong. She has!”

Not exactly. Porter first said Slanker’s statement was truncated, but political writer Molly Ball informed readers that it was taken without abridgement directly from an e-mail. Whoops. Guess there’s the old “double meaning” thing to fall back on, right?

And so it was: “The facts are that she moved to Nevada, bought a house and got a job because she was going to run for Congress. The bottom line is, she hasn’t lived in Nevada for the past 12 years. Voters need to know our backgrounds,” Porter said.

And sure enough, Hafen — who grew up in Henderson, where her dad Andy Hafen serves on the City Council — has lived out of state since she went to college and worked for U.S. Sen. Harry Reid in Washington, D.C. Then again, it’s not like she’s been away that whole time. We’ll bet she can name a few new casinos, if you asked her.

But the point is, Slanker said something that was wrong, and Porter (sort of) corrected the record. That’s commendable. Now, congressman, about that time that Slanker called Hafen “a joke,” …

• Quotable: “It [invading Iraq] was the right thing to do, and if we had it to do over again, we’d do exactly the same thing.” — Vice President Dick Cheney, asked if he’d still invade Iraq if he knew the administration’s claims about weapons of mass destruction were 100 percent wrong.

Now that’s staying the course, people! It’s consistency like that that makes the lemming jealous.

• And finally today, the answer to our political pop quiz. Laurie Bisch, who came in third in balloting with 19 percent of the vote in her first run for office, is a patrol officer. She returned to work after the primary, and has endorsed Undersheriff Doug Gillespie for the top job in November. (Also, answer “D” was a trick question; the Metro Police department doesn’t use the rank of “deputy inspector” or “inspector.”)

Just because you’re in the majority doesn’t necessarily mean you’re right, and there is no greater proof of that than the state Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Nevadans for the Protection of Property Rights v. Heller. (This was the ruling that concerned the People’s Initiative to Stop the Taking of Our Land, or PISTOL.)

Let’s take a look, in the last of our Various Things & Stuff Law Reviews.

• First, a word about the appellant’s name. “Nevadans for the Protection of Property Rights”? These are the people arguing against the measure that would provide a much greater degree of protection to property rights in Nevada. George Orwell would be proud. And sad.

• Now, on to substance. This ruling essentially dissected the baby, finding that the initiative violates the state’s newly passed requirement that initiative petitions address only one subject. But instead of rejecting it outright, as the court did with the Tax and Spending Control measure (for other reasons), justices simply lopped off the parts they thought were extraneous, and left the rest intact.

What remains is still good: A ban on government taking private property from one owner and giving it to another, as was done in the now-infamous case of Kelo v. New London. And what was removed were the parts that opponents (business groups in an unholy alliance with governments) hated the most.

So, there’s no more opposition right? Wrong! Nevadans for the Protection of Property Rights are still objecting to some of the provisions. We’ll see why now.

• What’s in. Essentially, the initiative now says that:

– “Public use” doesn’t include taking private land from one owner and giving it to another.

– Property owners have the right to see all government appraisals of their land, and to demand that a jury decide if they’re getting a fair price.

– Property will be valued at its highest and best use.

– “Just compensation” means making a property owner whole.

– Property taken by eminent domain will revert to the original property owner if it’s not used in five years.

– The government can’t win attorneys fees if a property owner challenges the government’s eminent domain action in court.

• What’s out. The provisions struck by the state Supreme Court are:

– A declaration that property rights are “fundamental rights.”

– Unpublished eminent domain opinions are void.

– “Government actions” that result in loss of property value must result in compensation for the property owner.

– No appointed or retired senior judge can hear eminent domain cases.

– The right to preempt one District Court judge and one state Supreme Court judge in eminent domain cases.

• The upshot. Opponents, the most vocal of whom is Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury argued that provisions such as requiring compensation for all “government actions” could bankrupt the county. But they’ve also argued that the five-year, use-it-or-lose it rule would hamstring big road projects, in which governments “bank” land, intending to use it far into the future when buying it now is cheaper. And, Woodbury has argued, eliminating the penalty of attorney’s fees could encourage lawsuits.

But proponents say the government uses the threat of legal fees to discourage property owners from fighting eminent domain, essentially forcing them to argue with a gun to their heads. They also say that zoning or height restrictions constitute a “taking” equivalent to eminent domain, and should be compensated as such.

• Batting cleanup. The ruling — as well as the ruling on TASC, which we’ve reported on in the previous post — took the time to clarify a few things along the way that will guide future petition circulators. Here’s a rundown:

– The state law that requires a 200-word “description of effect” for each initiative and the law that allows opponents to challenge the accuracy of that description in the 30 days after its filed, are both constitutional, because they “facilitate the people’s right to meaningfully engage in the initiative process.” (TASC ruling)

– The 2005 state law requiring initiatives be limited to a single subject is constitutional, and violates neither the First Amendment nor the Fourteenth. (PISTOL ruling) It should be noted that this single-subject limitation also applies to bills introduced in laws passed by the Legislature.

“Thus, the Nevada Constitution specifically authorizes the Legislature to enact laws regulating the initiative process, so long as those laws facilitate the provisions of Article 19 [of the Nevada Constitution].”

Moreover, the court wrote, citing the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in the case Campell v. Buckley (2000), “the single-subject rule prevents petitioners from gaining passage of provisions that would not otherwise become law by attaching them to more popular proposals or concealing them in a long and complex initiative.”

• The great divide. Instead of simply tossing the entire initiative off the ballot, the court’s majority ruled instead that parts should go forward and parts should not. Here’s how the majority explained it:

“In this instance, because the Legislature has provided no specific remedy, striking the entire initiative, instead of severing the offending sections and allowing the remaining initiative to be placed on the November ballot, would run counter to the people’s right to express their will through the initiative process.”

But that view wasn’t universally held. Two justices — Bill Maupin and James Hardesty — dissented, saying it was wrong for the court to edit the initiative.

“In this, the drafters of the multifaceted PISTOL petition have carefully added myriad additional features to ride the coattails of a very meaningful and salutory movement to restrict the powers of government to take private property for eventual transfer to other private interests,” Maupin wrote. “In short, the signatories to this petition were forced to vote for the other measures in order to achieve the protection they sought from the ruling in the Kelo case. And, conversely, it is quite arguable that the non-Kelo provisions were inserted because of a legitimate concern that they would fail on their own. This is exactly the type of logrolling that [the single-subject rule] was meant to prevent.”

Maupin said if the court really wanted to edit the initiative, it should have listened to the oral arguments of proponents — who said the initiative came as a result of the Kelo ruling — and strike all but the single section that seeks to remedy that problem here in Nevada. “Thus, while complete removal of the matter from the ballot is the harshest of all results, it is the most solid legally….”

Hardesty, on this subject, agreed: “That does not mean, however, that we may ignore admitted violations of the rules that plainly establish how the people of this state may amend their constitution and change their laws. In fashioning a ’sever and strike’ remedy for an admitted violation of the single-subject requirement, the majority has ignored the violation itself,” he wrote.

In this, he cites the case of Rogers v. Heller (2001), in which the court held “initiative legislation is not subject to judicial tampering — the substance of an initiative petition should reflect the unadulterated will of the people and should proceed, if at all, as originally proposed and signed.”

After noting the court majority struck at least two provisions without finding they were unconstitutional, Hardesty concludes, “Instead, courts should respect what the citizens of this state have signed by refusing to manipulate or tinker with it. While striking a petition that violates the single-subject requirement in its entirety perhaps seems severe, perverting the signers’ will through discretionary judicial modification is no less drastic a remedy.”

• Conclusion: We think the dissenters have a very good point. While the court majority at least let some of the initiative through, it was clearly not what was intended by its framers. And while the court eliminated TASC in its entirety for failing to follow the rules, it appears the majority made an exception to the single-subject rule here. (Preferring “substantial compliance” to “strict adherence”?) That opens the door for the majority to be accused of a political move — not wanting to anger conservatives who’d already lost their tax measure, by striking down a petition on another hot-button issue, eminent domain.

If the rules are the rules, they should be followed. Right?

We know the conventional wisdom among right wingers is that the state Supreme Court made a political ruling in deciding to throw the Tax and Spending Control initiative off the November ballot. The conventional wisdom among the what passes for the left in the mainstream media — the Las Vegas Sun — is that the court acted with “courage.”

But strip away the partisan rhetoric and you’ll find a solid ruling that actually includes a number of praiseworthy developments, including a little-noticed provision overturning one of the worst parts of the worst court decision in American jurisprudence, the 2003 case of Guinn v. Legislature.

Let’s take a look at the ruling in greater depth in the Various Things & Stuff Law Review:

• One question that was never really answered to anybody’s satisfaction was why the Tax and Spending Control people had two versions of its petition in the first place. (One version said the state’s budget could only grow by the rate of growth of population and inflation starting in 2007 and 2009, and another said the rate starting in 2005 and 2009. The difference amounted to about $1.5 billion.)

Now, this is an initiative that was drafted, re-drafted and re-drafted again. Its supporters waited to start circulating it until they learned the results of a referendum on a similar matter in Colorado last year. And it was held up by a lawsuit filed by the union-backed Nevadans for Nevada. If any document should have received — to coin a phrase — strict scrutiny, it’s the TASC petition.

But this expensive “typo” is what led the court to toss the matter out. Boiled down, the decision says initiative law requires that petition circulators file a copy of the measure they intend to circulate with the voters with the secretary of state’s office. In this case, the TASC masters filed two different versions with the secretary of state. Who’s to guess which one was correct and which is not? The court said there was no guessing required.

In fact, justices got downright comic in one section of their ruling. “As [a dissenting opinion in a California Supreme Court ruling] pointed out, when inaccurate information about a proposed initiative is widely disseminated, as it was here, the integrity of the electoral process is jeopardized. And there is no good reason to put courts in the position to decide whether the discrepancy was so insignificant that it satisfies a ‘substantial compliance’ standard, when a requirement is clearly and unambiguously mandated by the Nevada Constitution, and compliance with that requirement entails nothing more than using a photocopy machine.”

Bam! Take that, TASC people! Now that you’ve had your fun, Nevada Supreme Court, why not leave the political satire to the professionals here at Various Things & Stuff, OK?

• Which standard? Speaking of “substantial compliance,” what’s that all about? Glad you asked. The court ruled that there are two standards it could judge the TASC initiative by: strict adherence, which means you’ve got to follow the letter of the law, or substantial compliance, which essentially means close enough for government work.

They chose strict scrutiny. Why? The justices quoted a California case, Costa v. Superior Court (2006) in which a California initiative with two different versions was allowed to go on the ballot despite the discrepancy. But Nevada’s justices were more persuaded by the dissent in that case, which reasoned “the confusion and uncertainty about which version, if either, would be placed on the ballot necessarily impaired the ability of interested parties to understand the measure and debate its merits during a critical pre-election period” and that it was unnecessary anyway “given that the constitutional and statutory mandate of providing to the [California] attorney general a true copy of the initiative to be circulated is ‘readily and easily met’ and is ‘a simple matter of proofreading.”

Moreover, Nevada’s justices argued in another section of their ruling, if groups are allowed to file two — or multiple — copies of an initiative with the secretary of state and rely later on any or all of them, “interested parties would be left to guess which version was being circulated, and only when the circulated version was submitted to county registrars’ offices for verification would anyone other than the proponents have the opportunity to review which version was placed on the ballot.”

Yes, as the Review-Journal cannily noted in an editorial on Sunday, our justices were relying upon a dissent in the Costa case. But what does that matter, if the dissent is more persuasive than the majority holding? (You’ll see more of this kind of arguments from us in the blog on the PISTOL initiative.)

• Speaking of standards, this brings us to what may be the most earth shattering part of the TASC ruling. Out of the blue, the court on its own motion sought to undo the damage created by its 2003 Guinn v. Legislature ruling. Here are the relevant lines:

“And since the [TASC] committee has made a distinction between different types of constitutional procedural requirements, urging this court to adopt a looser standard of compliance for some constitutional requirements while maintaining a strict standard for constitutional authentication requirements, we take this opportunity to clarify Governor v. Nevada State Legislature [the official citation of the Guinn case], wherein this court, in construing the Nevada Constitution, distinguished between ‘procedural’ and ‘substantive’ requirements, concluding that procedure must yield to substance if the requirements conflict. We expressly overrule that portion of the opinion. The Nevada Constitution should be read as a whole, so as to give effect to and harmonize each provision.”

We’ll give you a moment to let it all sink in.

While that’s happening, a quick recap: In 2003, the Legislature was deadlocked over the budget and new taxes, and the schools budget was languishing in a special session of the Legislature. Gov. Kenny Guinn sued, asking the court to force the Legislature to fund the schools, which is a requirement of the state constitution, albeit one that says a single school must be funded in each county for six months out of the year.

The court faced the same dilemma as the Legislature: A requirement that new taxes be passed by a two-thirds majority in the Legislature, which was a voter-approved constitutional amendment championed by then-as-now gubernatorial candidate Jim Gibbons.

In the end, the court ruled that the two-thirds language was “procedural” and the education-funding language was “substantive,” and the procedural must of necessity yield to the substantive. So, the court said the two-thirds language doesn’t matter, and the Legislature could pass a budget with a simple majority.

The decision was outrageous, of course, and totally without merit, as everyone from law students to political pundits clearly saw. In the end, the Legislature acted with a two-thirds majority to approve a tax plan, and the matter was settled.

But the court refused to strike the offensive ruling from the books, specifically denying an appeal led by Republicans in the Legislature. Federal courts declined to intervene, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied a hearing on the matter. It was, until now, settled law.

But now, the court, on its own motion, in a single paragraph of an unrelated case, overturns the grievous error at the heart of Guinn v. Legislature? That is a truly unbelievable and noteworthy development. For that, we heap praise upon the justices. They have done the right thing, at long last.

Also, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out the irony: TASC master (and state Sen.) Bob Beers was one of the Assembly members who sued over Guinn v. Legislature, arguing that the two-thirds provision and the education-funding language of the constitution be given equal weight. Now, his TASC committee was found to be arguing for leniency with respect to a constitutional provision. And this time, the court stepped in to say no.

History’s hilarious merry-go-round is complete.

Finally, we’d be very remiss if we didn’t point out that Justice Nancy Becker, who is the first member of the high court to face election since Guinn v. Legislature, and whose opponent, District Court Judge Nancy Saitta has made it a campaign issue, signed on to the opinion overturning her work in Guinn v. Legislature.

Maybe there’s something to keeping a system of elected judges after all…

• With friends like these. The final noteworthy element of the TASC ruling was the fact that the court found, because of the two different versions, the initiative wouldn’t accomplish what it set out to accomplish, and thus voters who signed it wouldn’t get what they wanted.

“In other words, the circulated version, which would be presented to voters on the ballot, provided for 14-percent more spending than the filed version,” the justices wrote.

Conservatives will laugh at the notion that the court wanted to side with beleaguered taxpayers, but the fact is, the court is right: Voters who signed the circulated version to limit government spending would have gotten an initiative that allowed more than twice as much spending than the filed version.

• Beers, appearing on Friday on KTNV Channel 13, where he was interviewed by yours truly, promised that, in the future, the same mistakes would not be made. We tend to think he and the other TASCers won’t screw up again, and that voters will see this material on a future petition. The long-awaited, much-needed debate over taxes, spending and the future of Nevada will have to take place then.