Not only are there more partisan votes in the state Senate, but the Assembly is getting a little testy, as well. There, Republicans are a 15-person minority, and can be steamrolled at the whim of majority Democrats.

There’s very little that the Republicans can do to protest, but one tactic that the minorities in both houses use is voting in a partisan bloc against certain bills. Usually, it’s bills that aren’t critical or won’t cause Republican members election problems later on.

But if you read the Review-Journal today, you’ll no doubt have seen this story, which reports that the Republicans voted against AB 331 and an amendment thereto, which calls on the state engineer to encourage water suppliers to set prices that encourage conservation.

You mean, Republicans voted against encouraging water conservation? Why, that’s so stereotypical. And mock-worthy. And easily preventable by, say, actually reading the text of the bill.

So how did the Republicans let their partisan frustration lead them to go on the record against saving water?

“What happened, honestly, is we got our notes mixed up. We make a mistake. We meant to vote for the bill,” said Assembly Minority Leader Garn Mabey. “We made a mistake.”

Indeed, they did. Democrats in the Senate have been able to avoid voting against bills that, for example, encourage the love of babies and the imprisonment of criminals. The GOP in the lower house should be able to do the same. And Speaker Barbara Buckley has the prescription for how to do it: Read the bills, and don’t just rely on party leader’s notes.

The good news: On Friday, votes in the Assembly were almost all unanimous. Apparently, we can just get along. Mostly.

• Republicans hate mandates. That much is clear from this week’s big debate over state Sen. Dina Titus’ bill to force the few insurance companies that don’t already cover a vaccine for the human papilloma virus to do so. When the first vote was taken on April 13, Titus got every Democrat plus Republican state Sens. Mark Amodei and Randolph Townsend.

But after Townsend recalled the bill and set it aside, Titus was forced to remove the mandate with respect to local government self-funded insurance programs. That move was a big blow to the bill, since local governments are among the few entities left that don’t offer the potentially life-saving vaccine.

So after the local government mandate was removed, Titus not only got all her Democrats, Amodei and Townsend, she added a couple Republicans, too: state Sens. Dennis Nolan and Dean Rhodes.

Who are the holdouts? They are: State Sens. Bob Beers, Barbara Cegavske, Warren Hardy, Joe Heck, Bill Raggio, and Maurice Washington.

C’mon, people. As California’s legendary Jesse Unruh once said, “sometimes, you have to rise above principles.”

• When is more money not more money? When it’s calculated using legislative math.

On paper, it looks like Gov. Jim Gibbons has given the state’s K-12 education system lots more money than before, $300 million in fact. That’s a lot more than the $190 million in new money given to the state’s higher education system.

Or is it?

According to Assemblyman Morse Arberry, the $300 million will go mostly to inflation, salary increases, utilities, and additional enrollment. And as far as Arberry is concerned, he wants unencumbered new money beyond that, at least on par with what the state’s colleges and universities are getting. The Review-Journal calculates that would cost an additional $75 million.

In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, there’s not exactly bags of money sitting around in Carson City these days. (We know; we’ve looked.)

Something tells us this is going to be a battle that goes to the last hour of the last day of this Legislature.

• When are fees not fees? Well, they’re always fees. And they’re getting support from people like Raggio, the state Senate’s majority leader. In a budget work session on Thursday, Raggio wasn’t shy about indicating his support for fees assessed on industries to pay for their regulation.

Lawmakers agree to the fees. And so do industries, which get up and running a lot sooner when there’s enough money to pay for required inspections and certifications.

But will Gov. Jim Gibbons agree? He has said he will not sign any bill that contains a tax increase, a fee increase or anything that looks or smells remotely like that.

Since an initiative that Gibbons authored back in the 1990s says you need a two-thirds majority to increase taxes or fees, Raggio’s support will go a long way toward ensuring the measures pass by that margin. So the question then becomes, what does Gibbons do?

If he vetoes the bills, he will have kept his campaign-trail promise not to support taxes, not to mention upholding the Americans for Tax Reform’s infamous pledge. (They put pledge-breakers on a hall of shame website!) But the Legislature mostly likely will override his veto, and the fees will stand, thus making Gibbons irrelevant to the process. And irrelevant is not something that you want to be when you’re, say, governor. Plus, he’ll undoubtedly incur the wrath of Raggio, who believes in the process very deeply. (You’d rather be irrelevant than on Raggio’s shit list.)

If he signs the bills, reasoning (correctly) that their passage by a two-thirds majority means the Legislature will just override him, he stays a part of the process and in Raggio’s good graces, but he also breaks his pledge. The right-wing will be sure to pillory him for going back on it, and comparisons to George H.W. Bush are inevitable. At this point, his no-tax pledge is all the governor has.

It’s quite a dilemma, and yet another reason nobody should ever promise something like no new taxes. 

• And, just in case any of you readers are getting sick of the Legislature, why don’t we look at some other political news?

• If you didn’t think that U.S. Rep. Jon Porter was getting into the race against U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, you should now. Porter jumped in with both feet after Reid said publicly that he thinks the Iraq war is lost, and that top government officials know it.

“I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and — you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows — [know] this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday,” Reid said.

Porter, quoted in the same Associated Press story that reported Reid’s remarks, replied thus: “I have more faith in our soldiers than the Senate majority leader. I believe our troops can win this war as past generations have prevailed when our country’s future is at stake.”

Ouch, baby. That one is going to leave a mark.

Now, don’t get us wrong. We believe what Porter said isn’t accurate. Our troops can’t win the current war, because it’s a civil war in which they are only bystanders. And this war is not like “past wars,” which were planned and executed by men wiser than our current leadership, with just cause and discrete goals. Iraq is more like a bad misadventure, begun in lies and destined, inevitably, to be a stain on national honor.

But Porter was right about having faith in our troops: They won the ground war in days, rolling Iraq’s creaky military like a Marine taking down a Girl Scout. After that, there has literally been nothing whatsoever to “win” in Iraq.

That’s practical reality, however. Political reality is that Porter has his first solid issue to levy against Reid in three years. And Reid — if he’s to win his personal war, for reelection — can’t give Porter too many more of those.