(Bill Dentzer & Colton Lochhead | Las Vegas Review-Journal) – Twelve first-time state lawmakers will be among the 21 senators and 42 Assembly members when the 81st session of the Nevada Legislature convenes on Feb. 1. Two of the new members join the Senate, 10 join the Assembly; all 12 represent some part of Clark County. …
One of the new Assembly Republicans, Annie Black of Mesquite, has chosen not caucus with her party, saying that other Republicans had opposed her successful effort to unseat a sitting Republican and that the caucus wasn’t conservative enough for her. …
Black succeeds Republican Chris Edwards, whom she defeated in the primary election in one of the state’s most conservative districts. Among the newest crop of lawmakers, she has drawn the greatest pre-session attention, not for entirely welcome reasons: her participation at the Jan. 6 protest in Washington, D.C. that led to the U.S. Capitol being overrun by a mob led national Democrats to push for her resignation, a call she rejected. (Black says she did not enter the Capitol.) She has decided not to caucus with other Assembly Republicans.
“I’ve worked very hard to control my messaging, to control how I have interacted with the voters, the promises that I’ve made,” she said in a mid-December interview. “At the end of the day, I just felt like agreeing to what the caucus wanted me to agree to was sort of giving up my control over that.”
Her bill drafts, which she acknowledges are “long shots,” including proposals for a special committee to eliminate nonessential spending, exempting certain small businesses from state licensing requirements and fees, and expanding the need for supermajority approval on certain budget outlays.
“I think it’s going to be a bit of an uphill battle for me to accomplish the things that I would love to accomplish,” she said. “But I’m still going to go after what I promised in my campaign I was going to do which is, you know, not to raise taxes and cut spending and those things.”
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