Annie In the News

Here’s a report by Riley Snyder of the Nevada Independent on my efforts to reopen the People’s House to the people…

The effort to reopen the doors of the Legislature to the public has finally moved beyond rhetoric and press releases.

After giving a floor speech denouncing the continued closure of the building on Tuesday, Assemblywoman Annie Black (R-Mesquite) made a motion on the Assembly floor to “open the Legislative Building under the same safety procedures of Walmart, bars, casinos and other businesses.”

After a short recess to discuss legislative rules, the motion wasn’t recognized — the motion came under the wrong order of business (“Remarks from the Floor” and not “Motions, Resolutions and Notices”). Speaker Pro Tempore Steve Yeager (D-Las Vegas) told my colleague Michelle Rindels after the session on Tuesday that it was an “inappropriate motion.”

Black nonetheless wrote in her newsletter that she plans to bring up similar motions during floor sessions. But Black — a freshman in the minority party who opted to not join the Assembly Republican Caucus — has relatively few cards to play under Assembly procedural rules. 

In essence, there’s no realistic pathway for a motion like the one Black brought to pass unless she’s able to get the support of a majority of the Assembly — an impossible task in the Democratic-controlled body. If she’s able to get her procedural ducks in a row, make the motion at the right time and is recognized by the Assembly speaker, Black could in theory force a roll call vote related to the building’s closure.

Such a vote would likely be on a motion to table Black’s initial motion, so not a direct vote on opening the building. It’d also default to a voice vote, but she’d need support from only two colleagues to force a roll call vote (fellow Republicans Jim Wheeler (R-Minden) and John Ellison (R-Elko) spoke in favor of her motion on Tuesday).

Even if all the pieces fall into place and a roll call vote is taken, any victory would be symbolic — I don’t think any Assembly Democrats would publicly move away from leadership’s position that a limited reopening should come in mid-April, after building staff are fully vaccinated.

(Steve Sebelius | Las Vegas Review-Journal) – Assemblywoman Annie Black, R-Mesquite, staged a bit of political performance art on the Assembly floor Tuesday.

Rising during a portion of the agenda reserved for “remarks from the floor,” Black recounted how the Legislature needed to allow people into its building on Carson Street despite ongoing COVID-19 restrictions, especially given that restaurants, casinos, bars and even T-Mobile Arena were open.

“Mr. Speaker, it is hypocritical for us to have this building closed but allow businesses in Nevada to be open,” Black said. “Either it is safe or it is unsafe to allow people into buildings. The Legislature should either close all buildings or open our doors.”

Black then quickly tried to switch to another part of the agenda, one reserved for motions, resolutions and notices, to say this: “I move we open the Legislative Building under the same safety precautions as required of Walmart, bars, casinos, grocery stores and other businesses.”

Although Black believes wholeheartedly in her cause, you could tell she was acting because she accidentally blurted out the next line of her script — appealing the ruling of the speaker — before the speaker had actually made a ruling. The Assembly instead went into a short recess, after which Speaker Pro Tem Steve Yeager refused to recognize Black’s motion.

Black definitely has a point. Nevadans have the fundamental right to petition the government for the redress of their grievances, under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article I, Section 10, of the Nevada Constitution. And fundamental rights may be limited only by laws that are narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling state interest.

Black is also not alone in wanting the building opened to the public, as it usually is during the Legislature’s 120-day session. Whether the public actually has a burning desire to go to Carson City is an open question. …

(A)s Black well knows, the Legislature is working toward opening the building as early as next month. Her push to do so now is more about getting a reaction from her real audience – constituents – than actually opening the building. When that finally happens, she can point to her stage debut and, in the meantime, look like she’s agitating for change.

They say freshmen in the Legislature should be seen and not heard, but that’s not Black’s style. Ever since she defeated former Assemblyman Chris Edwards in a GOP primary, she’s signaled that she would be an outlier. As a freshman member of the minority party (she even eschewed joining the Assembly’s GOP caucus, lest her values be compromised), Political Orphan Annie is a minority of one, and she has literally nothing to lose. The big, bad Democratic majority was going to ignore her no matter what.

Click here to read the full article

Annie talks with Kevin about her efforts to reopen the Legislature to the public, her bill to terminate Gov. Steve Sisolak’s “Declaration of Emergency” and her other pending BDR’s (bill draft requests)…

(Katelyn Newberg and Bill Dentzer | Las Vegas Review-Journal) – As the state pulls back from the most stringent of pandemic-driven restrictions on public gatherings, Republican lawmakers in both houses have been agitating for the currently-closed legislative building to be reopened to the public.

They did so again on the Assembly floor Tuesday, when Assemblywoman Annie Black, R-Mesquite, used her floor remarks to outline the reasons for reopening then made a snap motion for the body to vote on reopening.

That motion was denied.

“Local governments are opening, businesses are open. It is time the Legislature was open to the public,” Black said ahead of her motion. “If it is safe to allow people from across the world into our casinos, it is safe to allow people into this building.”

The Legislature has conducted committee hearings and other business remotely, with those seeking to testify in committee calling in to virtual gatherings. Lawmakers, staff, the media, and others who work in the building began receiving vaccinations last week for COVID-19 ahead of the expected eventual reopening.

Assemblyman Steve Yeager, D-Las Vegas, acting as speaker on Tuesday, ruled Black’s motion out of order, and in his own floor remarks defended the existing rules.

“The safety of those in this building, whether they be members or whether they be staff, is and will continue to be first and foremost in the decision making process about if and when this building opens,” Yeager said just before the Assembly adjourned.

“I also like to say that this legislative process perhaps has never been more open to the public, than it is now. We have people calling in from all over the state to participate in these meetings that typically is not an option that’s available.”

(James DeHaven | Reno Gazette-Journal) – Campaign finance records show Amodei in December also made a $2,500 donation to divisive Mesquite Assemblywoman Annie Black, who attended the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that turned violent at the Capitol.

Black responded to calls for her resignation by saying she never breached the barricades nor entered the Capitol, adding that those who did should be punished “severely.”

Amodei’s campaign contribution to Black was the first to pop up in state records since 2017, when he cut a $500 check to the Lyon County Republican Central Committee. He has made only three other donations to a state candidates over the past seven years, according to filings from the Nevada Secretary of State’s office — all to Adam Laxalt ahead of his successful 2014 campaign for attorney general.

Laxalt chaired Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign in Nevada and helped orchestrate a slew of failed lawsuits meant to stop the ballot tally in the Silver State. He’s also one of a handful of high-profile Nevada Republicans who may challenge Amodei for Gov. Steve Sisolak’s seat in 2022.

Amodei’s Dec. 30 donation to Black’s campaign arrived well after she had first gained media attention for promoting baseless election fraud claims and declining to caucus with other Republicans in Carson City.

Amodei said he didn’t know Black very well, but was impressed by her appearances at a series of GOP-hosted Lincoln Day dinners in rural Nevada two years ago.

The congressman said he was later approached by Black’s campaign consultants, who asked if Amodei could make a donation to help out with her office expenses at the state Legislature.

He said future political considerations did not play a part in the move.

“Anytime somebody from Clark County shows up at a Lincoln Day Dinner, it gets my attention,” Amodei told the RGJ. “I don’t try to tack toward anything (before a primary election).

“I know some of the base is upset with me about voting to support the election. I get that.

“But I went to a (Republican) central committee meeting in Elko two weeks ago. … I didn’t ever feel threatened and most of them clapped politely when I was done.”

Black — a former city councilwoman from Mesquite who pulled more than $21,000 out of her own pocket on the way to ousting ex-Assemblyman Chris Edwards — confirmed Amodei’s account in a brief Friday phone interview.

To read full article, click here

(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.”

To read the full article, click here

Interview with Assemblywoman Annie Black starts in the second half of the podcast…

(Don Dike-Anukam | Fallon Post) – Incoming Nevada State Assemblywoman, Annie Black (R-Mesquite), is a very active political figure in Southern Nevada, who served on the Mesquite City Council for two years, running unsuccessfully in 2019 for the Chairmanship of the Nevada Republican Party.

In June 2020, she kicked off her candidacy for Nevada State Assembly District 19 and defeated three-term incumbent Chris Edwards (R). After winning that seat in November, Black announced that she would not join the Republican Assembly caucus led by Assemblywoman Dr. Robin Titus (R-Lyon/Churchill CO./Wellington/Smith Valley).

Black is a native Nevadan, born and raised in Las Vegas who is the mother of two boys, 16 and 18 years old. She is also a realtor, who moved to Mesquite six years ago.

As a sitting Assemblywoman, Black says, “My plans are to be a fiscal conservative, to work to help pass legislation that supports our businesses, and to raise no new taxes.” She says that she has already come out with BDRs (Bill Draft Requests). “I’ve announced them. And they’re all along the conservative lines. So, we’re doing Spending Restraint Act. I want to make sure that we don’t blow the budget out, like we have the last three sessions.”

She is still disappointed in how the 2020 election was handled, saying, “I’m disappointed in our elections in Nevada. I was not in favor of the primary being all done by mail-in ballot; I thought that was a big mistake, which opened the door for what happened in the general.” Black went on to explain that this led to same day voter registration, ballot harvesting, and ballots being sent to people who did not request an absentee ballot. She believes that her sentiments are shared by a lot of people.

Black was in Washington D.C. on Jan 6th when the U.S. Capitol building was attacked and saw first-hand much of what happened. Since returning to Nevada, she has experienced some backlash from critics stemming from that event.

She was at the Ellipse, an area located south of the White House and north of the National Mall, when President Trump spoke to supporters. “It definitely did not go the way that I anticipated, I can tell you that much.”

She explained that she made a last-minute decision to go and flew to Washington DC on Tuesday. She arrived at the Ellipse at around 8:00 a.m. on Wednesday, where she knew there would be a rally, and was there until about 11:00 a.m. “It was a typical Trump rally atmosphere, but we were pretty far from the stage and the feedback on the sound system was bad, so, we decided to go back, to go to the Capitol, because we thought we had heard the President was going to speak there at the end of the march.”

According to Black, when she arrived at the Capitol around 11:30 a.m., there was only one family there with teenage children. She did not notice any children there. She listened to the President’s speech on her phone and stayed in the crowd until two o’clock when the situation quickly began to change.

Black said at that time more people started to fill the area and, “there were definitely some different characters; there are people in gas masks and helmets and wearing all black and it just didn’t seem like the same group that was over at the Ellipse. So, it was a little strange; you know, you’re on edge, because already, you go into that situation, hoping that there’s no sort of terrorist attack or whatever. I mean, you just kind of want to be safe, and so, you’re already kind of on edge.” At this point, the situation began to escalate from what she could see where she was standing between the Capitol and the Supreme Court building.

Assemblywoman Black will begin her first day in the legislature on Feb 1st. She will serve on three committees: Government Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Natural Resources.

The Interview in Full…

Annie went back into the lion’s den to discuss the January 6 rally in Washington, DC.

Some fiery exchanges with one of the hosts, but Annie stood her ground. As listener Cory McMan put it…

“I just wanted to send you a note in show of support after hearing your interview on The Vegas Take radio show. You were treated very unfairly by the host, Brian Shapiro, but you handled yourself very respectfully and it was encouraging to hear your strength during the interview. Thank you for your service and please remain positive and confident in what you are doing.”

Thank you, Cory!

Interview with Annie starts at around the 21-minute mark…

(Vernon Robison | The Progress) – One local elected official had a first-hand witness of the explosive danger in feeding charged rhetoric to a frenzied crowd.

Nevada Assemblywoman-elect Annie Black of Mesquite travelled to Washington D.C. last week to attend the National Mall rally in support of Donald Trump held on Wednesday, Jan. 6. She planned to participate in a peaceful protest. But before the end of the day, she experienced a nightmarish scene as crowds got out of control and stormed through security into the Capitol building.

“I sure wasn’t planning on what happened, that is for sure,” Black said in an interview with The Progress after she returned home last week. “It definitely wasn’t at all what I signed up in attending the event.”

Black, who has attended several Trump rallies in various places during the past year, said that she had received word that a big rally would be held in Washington on Wednesday, the day that the Congress was scheduled to vote to certify the electoral votes in the Presidential election.

“There had been some rallies and protests recently and we really wanted to go,” Black said. “But we stayed home and just watched them on TV and kind of regretted that. So this time, we decided we were going to go and support the President.”

In addition, Black said she has been averaging more than 200 emails every day from people in her Assembly district who were asking her to stand up and fight for Trump and somehow change the Nevada outcome at the state legislature.

“Unfortunately, because of the make-up of the legislature, and the fact that we don’t even go into session until February, there really wasn’t anything that I could do,” Black said. “I did ask Speaker Friarsen to call a special session. But obviously that wasn’t going to happen.”

Black spent all of Wednesday in Washington. She arrived near the Ellipse just south of the White House, where the rally was taking place, at around 8 am that morning. The gathering at the rally was huge. Black said that she could barely see the stage and the sound system wasn’t working well at that distance.

She had heard that, after his speech near the White House, the President would make another appearance later on at the Capitol. So at around 11 am, she and her group decided to just go up to the Capitol Building and wait, hoping they could get better positioning for the later speech.

When they got there, they set up amid a much smaller crowd on the east side of the Capitol.

The President spoke at about 1 pm and they listened to the speech over a loudspeaker that another attendee had hooked to his phone.

“And then, all hell broke loose,” Black said. “All of a sudden there are thousands of people. And they were just fired up. I think a lot of people got caught up in the moment and things got a little crazy. That is not an excuse for what they did. But when such a big crowd gets fired up sometimes things get pretty wild.”

Black said that she had backed away from the activity, so she couldn’t see very well when the front lines of the crowd started to break through the barricades and approach the building.

But she definitely noted a very different feel to the crowd from what she had experienced near the Ellipse earlier in the day.

“It was just a different mixture of people that came there,” Black said. “When the influx of people started to arrive I remember noting that there were people walking around with gas masks and helmets. There were people with American flags that were letting them drag on the ground. It was just a different vibe.”

Black said that she witnessed a lot of people in the crowd who were trying to keep things from becoming destructive and violent.

“When stuff really started to hit the fan, there were a lot of people there who were shouting saying, ‘They’re not MAGA!’ about the people trying to get through the barricade,” Black said. “And when people tried to pull the barriers away, others were struggling with them to keep them in place.”

As the crowd broke through the barriers and began to approach the Capitol building, Black said that she withdrew far back to the east, toward the front of the Supreme Court building.

“When people rushed the fence, I didn’t want any part of that,” she said. “That wasn’t what I came for. I’ve just worked too hard and sacrificed too much to have this opportunity thrown away by doing something stupid like that.”

Even so, there were some Democratic groups that called for Black, and other Republican state legislators from across the event who attended the event, to relinquish their legislative positions and not be seated for the next session.

But Black said that she has no intention of resigning.

“It is ridiculous,” she said. “Those groups have never even talked to me and they didn’t even wait for me to make a statement about it. They just want me to resign for purely political reasons. I didn’t break any laws and I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Black said that witnessing this debacle has changed her life forever, though. She said that it has taught her lessons that she will remember. The manipulative and inflammatory rhetoric on both sides of the political divide needs to stop or terrible things could result, she said.

“When the representatives of either party pumps people full of this charged language and makes folks think it is the end of the world, then where do they go from there?” Black said. “I mean people felt like they don’t have a president to protect them, they don’t have a Senate majority or a majority in Congress; and especially in Nevada, we don’t have equal representation in our state legislature. So people start feeling really desperate and backed into a corner. All someone has to do is throw a rhetorical match in there and everything goes up in flames. I think that is what we were seeing there.”

Black said that the experience will definitely inform her approach to the State Legislature when she is seated in the Assembly next month. She wants to reach across the aisle to political opponents and get to know them as people she can work with.

“I feel like we all need to humanize one another,” Black said. “We need to start understanding that I’m not just a Republican and you’re not just a Democrat. We are all humans and we have things in common.”

“I don’t know how else we are going to fix this, because I am really afraid,” Black said. “We opened a Pandora’s box on Wednesday. And I don’t know if that is something that is going to go away.”