I still remember the press conference to kick off the second special session with Gov. Steve Sisolak and the Democratic leadership.

“These are difficult issues,” the governor said. “But I want the people of Nevada to know that I have insisted both on worker protections and business protections being in the same bill. Both are critical to protecting lives and the economy. Some may ask why hospitals are excluded from the bill. It’s simple: They already have much greater protections in the law, as they should. They should not have more layered on top of those. That is only fair to patients and their loved ones.”

“That’s right, governor,” Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro added. “These will be difficult votes for our members. But we are committed to an open process with a thorough hearing on all of these issues and the public and interested parties will have plenty of time to make their cases. And we will make sure the Republican minority is informed every step of the way. Nothing will happen in the dead of night. This is too important.”

“We are at a crisis point in this state,” said Speaker Jason Frierson. “This is truly an extraordinary situation, which is the constitutional threshold for calling a special session. So we will not consider any extraneous issues that our core supporters want us to bring up, such as passing silly resolutions to tax mining or jamming through election changes we think will have a partisan benefit.”

The governor and the leaders pledged to have joint news conferences at the end of every day of the session to answer any questions. They promised the controversial worker protection/business liability legislation would be introduced on the first day to make sure it received a full vetting.

***

Of course, none of that actually happened.

And as a result of a profound failure to communicate and a careening rush to passage, an ordinarily opaque process was rendered visibly dark (sorry, Mr. Milton) and public confidence in what occurred surely was shaken, if not shattered. The “process” whereby SB4, now known as the liability bill because the worker protections were barely talked about, was cobbled together would have made Dr. Frankenstein proud. A product of good intentions that paved the way to a legislative hell, the measure was conceived by powerful interests before the session began and then passed from one house to another like a child desperate to receive the approval of foster parents but whose provenance was kept a mystery.

This is the way sessions fail; not with the end result but with disastrous messaging that makes potentially good public policy look like the ingredients of the sausage laid bare. Thus it becomes unpalatable or incomprehensible for many, a grotesquerie that even Mary Shelley could not have imagined.

I’m not naïve. Of course, some negotiations have to occur in private. You can’t have all members of the Gang of 63 involved in everything.

Fine. But this is a body not bound by the Open Meeting Law, meeting far away from where most people live AND during a pandemic. To execute a Ram and Jam session, taking half the time on many more and complicated issues than it took last month to cut the budget, is a travesty.

It did not have to be this way.

The underlying precept of SB4 makes sense — COVID-19 created a situation whereby employees returning to work needed assurances they would be safe, and businesses had every reason to demand that if they acted in good faith, they should not be subject to legal liability.

Sisolak knew that, and before the session started, despite pushback from his friends across the courtyard, he insisted the issues be linked. Politically, that was the only way to get the liability bill enacted. Does anyone think the Democratic leaders would have passed a standalone business liability bill?

The governor deserves credit for his heavy hand on this and for generally riding herd on the Gang of 63 in a way he did not in Special Session I. But he and his team were complicit once the session began in the failure to communicate exactly what they were trying to do, especially in allowing the hospital exclusion to become a flashpoint.

His estimable general counsel, Brin Gibson, committed an all-time Kinsley gaffe when first asked why health care facilities were not included by saying the legislation was the byproduct of conversations between “some of the most important members of the Nevada economy.” That is, the gaming industry and Culinary union had made a deal and, generally, that’s enough to get ANY bill passed.

But Gibson’s inadvertent transparency was followed in the ensuing days, as the hospital exclusion became an easy-to-foresee focal point, by multiple explanations of how that had occurred, ranging from the governor’s original directive protecting health care facilities to the answer being too complex to “premises liability” being different from medical malpractice coverage.

Everyone, from lawmakers to journalists to the poor hospitals, was flummoxed. And then when the teachers unions demanded that schools be excluded, too, thus threatening the measure’s viability in the Assembly, they were quickly taken out of the bill. Frankensteinian indeed.

A quick note about the poor hospitals, who even went so far as to put out a video that influenced no one: Their “we just care about the patients and our front-line workers” pitch tugged at some heartstrings but is belied by their existing liability protections and their ample bottom lines. But by singling them out and doing a terrible job of explaining why, lawmakers elicited sympathy for fundamentally unsympathetic organizations.

The trial lawyers made the case early on (behind the scenes) that hospitals should be excluded because of their existing special protections, and it’s not as if the casinos and Culinary went to the ramparts to fight for their inclusion. Their deal was done, thus giving the bill all the political momentum it needed.

In the end, the static notwithstanding, the bill passed easily despite all the hairshirt-wearing on the floors of both houses – 47 of 63 lawmakers voted for it. This is what Sisolak knew from the outset. By tying the issues together, you would get enough votes from both parties to pass it, even if there was a little hemorrhaging on both sides.

The Culinary and the Sands lobbying for the same bill! Now that’s bipartisanship.

But the ends were not justified by the means here because of the process, which was reminiscent of so many “important members of the Nevada economy” (hereafter known as The Gibson Euphemism) making deals and then foisting them on a generally compliant Gang of 63 that has rubber-stamped so many bills after a glitch or two and fiery, truth-laden speech by Ira Hansen.

I have seen this movie before — lawmakers helping write contracts between the Culinary and the Strip and rubber-stamping deals worked out by special interests. But this felt like the sequel that jumped the shark, like a horror series that had one too many installments.

I don’t want to hear about how tough this vote was or how pained you are that hospitals and schools were excluded. This bill would have made Otto Von Bismarck blush and is emblematic of a terrible process that we see time after time in Carson City.

Yes, substance matters more than style, and SB4, for the most part, makes a lot of sense. But ensuring the public has faith in how you got there is part of an elected official’s job.

Was the 32^nd special session the nadir of an ever-deteriorating process? It’s arguable, but I have never seen it worse. And while the liability bill was the best example, all six days featured actions that ranged from offensive to outrageous.

Late-night hearings with little opportunity for public testimony — sure, they generally ignore it anyhow but at least pretend you care! Restrictive rules such as banning minority amendments and dumping complex policy bills into the public eye with no notice — yes, the Republicans may act in bad faith, but kill them with kindness before you kill their amendments. And three different mining tax resolutions all passed without any hearings or analysis, and with some lawmakers arguing they can be properly vetted in 2021 — how does that make any sense to anyone not in the bubble?

There was much-needed and debatably emergency legislation passed here — baby steps on enacting criminal justice reform, addressing a coming eviction cliff and fixing the unemployment benefits debacle. You can even argue that mandating all active voters get a ballot during a pandemic makes sense – it’s arguable but defensible – but also legalizing “ballot harvesting” was bound to draw blowback – it’s arguable and not nearly so easily defensible.

So why did this occur? The answer Democrats won’t give, but is the truth: Because we can.

Yes, Lord Acton was right, and the majority party seemed eager to prove his thesis correct. Perhaps there will not be consequences; maybe the Democrats will even perversely benefit because those mining tax “no” votes could hurt Republicans.

No matter. The bigger issue is the process is broken, and it is not strictly a partisan affliction. Indeed, the GOP minority would surely behave in much the same way (and has) if it held the majority. And the midnight stunt as the session came to a close of Senate Minority Leader James Settelmeyer calling for another special session to limit the governor’s emergency powers and GOP Sen. Keith Pickard reading from the Declaration of Independence (I kid you not) did not exactly inspire confidence.

But for now this is a Democratic problem. They control Carson City and will come 2021, too. It’s on them to reform the process, adding more transparency or openness. I am probably whistling in the dark because there is rarely a penalty for this kind of bad behavior. But I am also ever-hopeful (definition of insanity, I know).

All sessions end ugly, and some end uglier than others. But this one began badly, continued to get worse and ended abominably.

It didn’t have to be this way. It should never be so again.

Jon Ralston is the founder and editor of The Nevada Independent. He has been covering Nevada politics for more than thirty years.