Jon Ralston's recent lament about Nevada's "broken Legislature" strikes a familiar chord — one I've heard throughout my years practicing law, serving the community in various capacities and, yes, even during my own unsuccessful run for office. With his decades of experience covering Nevada politics, Ralston understands better than most how the exodus of experienced legislators weakens our democratic institutions. His diagnosis of the disease is correct. Term limits have drained institutional knowledge from Carson City, shifting power to the permanent class of lobbyists and staff who remain while elected officials cycle through.

But where Ralston prescribes professionalization as the cure — higher pay, annual sessions, more staff — I see a remedy that would kill the patient. The solution isn't to transform our citizen Legislature into a professional political class. Instead, we must strengthen the institution itself while preserving what makes Nevada's system a beacon of democratic governance with a Legislature composed of educators, lawyers, ranchers, small-business owners, plumbers, electricians, contractors, doctors, Realtors, retirees and working mothers, among others, who bring the authentic struggles and perspectives of their communities to Carson City. 

When the Nevada Constitution's framers designed our part-time Legislature with minimal compensation, they weren’t shortsighted — they were visionary. They recognized that the best lawmakers aren't the ones who stay longest, but the ones who bring their real lives to the legislative process, serve with sacrifice and return home to live under the laws they've made.

It’s called “public service” for a reason. Service implies sacrifice, temporary duty, a calling higher than personal gain. The teacher who takes unpaid leave to serve in Carson City understands education funding debates in ways no career politician could fathom. The small-business owner who closes shop for four months knows viscerally what regulatory burdens mean. The rancher from Ely ensures that voices from beyond the Reno-Vegas corridor are heard not as abstractions but as lived experiences. This diversity of experience and perspective is not a weakness to be corrected through professionalization — it's the very strength of our system.

While the loss of institutional knowledge due to high turnover of legislators concerns me as much as it does Ralston, there's an upside to legislative turnover that deserves recognition. New legislators bring fresh perspectives, innovative ideas and different leadership styles that reflect Nevada's evolving character. Fresh legislators question why things have "always been done this way." They question long-standing assumptions, challenge entrenched interests and resist the comfortable compromises that can calcify in any institution over time. They bring innovations from their industries, perspectives from their communities and, most importantly, they haven't yet learned what's "impossible" in Carson City.  

Consider my law partner, Assm. Toby Yurek — a 20-year Henderson police veteran turned attorney who represents injured first responders. His lived experience transformed abstract policy debates into concrete enhancements of our workers' compensation system and law enforcement statutes. Or my friend former Assm. Jill Tolles, whose background as an educator and advocate for trafficking victims led to landmark legislation combating human trafficking in Nevada. Both brought perspectives no career politician could replicate, worked across party lines and then returned to serving Nevadans directly — Yurek to representing injured workers, Tolles to leading a nonpartisan policy center. They haven't just theorized about Nevada's challenges; they've lived them.

Nevada’s citizen Legislature embodies what Czech president and playwright Václav Havel called 'living in truth' — the democratic discipline of facing reality rather than political abstraction. Havel, who helped topple communism through citizen action, understood that professional politicians eventually stop living in the same reality as their constituents. But when Nevada legislators know they'll soon return to running their businesses or teaching their classes, they can't escape into a cloistered political echo chamber of an entitled career politician and ignore the real-life consequences of their decisions.

Rather than creating a professional political class, let's implement reforms that address Ralston's legitimate concerns while preserving citizen governance.

1. Expand the legislative calendar rather than increasing salaries. Nevada's issues can't be fully tackled in just 120 days every other year. Instead of relying on full-time legislators, we could hold annual sessions, allow the Legislature to call special sessions on particular issues, establish stronger interim committees with actual authority, or lengthen regular sessions to 180 days. The focus should be on deliberate lawmaking, not on nurturing the ambitions of career politicians.

2. Limit the power of lobbyists. Require a five-year cooling-off period before former legislators can become lobbyists. Prohibit lobbyists from openly supporting or opposing legislation involving legislators they have financially backed or whose clients they represent. Mandate that lobbyists disclose their clients and all activities related to bill drafting and their positions on legislation. Ensure transparency in their behind-the-scenes actions in bars, restaurants, hallways and private meetings through more robust and detailed reporting requirements.

3. Radical transparency. End the Legislature's hypocritical exemption from transparency laws. Lawmakers force every public body to operate in the sunshine while they operate in shadows. Make them follow the same Open Meeting Law and Public Records Act they impose on everyone else. If city councils, county commissions and school boards must follow Nevada's Open Meeting Law and Public Records Act, why should lawmakers exempt themselves? Sunshine that's good enough for local government should be good enough for lawmakers in Carson City.   

4. Stronger ethics oversight. Create an independent ethics commission for the Legislature with subpoena power and the authority to hand down strong sanctions, including recall procedures, for violations. Make sure that penalties for corruption are tough enough to discourage even the most tempted individuals.

Strengthening institutions matters more than changing how people serve in them. California's professional legislature, with its $128,215 base salary, $214 tax-free per diem, and year-round legislative sessions, offers a cautionary tale. Has professionalization produced better governance? California faces many of the same challenges as Nevada — budget battles, hyperpartisan agendas and special interest influence — despite having well-paid full-time legislators. Meanwhile, the state's political class has become increasingly disconnected from the citizens they serve.

Compare California’s professional legislature with other citizen legislatures states. New Hampshire, with its 400-member House paid $100 per year, manages to govern effectively while maintaining deep connections to constituents. Wyoming's part-time legislature has built massive reserve funds while keeping taxes low. These aren't accidents — they're the fruits of citizen governance.

Yes, the departure of experienced legislators is a real loss for the legislative body. Their institutional knowledge matters. But the answer isn't to make legislative service so comfortable that people never leave. It's to build an institution resilient enough to function regardless of who serves — an institution that honors service over careerism, sacrifice over comfort and citizenship over professional politics.

Ralston is right that our Legislature faces serious challenges. But professionalization of our Legislature isn't reform — it's surrender. It's admitting that self-governance is too hard, that we need a political class to manage democracy for us.

I refuse to accept that surrender. Nevada's citizen Legislature, for all its flaws, represents something precious: the belief that ordinary people can govern themselves. That a teacher from Reno, a rancher from Elko or a small-business owner from Henderson can sit in Carson City and craft laws as well as any professional politician — and probably better, because they must live with the results of their lawmaking.

The work of the people must continue, whether individual legislators come or go. Our challenge is to make the Legislature work better as an institution while preserving its character as a body of citizen-servants. That means addressing the legitimate concerns Ralston raises about compressed timeframes, inadequate resources and lobbyist influence — but doing so without creating a professional political class divorced from the daily lives of ordinary Nevadans. Let's fix the process — the timeline, the transparency, the resources — while preserving the character that makes our Legislature uniquely Nevadan.

The Battle Born spirit isn't about making governance comfortable — it's about ordinary Nevadans devoting themselves to serving the public good, not because it's their job, but because it's their duty. That's not broken. That's democracy working exactly as our founders intended.

Jason D. Guinasso is an attorney with Greenman Goldberg Raby & Martinez in Reno and Las Vegas. Licensed in Nevada and California, he is a litigator and trial attorney. He also teaches business law at UNR and is a graduate student in the MALTS program at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. The opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author in his personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the views of his law firm, its clients or any other organization with which the author may be affiliated.

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