This week both Democrats and Assembly Republicans unveiled their “blueprints” supposedly detailing their legislative priorities. Both documents reveal the deepest shallowness of our Legislature — and a lack of respect for their constituents.

I’ve been making fun of these silly documents as long as I’ve been column-writing, and they haven’t gotten any better. At least Assembly Republicans had enough shame not to claim theirs was a “blueprint,” a word that implies an actual detailed plan.

The documents are nothing more than large campaign fliers. They aren’t very long, and most of the pages of these little brochures are filled with pictures rather than actual information. They vary slightly in style — the Democrats use bullet-pointed sound bites while the Republicans opted for lofty-sounding wall-of-text. But both techniques are perfectly legitimate ways to hide your total lack of substance in plain sight.

The interesting thing is that if you take out the party affiliation references, you might be hard-pressed to correctly guess to which party the “blueprints” belong. Some of the language seems to have been borrowed verbatim from the other. For example, let’s see the sharp divide in our two polarized parties’ proposals:

• “Give more choices in public education”
• “Increase access to mental health services”
• “Expand apprenticeship and job training programs”
• “Keep Nevada’s Business Friendly Climate”
• “Streamline the licensing process for small businesses”
• “Provide local law enforcement with the resources they need to combat crime”

Versus:

• “Support education policies that promote choice”
• “Fight for greater access to mental health services”
• “Focus on workforce development policies”
• “Push pro-growth, pro-job policies”
• “Guarding against anti-business policies that will stifle our economic growth”
• “Give [first responders] the necessary tools they need to do their jobs effectively”

To be sure, both versions have some readily identifiable partisan red meat as well. But it’s more like red tofu in terms of flavor, detail or substance.

There are no numbers, no deadlines, no specific policy proposals, and no surprises. What really struck me is the total lack of any citation of actual pending legislation, plenty of which is on deck right now and actually gives flesh to nebulous bullet points.

This would make sense if this was sent out to potential voters in September before an election, but what’s the point one month into the legislative session? Lawmakers only have 120 days to vet actual legislation — why are they spending even five minutes on something like this in that time? It’s not like we don’t already know what the broadest possibly political goals are from either political party. Why have press conferences on this, instead of on actual bills or bill draft requests the respective caucuses want to promote and sell to the public?  

Why, it’s almost as if politicians don’t really want to talk about actual specifics, even in the time and place they are specifically tasked with hashing out those specifics, because that leads to conversations about actual costs and actual unintended consequences that might make voters balk. It’s almost as if they’re hoping we won’t notice the details, because the meaningless soundbites can be whatever anyone wants them to be, and therefore won’t upset any voters. And we wonder why the last minute flurry of activity at the end of the session is always such a non-transparent mess.

The only thing worth anything about these silly documents is that they show there really is plenty of common ground to find. Even in their large majorities, Democrats shouldn’t underestimate the value to our state as a whole of working with their Republican colleagues to solve problems everyone agrees need to be solved, instead of embracing and exacerbating tribal bickering that leaves the public with such disdain for all of their politicians in the end.

All policy change starts with an idea, lacking in form and details. There’s nothing wrong with discussing the direction you want to go in broad terms when you’re at the “kicking things around” stage. But now we’re at the “how do we make this happen the way we want without causing accidental havoc?” stage, and it’s time to get serious. Being as vague as possible might be good politics, but it’s a terrible way to make policy. It’s time for our legislators to stop waving around glossy brochures that don’t actually say anything, and commit themselves to focus on the business of actual lawmaking.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007. He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016. By day, he is a criminal defense attorney in Reno. Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].