DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

In 1979, I was in the Nevada Assembly hall one day when a vote was cast on, as I recall, an insurance measure.

A Clark County legislator was among those who voted on it, and his vote occasioned considerable comment because it was an egregious conflict of interest. A recess was called and the legislator's party leaders had a prayer meeting with him.

After they came out of their meeting, the house went back into session, someone made a motion to rescind the previous vote, the motion was voted on and passed. Then the house voted again on the original bill. That was three votes altogether.

The next day I picked up a copy of the Assembly Journal and discovered that there was no record of all these machinations. Only the third vote was recorded. The legal record was stage-managed to politically protect a legislator's conduct.

Frequently those in politics take for granted procedures and practices that in other settings would seem outlandish. (In Congress, for instance, it's common practice for legislators to steer federal contracts to companies in their home states.) Most people would probably assume that legislative journals are sacred and faithful records of legislative proceedings.

Actually, tampering with the record is common. Last week U.S. Senate Republican and Democratic floor leaders Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid cut a deal under which the record of a nasty Senate debate over Clinton and Bush presidential pardons was erased before it could get into the Congressional Record. Sen. Reid unintentionally described the nature of the act when he said he wanted the record "vitiated" - that is (according to the Random House Dictionary), debased, corrupted, and made legally invalid.

The Congressional Record contains a record of some events that never actually happened, and some events that DID happen are not recorded. Even the Nevada Legislature has not reached that level of manipulation of the legal record yet.

In 1979 the Nevada Legislature approved a measure calling for a federal constitutional convention. (If two thirds of the states issue such calls, a convention is convened.) Ten years later that call was still legally alive when Assemblymember Bob Price of Clark County introduced legislation to repeal it. He was unable to get repeal approved. So he turned to a different approach. He was one of the all-time best Nevada legislators, but this time he went too far. He got the Assembly alone to "expunge" the house's original 1979 record that the measure had been passed in the first place. Basically, this means mutilating legal records - tampering with the historical record and also seeking to overturn a legal action of the Nevada Legislature with only one house's action. Fortunately, this dubious maneuver was recognized for what it was and failed in its intent. In Congress Nevada was still listed on tallies of states that had issued calls to convention.

These tawdry devices reflect a common view among legislators that the trappings of a legislative body, from the hall to the journal to the rules, belong to them instead of to the public. And so they feel free to falsify the public's record, with all its legal implications.

A much better example was set by U.S. Sen. John Tyler of Virginia in 1836. After the Democratic Party won a majority in Congress, its leaders launched an effort to tamper with the 1834 Senate journal to remove any record of the censure of President Andrew Jackson, a Democrat, suggesting that anytime a party majority changed, the legal record was fair game. Tyler, himself a Democrat, was "instructed" by his state legislature to vote for the maneuver (this was in the days when legislatures appointed U.S. senators). Rather than obey those instructions, which he believed forbidden by the constitution, Tyler resigned.

He told the legislature, "I dare not touch the journal of the senate. The Constitution forbids it. In the midst of all the agitations of party, I have heretofore stood by that sacred instrument. It is the only post of honor and of safety. Parties are continually changing. The man of to-day gives way to the man of to-morrow, and the idols which one set worship, the next destroy. The only object of my political worship shall be the Constitution of my country."