In Las Vegas, a free-market hero battles the son of Harry Reid’s political machine.
In Las Vegas, a free-market hero battles the son of Harry Reid’s political machine.
Las Vegas — Johnson v. Jones. What sounds like a landmark Supreme Court case is one of 2022’s costliest county-level campaigns and one with national implications. Republican Drew Johnson is challenging incumbent Democrat Justin Jones in District F of the Clark County Commission. All told, these combatants and their supporters will spend some $5 million for one of seven seats on the institution that controls Sin City.
Johnson, 43, is a lifelong free-market advocate, think-tank founder, and political commenter. Jones, 47, is a protégé of the former U.S. Senate Democratic leader, the late Harry Reid. His wife, Megan Krausman Jones, worked for Reid and now oscillates between Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., where she began in September as a top political aide to Vice President Kamala Harris.
More important, Justin Jones inherited the Reid political machine and is running for his second, four-year term.
Jones learned plenty from Reid.
Suspiciously deploying the passive voice, the crotchety legislative warhorse famously said about Mitt Romney in August 2012: “The word’s out that he hasn’t paid any taxes for ten years.”
This total lie may have cost Romney the White House. In 2015, Reid boasted to CNN about this wholly baseless smear: “Romney didn’t win, did he?” Reid said of his fabrication: “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
Justin Jones picks up where his snarling role model left off.
Jones was in court on October 20 to face accusations that he destroyed evidence and official records related to a quid pro quo scandal.
As an attorney for a radical environmental outfit called Save Red Rock, Jones allegedly swapped favors with now–Governor Steve Sisolak (D., Nevada) when Sisolak was on the Clark County Commission. Jones abandoned an “embarrassing lawsuit” against Sisolak and rallied campaign support among environmental groups during Sisolak’s gubernatorial run.
Purportedly in exchange, Sisolak accepted Jones’s demand to block Blue Diamond Hill, a 7,000-home real-estate project that Save Red Rock and other green extremists hated.
Jones is accused of covering up this dodgy deal by deleting text messages — some of which were government records. This became public when recipients of Jones’s texts shared copies of these seemingly crooked conversations.
Gypsum Resources and its owner, Jim Rhodes, the builder behind Blue Diamond Hill, have sued Clark County for stopping Rhodes from using his own land. This litigation could cost county taxpayers at least $2 billion.
Beleaguered by his skullduggery, Jones attacked his opponent, my old friend and free-market think-tank colleague Drew Johnson, with ads and mailers in which he claimed that Johnson wrote that he wanted to “ban abortion, even in cases of rape and incest” and “opposed helping small business during the pandemic.”
Jones’s ads cited articles allegedly penned by Johnson. However, these citations were fake. Those articles do not exist. Johnson never wrote them.
These bogus citations are akin to phony footnotes in a term paper. They are unworthy of a lazy college freshman, much less a county official seeking reelection.
Jones also has installed billboards claiming that Johnson is “Anti-Choice, Anti-Woman.”
Johnson says that the Clark County Commission has no role in abortion — pro or con — and that he never has written or spoken publicly about abortion. Also, Nevada law protects abortion up to 24 weeks. Further restrictions would require two separate ballot questions, which most assuredly would fail in this libertine swing state.
Like many Democrats in Election 2022, Jones’s policy successes are thinner than a sun-bleached cattle carcass. Indeed, his official website lists only two “Accomplishments” — being named “Top Lawyer” by VEGAS INC and making its “40 under 40” list — both six to seven years before he entered office.
So, with little to show for his tenure, Jones spouts extreme pro-abortion rhetoric in hopes of clinging to the pro-choicers among voters who are fleeing Democrats in an Israelite-like exodus.
Jones’s roadside campaign billboards also claim that “Johnson said the KKK should be able to adopt this highway.” The Las Vegas Review-Journal slammed Jones for convoluting Johnson’s words.
Johnson, the paper reported, had posted on social media about the Klan’s plans to husband a highway . . . in Georgia. However, his Twitter message criticized these white supremacists.
The “KKK wants to adopt a GA hwy. Good, it saves tax money & gives them less free time for cross burning and hangings,” Johnson wrote. “If the KKK is allowed to adopt the hwy, every black person in North GA should use the roadside as a dumpster.”
Johnson is everything but a Klan sympathizer. The native of Johnson City, Tenn., served on his birth-state’s advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and on a U.S. Justice Department panel aimed at reducing the disproportionate number of minorities in the justice system. Johnson also has fought for deregulation, to help minority-owned businesses flourish.
David Duke would be disgusted.
Jones even hypocritically attacked Johnson’s wife, Sarah, for accepting $30,000 in PPP loans to help her small company survive the Covid-19 lockdown. Meanwhile, Hilltop Public Solutions, Mrs. Jones’s lobbying firm, secured $1,079,590 in PPP loans.
No surprise, veteran conservative activists have rallied to Johnson’s cause.
“Drew Johnson has spent his career fighting for smaller, more accountable government,” says Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “He has uncovered wasteful spending, pushed to eliminate burdensome regulations, and forced corrupt lawmakers out of office. The people of Clark County would benefit from his experience as a policy expert and a tenacious government watchdog.”
But Johnson also enjoys unexpected allies.
— For starters, he scored the endorsement of the biggest paper in the city.
“The Clark County Commission has been called the state’s most powerful board — and with good reason. The economic engine that drives Nevada — the Strip — falls under its jurisdiction,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal observed on October 13. The paper added that, “this board is in desperate need of ideological diversity. Mr. Johnson vows a commitment to transparency and would be an advocate for lower taxes and regulatory reform. We recommend a vote for Drew Johnson.”
— Ethnically Chinese and Filipino residents, many of them entrepreneurs, largely support Johnson’s plan to streamline the 23 steps that Clark County bureaucrats require just to open a food truck. Consequently, Johnson is the only County Commission challenger to win the seal of approval from the ever-striving Las Vegas Asian Chamber of Commerce.
— Johnson once cited data that suggest increased access to internet pornography may correlate with a 7.3 percent reduction in rape. Though Johnson hardly advocated Porn for All, Justin Jones then smeared him as “Dirty Drew” and — how prude for this town! — dubbed him “the Hugh Hefner of Las Vegas.” (I thought Hugh Hefner was the Hugh Hefner of Las Vegas. But I digress.) Either way, the Sin City Chamber of Commerce has given Johnson its full-throated support. With offices on Sammy Davis Jr. Drive, these roulette-wheel spinners, exotic dancers, and late-night strippers are in Johnson’s corner, along with the tax cutters and deregulators.
— “We want Johnson!” said Ed Williams, president of Log Cabin Republicans of Nevada, the Silver State’s natural home for gays in the GOP. “It has been decades since we’ve had a principled, conservative Commissioner in the nation’s 13th largest county,” Williams added. “With Drew in office, we will have another voice to push back against the liberal ‘woke and broke’ mentality that has infected our country.”
Johnson hopes, at long last, to end one-party Democrat rule on the Clark County Commission. District F is a tad smaller than Delaware. If Johnson beats Jones, his victory will deal a losing hand to the remnants of the Harry Reid machine.
If elected, Drew Johnson hopes to rechristen Sin City’s aviation hub as Las Vegas International Airport. That would scrub the stain from the facility that Justin Jones renamed to honor his shady mentor and his wife’s crooked boss of 20 years — Harry Reid International Airport.