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Last Updated June 22, 2005
John Ensign was elected to the Senate in 2000, in his second try for the office. Ensign grew up in northern Nevada and moved to Las Vegas at 16. For a time his mother was a change girl at a Reno casino, supporting three children with no help from her ex-husband. Then she married Mike Ensign, who became a top executive at Circus Circus and is now head of the Mandalay Resort Group. John Ensign graduated from Oregon State in 1981 and in 1985 graduated from veterinary school at Colorado State, where he became a born-again Christian. He built a successful veterinary practice in Las Vegas, with the first 24-hour clinic, and managed a family hotel, became involved in civic affairs and at his wife's suggestion became active in Promise Keepers. Disturbed at trends in national life, they decided he would run for the House in 1994, against 1st District incumbent James Bilbray. This was the more Democratic of Nevada's then two seats, and Bilbray was an eight-year incumbent. But 1994 was also a Republican year, and with the help of Ensign's stepfather's connections in the gaming industry he was able to raise substantial funds. On election night, Bilbray claimed victory, but when the votes came in Ensign had won by 1,436 votes. In the House, Ensign compiled a generally conservative voting record and got a seat on the Ways and Means Committee. In the summer of 1996 he and colleague David Camp persuaded Newt Gingrich to separate the welfare and Medicaid issues and present Bill Clinton with a welfare bill, which he signed 11 weeks before the election; Ensign can reasonably claim to be one of the fathers of the 1996 Welfare Act. He was re-elected in 1996 by 50%-44%. Ensign decided to run against Senator Harry Reid in 1998. This was a hard-fought, high-spending race, targeted by both national parties and fought with intensity by the candidates; Reid spent $4.9 million and Ensign $3.5 million. Reid attacked Ensign harshly as an "extremist" who called environmentalists "socialists," and would gut Social Security. "You send Ensign to the Senate, you send nuclear waste to Nevada," he proclaimed. The election night tally showed Reid ahead by 459 votes; Ensign called for a recount, and it turned out that the Washoe County ballots had been misprinted, preventing some from being read by machines. The hand count there took weeks, and Ensign finally conceded December 9, with Reid ahead by 428 votes. Then just two months later, in February 1999, Bryan announced that he would not run for re-election in 2000. Ensign, who had said he would not run against Bryan, announced his candidacy the next day. Democrats tried to enlist their strongest candidate, Bob Miller, who had just completed eight years as governor, but he preferred to remain in the private sector in Las Vegas. Then Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa launched her candidacy; an April poll showed Ensign with a narrow 45%-40% lead, but he was much farther ahead in money: $1.1 million to $250,000 by the end of June. In September Del Papa abruptly withdrew from the race, as she had withdrawn from the 1998 race for governor, citing difficulties in fundraising; her bad relations with Las Vegas unions did not help. Democratic efforts to recruit Brian Greenspun, owner of the Las Vegas Sun, failed. What appears to have happened is that the gaming industry, developers and other leading funders in Las Vegas, who had supported Miller and then Republican Kenny Guinn to succeed him, decided that Ensign was on the road to victory and that it might suit their interests to have in a Republican Senate one Democratic and one Republican senator. That left the Democratic banner in the hands of Ed Bernstein, a personal injury lawyer who had run ads on Las Vegas TV for years. Bernstein put in $1.1 million of his own money; his main issues were prescription drugs for seniors and abortion. The candidates engaged in six debates; one highlight came when Ensign quizzed Bernstein about a water project in northern Nevada of which Bernstein obviously had never heard. Naturally both candidates promised to fight nuclear waste storage in Nevada; Ensign was careful to return a contribution from a Yucca Mountain contractor. Bernstein managed to tighten the race for a while, but Ensign ended up winning by a large 55%-40%. Ensign carried Las Vegas and Clark County 51%-45%, Reno and Washoe County 58%-35% and the Cow Counties 68%-27%. Ensign and Reid, bitter rivals in 1998, quickly became cooperative colleagues. In December 2000 they announced that their first priority was blocking the move by John McCain and Sam Brownback to prohibit betting on college and amateur sports--they argue that sports books are well regulated by Nevada state authorities--and Ensign tried to gut the bill in the Commerce Committee in May 2001 but his amendment to do so failed 10-10. They co-sponsored a bill to make permanent the Social HMOs permitted in Nevada under Medicare. As a freshman senator, Ensign has done much of his work by sponsoring amendments. To the election procedures bill, he added an amendment requiring paper documentation of votes so that they could be hand-counted if necessary, as in Washoe County in 1998; he was dismayed when Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller said it didn't require paper documents. To the corporate accountability bill he added an amendment to discourage regulators from treating very small non-public accounting firms the same way as large CPAs. To the HMO regulation bill he sponsored amendments to prohibit genetic discrimination, to make sure its protections were available to union members and to protect doctors doing pro bono work in poor areas from lawsuits. He sponsored an amendment to ban interstate transportation of cockfighting paraphernalia and increase to two years the sentence for interstate transportation of cockfighting roosters; he failed to get it into the 2002 farm bill and it was stripped out of the forestry bill in November 2003. He sponsored another bill to outlaw the slaughter of horses in the U.S. for human consumption in other countries. Ensign was the only member of Congress in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003. He supported the Bush guest worker immigration proposal. "Without them [immigrants] the economy collapses, especially the economy of the state of Nevada. We've got to have those people. A lot of them are doing jobs Americans flat out wouldn't do." He announced in January 2004 he would support the filibuster of the energy bill because of its new subsidies for the nuclear power industry. He got Budget Chairman Don Nickles to delete from the 2004 budget resolution a proposal requiring casinos to withhold winnings from gamblers behind on child support payments. He called EPA's arsenic water standard an unfunded mandate; 140 community water systems in Nevada exceed the standard. As chairman of the Republican High Tech Task Force, he opposed the FASB's recommendation that stock options be expensed, but in April 2004 conceded, "We will unfortunately lose this battle." In May 2003 the Senate adopted his amendment allowing a one-time tax break for profits that were earned overseas if they are invested in the United States. With Lindsey Graham, he sponsored a bill to cut U.S. dues to the United Nations 10% unless the UN cooperates with American investigations of the Oil For Food program; in December 2004 he called for the resignation of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. One important federal issue for Nevada is the proposed nuclear waste repository in Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The federal government assumed responsibility for nuclear waste in 1982 and a bill passed in 1987 named Yucca Mountain and one other contender as the only two sites; the other one was later ruled out. Ensign strongly opposed Yucca Mountain when he was in the House, but there the odds were very heavily against him. Creation of a temporary storage site in Yucca Mountain was prevented during the Clinton years by Clinton's promise to veto it--probably the reason he carried Republican-leaning Nevada twice by narrow margins--and by Harry Reid's success in getting at least 34 senators to oppose it, enough to prevent an override of Clinton's veto. George W. Bush in 2000 also pledged not to support a temporary site, but at the same time he refrained from promising to veto a permanent site, saying that his decision would be based on "sound science and not politics." In February 2002 Bush, on the recommendation of Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, designated Yucca Mountain as the permanent site. The law provided for a veto by the governor, which could be overridden by majorities in both houses of Congress. In April 2002, Governor Kenny Guinn issued his veto. In May 2002, the House cast a large majority for Yucca Mountain. In the Senate Reid lobbied furiously for votes among Democrats, most of whom had stood with him before on the issue, while Ensign lobbied desperately for Republican votes. This was much more difficult because of the opposition of the Bush administration. Reid got 35 Democrats and Jim Jeffords to vote his way. Ensign could get only two other Republicans, Lincoln Chafee and Ben Nighthorse Campbell. So the site was approved 60-39. But the fight was not over. Lawsuits had been filed against the plan, and the Energy Department must get approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which could take many years. And Ensign has worked with Harry Reid to block funding of Yucca Mountain outside the congressional appropriations process. Immediately after the November 2004 election, Ensign announced that he would seek a Republican leadership position after the 2006 election. Of course he could not seek such a position unless he is reelected that year, but in mid-2005 his prospects looked good. His support from Las Vegas gaming interests means that his campaign will be well funded and makes it likely that the campaign of any opponent will not. And his good working relations with Harry Reid suggest that the minority leader will look for new Democrats to be elected elsewhere than in this Republican-leaning state.
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