The president, Reid told him, had lied to the people of Nevada about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which the state vehemently opposes. He and Cheney campaigned on a promise that science would determine whether the resting place for 77,000 tons of nuclear waste would be in a mountain 90 miles from Las Vegas. Reid charges that the standards applied in the recommendation offered by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham were, according to experts,"weak to moderate" and inadequate for radioactive storage.

Reid, who is the Senate Democratic whip, was included in the meeting at the request of Nevada's Republican governor, Kenny Guinn, and Nevada's other senator, Republican John Ensign, both of whom are equally opposed, if less outspoken. They talked science to the president; Reid talked politics, telling Bush and his astonished chief of staff, Andy Card, that he wouldn't have won the presidency without Nevada's four electoral votes and had he not lied about Yucca Mountain. If he went ahead with the site, Reid warned the president, he would do everything he could to remind Nevada that Bush had broken his word.

As he was leaving, Bush grabbed Reid's arm and told him, "I appreciate a frank-spoken man." But he did not heed Reid's counsel. Just eight days later, the president made it official: Nevada had won the booby prize, the privilege of receiving and storing the nation's radioactive nuclear waste.

Reid's rejoinder, fashioned after a sojourn in his native hills, was to announce he was filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the famous case being brought against Vice President Cheney by the General Accounting Office, which persists in the belief that the public has a right to know how Cheney reached decisions about energy policy that devastated environmentalists, who noticed all the face time Enron got with Cheney.

Strongly as they feel about Mt. Nuke, Reid's constituents were nervous about his giving grief to the president. "He could help us on roads," they murmured. Colleagues were even less enthusiastic. No one at the Democratic Caucus lunch mentioned his bold move. "Probably think it is suicidal," says Reid, sitting in his whip office under a portrait of another iconoclast, Mark Twain. "I'm separate but equal," he explains. "I'm a senator from the sovereign state of Nevada, and I don't have to kowtow to anybody." He's proud that his 30-year-old son, a Stanford law graduate, is preparing the brief in the Cheney lawsuit. He hopes others will take heart and take on Bush.

The president's phenomenal popularity has tied the tongues of Democrats. They have been largely mum on the administration's assault on the environment, the justice system and the press. Since Attorney General John Ashcroft informed a Senate committee in December that people resisting the proposal for secret military tribunals for terrorists "give our enemies ammunition," the administration has been reinventing government in a style of obsessive secrecy worthy of the Soviets. Invoking wartime security, it limits citizens' right to know to that which the government chooses to tell them, which is often nothing. Ashcroft has turned one of the bedrock principles of our justice system on its head. He has reversed the constitutional dictum that a defendant is innocent until proved guilty. Uncounted numbers of black-haired men who were rounded up after Sept. 11 are held in jails without charges while FBI bunglers fish around for more reasons to keep them longer. We can't know how many there are, or their names.

You think this land is your land? Dick Cheney doesn't think so. How he formulated plans for the environment is classified. Thank heaven Reid disagrees.

But the most grotesque development is the Bush attempt to put the Afghan war off the record. The Pentagon regards the press as a nuisance, not as a conduit to tell the people how their tax dollars are being spent in the field. In the Gulf War, the Pentagon put a choke hold on it. Now, in Afghanistan, it's seeking extermination. Reporters can't cover events without credentials the military refuses to give them.

The issue came to a boil in Zhawar, a village we bombed and otherwise clobbered under the mistaken impression that it harbored al Qaeda. The new government protested. When U.S. reporters appeared to check matters out, Washington Post correspondent Doug Struck was stopped by a U.S. soldier at gunpoint.

Things will only get worse if nobody complains, as Harry Reid has concluded.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

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