It’s not often voters get a side-by-side comparison of two candidates who’ve once held the same job as elected officials. This is the case in Nevada’s Senate race. Democrat Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto spent eight years as Nevada’s attorney general – a key position tasked with carrying out justice – and it’s the same job that Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt took over from her in 2015.
Nevadans should take note of how each performed during their respective tenures because it could determine their safety and security for the next six years. (RELATED: HICKS: Biden Is Nowhere To Be Found After Unleashing Total Chaos At The Southern Border)
As Nevada’s attorney general, Cortez Masto ignored a backlog of nearly 8,000 rape kits. These kits sat neglected and untested in police lockers for years, preventing sexual assault survivors and their families from finding closure in knowing that their heinous perpetrators were locked behind bars. Cortez Masto had eight long years to hold criminals accountable but didn’t lift a finger.
It was Laxalt who delivered justice. When he took office in 2015, he quickly secured $3.7 million to test these kits. By the end of his term, nearly all these kits had been sent to labs for testing. Ultimately, it led to hundreds of DNA matches, at least 13 arrests, and cases solved that had eluded closure for decades.
Laxalt’s swift handling of the rape kit backlog is just one example of his commitment to putting law-abiding Nevadans over criminals. As attorney general, he also organized the first Law Enforcement Summit in the state and took decisive action to fight the opioid crisis. When Cortez Masto left office, Nevada was ranked the third most dangerous state in the country – an abject failure for the state’s “top law enforcement officer.”
That might be why 95% of law enforcement in Nevada support Laxalt. If he could clean up Cortez Masto’s mess before, he can do it again. They know they need someone to support them, not undermine them: last year, the Silver State saw an uptick in its murder rate and violent crimes significantly outpaced the national average.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s border crisis has opened the floodgates for drugs to hit Nevada streets and fueled an uptick in fentanyl deaths and crime. In just one weekend last month, Nevada State Police seized 56 pounds of fentanyl during a traffic stop.
Yet Cortez Masto remains adamant “there’s no open borders” – a bald-faced lie, if ever there was one. Under Biden, there have been over 900,000 “gotaways” who’ve slipped past Border Patrol into our country, and in August alone more than 500 million lethal doses of fentanyl were seized at our southern border.
Cortez Masto lies because she has no excuse for putting Nevadans last. In the Senate, she has been in lockstep with the radical Democrat agenda, voting multiple times against securing our porous border. She even praised a radical nonprofit that supports the Defund the Police movement. Recently, she voted alongside all 50 Democrat Senators in opposing an amendment to combat rising crime across the country and ensuring progressive prosecutors crack down on criminals.
It’s no wonder law enforcement groups who supported Cortez Masto before have switched their support to Laxalt. This includes the Nevada Fraternal Order of Police, the Las Vegas Peace Officers Association and Peace Officers Association of the Clark County School District.
More broadly, the Public Safety Alliance of Nevada (PSAN), which represents over 10,000 law enforcement officers in Nevada, just gave Laxalt its sweeping endorsement. PSAN Director John Abel said Laxalt “stood by cops when it mattered, and we are proud to stand by him now.”
Just five weeks from the midterm elections, Nevada voters have a clear choice between two former attorney generals who did the same job, in the same state, for the same people.
Law enforcement has already made their choice: Laxalt stands for law and order. He will move heaven and earth, if his time as Nevada’s attorney general is any indication, to secure justice and fight for law-abiding citizens.
As Cortez Masto continues to fail and fall in the polls, the contrast is growing clearer. But if the case for Laxalt isn’t compelling enough, imagine the future. Just think about how much safer Nevadans and the United States would be if Adam Laxalt brought his solution-oriented, can-do attitude and support of law enforcement to the Senate.
Tommy Hicks is the co-chairman of the Republican National Committee.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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