U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen prides herself on being one of the most bipartisan senators in Congress, but on Thursday at a Las Vegas roundtable on reproductive freedom, Rosen unloaded on Republicans – including her 2024 election opponent, Sam Brown. 

“If Republicans take back the Senate, they’ll do everything they can to ban abortion across the country and right here in Nevada,” she said. “We can’t trust a word they’re saying, not when it’s an election year.” 

Rosen said Brown, who unsuccessfully ran for state office in Texas and supported extreme anti-abortion legislation, “will do or say anything to get elected. That’s why he’s trying to cover up his anti-choice record.”

Rosen was leading Brown in polls before Pres. Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. 

On Saturday, she’ll attend Vice-President Kamala Harris’ rally in Las Vegas, where she says she’s looking forward to greeting Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

Rosen was joined at the event by Jessica Mackler, president of EMILY’s List, a powerful national organization that supports pro-choice candidates. 

Mackler said the issue at the heart of the upcoming is “what is the future that we want for this country, and are people going to choose a path that is about this very narrow world view in which our choices are controlled, or are we going to choose a future in which everybody has an opportunity?”

Rosen lashed out at the Supreme Court, noting nominees “promised the people that Roe was the law of the land and they went back on their word,” she said of the court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to an abortion. 

Rosen, who has already voiced support for some of Pres. Joe Biden’s Supreme Court reforms, says term limits for the high court’s justices would help hold them accountable and “might take off some of this oppression people feel about appointing judges for a lifetime. They can be there forever, and I think it would make the court more receptive to really doing their job and being arbitrators.”

Biden’s proposed reforms include 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices, an enforceable code of conduct, and a constitutional amendment that no former president is immune from prosecution for crimes committed in office.

Tips and taxes

Despite her election year distrust of Republicans, Rosen defended her support of Sen. Ted Cruz’ No Tax on Tips Act, a concept former Pres. Donald Trump says he got from a waitress in Las Vegas while having lunch. 

“I got my information from a very smart waitress,” he said at a rally in Las Vegas in June. “They make money. Let them keep their money.” 

The Center for American Progress says that because many hospitality workers earn low wages, about a third pay no taxes and would not benefit from the measure. Some may no longer qualify for breaks, such as the Earned Income Credit, if they don’t report tip income. 

Additionally, the proposed legislation, if enacted, could spawn abuse by wealthy taxpayers who could find loopholes in the law that would allow them to classify income as tips and avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars to the government. 

“I can tell you that 25% of the Nevada workforce is in the hospitality industry, and they heavily rely on tips,”  Rosen said, noting she is the chairwoman of the Commerce Subcommittee on Tourism, Trade, and Export Promotion. 

She added that Culinary Local 226 supports the legislation, which was introduced by Cruz in June, and has become a rallying cry for Trump. It is also supported by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada. “This is going to help those tipped workers be able to not pay taxes on tips,” Rosen said. 

In follow-up questions submitted by the Current, Rosen did not say by deadline whether she’d insist on guardrails to deter taxpayers from exploiting loopholes, or which workers would find tax relief via the measure.

Bethany Khan, spokeswoman for Culinary Local 226, says the union has no data indicating at what income levels workers would benefit from the measure.