One Woman's Viewpoint

This week, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham called a special session of the Legislature to convene on Oct. 1 to address federal funding cuts and potentially behavioral health challenges and their impact on community safety and criminal justice.

This will be the seventh special session of the Legislature in six years. Regardless of partisan sniping over the appropriateness or effectiveness of special sessions, what New Mexicans should trip to here is that if you have to have more than one special session every year, the Legislature does not have enough time to conduct its business as currently scheduled.

It is certainly true that New Mexico was originally organized to be a government-light state. Governors originally only had two-year terms and could not hold consecutive terms (although they could hold as many non-consecutive terms as voters elected them to). The Legislature is not paid, except for a per diem allowance for days when legislators are in meetings and meets for 30 days in even-numbered years and 60-days in odd-numbered years.

If you are driving past Exit 181 on Interstate 40 from now on, you can spot them: American flags, properly displayed, on either side of the overpass. Depending on your perspective you may smile, or snort derisively, or not notice them at all.

These flags are the product of two and a half years of a completely ad hoc, grassroots, random assembly of volunteers across the East Mountains, itself a diverse region spanning four counties. It started with a post on the Nextdoor social media site.

There had been flags at this site previously, but the effort to keep them flying was considered too much of a burden by the previous sponsor. The wind in the area shreds the flags in three to four months. As soon as the flags came down, the poles were taken down by the Department of Transportation as they posed a hazard due to their proximity to the interstate.

A couple weeks ago my column talked about the kickoff meeting of the 2025 New Mexico Redistricting Task Force. I got some criticism – at home and online. I stood my stubborn ground that letting lawmakers draw maps to choose their voters is simply wrong.

Since that column posted, the Redistricting Task Force has had a bit of a shakeup as the two Democratic legislative members resigned on Aug. 18. Rep. Cristina Parajón (D-25) and Sen. Howard Pope (D-23) both cited Republican-led mid-decade partisan redistricting in Texas and Ohio as their reason for resigning.

I've observed that the most common refrain I hear from my Republican friends when I comment on some shady/inappropriate/openly illegal behavior on the part of a GOP politician, I can count on the next three words I hear being, "But the Democrats!" followed by a litany of misdeeds that generally starts with Hunter Biden and ends with Vince Foster.

Stubbornly, the U.S.-Russia summit will not provide any meaningful details before my late deadline this week so I began looking for other topics of interest. In my search I stumbled across the British media analysis site, the Press Gazette and its monthly ranking of the world's most visited English-language news websites.

BBC is number one by a wide margin: 949 million visits in June. The next most popular site, The New York Times, had 662 million visits in June. For a country of its size the U.K. garners a lot of global traffic; together with The Guardian and The Daily Mail, British news sites pulled in 1.5 billion visits in June.

American news sites comprise 12 of the top 20 most popular sites in June. The remaining five are Indian, the most popular being The India Times at number five with 357 million visits. And I was pleased to see the site that really started it all more than a quarter century ago, The Drudge Report, hanging in there at 56 million visits in June, and showing 13% growth over the last 12 months.

This was a banner week in the state for progress on sticky issues. The 2025 New Mexico Redistricting Task Force began meetings on August 4, and the State of New Mexico Child Advocate Selection Committee met on August 5.

Both efforts are crucial to right vast wrongs in our state. The 2025 Redistricting Task Force will again address independent redistricting to minimize gerrymandering and ensure the “one person, one vote” principles of the Voting Rights Act are finally brought to bear in our elections. The Child Advocate Selection Committee will vet candidates to fill a six-year term in the Attorney General’s Office to lead an office responsible for responding and investigating complaints on behalf of children in state custody or families interacting with the state’s Child Youth and Families Department (CYFD).

What if you could pull power from the ground below us?

That’s all New Mexico does, Merritt. First coal, now oil and gas. Been at it for over a century now. Tell us something new.

All right, smarty pants. What if we had tremendous amounts of power in the ground here in New Mexico that was older than coal and even older than the Permian Basin (fun fact: the oil in the Permian Basin is older than most coal)?

Next-generation geothermal energy production taps into the heat under the Earth’s surface to generate electricity. If you have visited one of our many lovely hot springs in New Mexico for some rejuvenation, congratulations, you have seen geothermal energy at work!

The headlines coming out of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act - or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act - or whatever you want to call it – have been centered squarely on cuts to SNAP and Medicaid. For New Mexico, this causes worries at many levels.

On the Medicaid front, in a state where more than 7 out of 10 babies are delivered under Medicaid, and an already stressed rural healthcare infrastructure copes with sparse resources to support high-risk populations, this legislation weighs heavily on elected officials, healthcare providers and patients.

But an article out this week in The Economist places New Mexico at ground zero for the brunt of the SNAP fallout. One in five New Mexicans is enrolled in SNAP, the highest rate in the nation. The Economist's feature opens at a Santa Fe food bank, pointing out that monthly SNAP benefits last for five days in our beautiful but expensive capital.

On July 16, the Senate voted to claw back funding for soft power initiatives – that is, foreign aid – and for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This is important to the Heritage Foundation / far right appointees in the administration and some of the fringe elements of the Republican Party.

I don’t believe Congressional Republicans are excited about these clawbacks, but fear being primaried in the midterm elections far more than they care about eroding the United States’ position as the leader of the free world or providing vital educational, informational and artistic programming across the country.