The Roundhouse in Santa Fe (Photo by Peter St. Cyr)

The last thing we can afford is a repeat of the dynamics on display during the October special session

Between now and the regular session, I hope New Mexico’s political class will dispense with the increasingly boring potshots and posturing and do what’s in the best interest of New Mexicans: Work together to find a solution to our towering state fiscal crisis.

When the state Legislature convenes in January to balance the budget — which some say will mean plugging a $1 billion deficit — we need an environment in which folks roll up their sleeves and work together in a balanced manner. The last thing we can afford is a repeat of the dynamics on display during the October special session.

To start, the governor needs to recognize his own culpability in that fiasco of a special session that delivered him a bill mandating 7.6 percent cuts to executive state agencies, including some Medicaid programs.

Being governor doesn’t mean you are a feudal king with the power to dictate to the state’s lawmaking body exactly how to do their constitutionally mandated job. When you approach them like that, you can expect them to be a little ticked off — and maybe give you legislation not to your liking.

In the same vein, legislators should own up to the fact that they haven’t protected their autonomy sufficiently over the years. This showed during the special session when they refused to exert control over their privileges and consider bills to raise revenue alongside those to cut spending. Not doing so created an untenable situation in which legislators couldn’t take a balanced approach to solving the budget deficit.

And it’s quite hard, if not next to impossible, to support the bill they did pass as a result, given the degree to which it penalizes state workers.

‘Richardson/Denish’ didn’t cause this fiscal crisis

Marjorie Childress

The corrosive political climate is exacerbated by Republican gubernatorial candidates who flood the media with ridiculous claims that “Richardson/Denish” caused the state’s fiscal crisis, as though we aren’t somehow mired in a national economic meltdown that not only began but matured during a Republican administration. The pickle we’re in was caused by an unregulated field day in the banking sector that didn’t just hurt New Mexico, but hurt the entire global economic system.

Given the actual history of the mess we’re in, its very hard to take the Republican broadsides laying the crisis at the feet of “Richardson/Denish” seriously. Especially since Richardson himself should be a Democrat the Republicans love. He passed his own version of the “Bush tax cuts” back in 2003 when he slashed the top personal income tax rates.

And he one-upped the Republicans by not including a sunset clause like the one President Bush included in his tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire in 2011.

If Republican legislators do their work at the regular session in a similar vein as their cohorts running for office, it won’t help along the spirit of cooperation that’s desperately needed among our political leaders.

Raise taxes, make cuts, pull back capital outlay

As painful as the thought may be to Republican legislators and to Richardson, in January we need to seriously consider rolling back those cuts  to the state income tax rate on top income earners, and there are other avenues for raising revenue that need to be considered as well. Otherwise we’ll be balancing the budget on the backs of the vast strata of New Mexicans who live at or near poverty, and it won’t be pretty.

In the meantime, Richardson should veto the 7.6 percent budget cuts to executive state agencies. Unfortunately, the wording in the budget bill concerning Medicaid is sloppy, and could lead to deeper cuts than 7.6 percent in executive agencies if the governor chooses to hold Medicaid harmless.

Let’s be clear. If the governor actually cuts Medicaid programs, he’ll damage a lot of the goodwill that exists for him in this state. It’ll go down in history as one of the final things he did while in office, and it won’t be a point of pride.

But going with his interpretation of the bill, not cutting Medicaid will force him to make deeper cuts than 7.6 percent to other programs. Leaders of the state Legislature acknowledged the legitimacy of the governor’s interpretation last Friday when they sent a letter to the governor urging him to not cut Medicaid.

The last thing we can afford are cuts as deep as the budget bill would require if the governor implements it. A guiding principle in the coming months as state leaders grapple with how to balance the budget is that the jobs we still have should be saved.

Like the rest of the country, our unemployment rate has already doubled. In a poor state like ours, government jobs are critical — making up 24 percent of our economy. To further exacerbate our economic stress by cutting jobs will make this recession even longer and even more painful.

The unpopular reality is that legislators are going to have to raise taxes along with budget cuts and the pulling back of capital outlay dollars. It’ll take a lot of collaboration and hard work to get just the right mix so that both jobs and critical services aren’t compromised. A little humility all around would help set the stage for how best to get that done.

Childress writes about politics for the New Mexico Independent, and for m-pyre, a local blog founded in 2004. She also works for the SouthWest Organizing Project. Views expressed in this column are solely her own, and do not reflect the positions or opinions of any organization or person she is affiliated with. You can reach Childress at mrchili9@gmail.com.

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Marjorie Childress

Jeez.

As I settled in to write this column, all of a sudden I had one of those, “oh, wait” moments.  I’ve already written this before. “This” being a column I wrote last October about racism that a lot of us saw bubbling up on the campaign trail as Barack Obama increasingly emerged as the front runner to win the presidency.

Substitute “economic news” in that column from last year with “health care reform,” and I could just run the darn thing again.

Because as it turns out, some people still think President Obama is a Muslim, which is proxy for “foreign,” or even worse, “terrorist.” Presidential candidate John McCain urged people to stop with this nonsense last year, but they haven’t.

Some of these same folks also believe Obama was born in Kenya so therefore isn’t eligible to be president. This is a man whose mother is a white woman from Kansas. Can anyone even doubt that had she married a white South African instead of a black Kenyan that this would never have come up?

There’s also the charge that he’s socialist, or more stridently, a communist — and, believe it or not, a Nazi too. As if those things have ever gone together.

The cognitive dissonance is astounding. But they make their point:  “He’s not only not like us, he’s the enemy.”

If you don’t believe me, I’ve included a photo I took just last month in Albuquerque at Congressman Martin Heinrich’s health care town hall that seems to suggest  just that.

Then there are those who call him a racist for suggesting — on a very rare occasion — that racism actually exists.

‘Reverse racism’ is a ploy used to divide people

Sign showing Obama as a foreigner at a town hall in Albuquerque, August 2009. (Photo by Marjorie Childress)

A favorite canard of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh is to continually attack Obama as a reverse racist who hates white people. In essence, if Obama or anyone else points to institutional racism, they must have it out for white people. This is the primary activity — the drawing of attention to institutional racism — that forced Obama’s green jobs advisor, Van Jones, to resign after Beck went after him relentlessly.

Something tells me that South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson was drunk on this flavor of the Limbaugh/Beck Kool-Aid when he very noticeably interrupted Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress. Wilson — who also happens to have a love for the Confederate flag — shouted out for all to hear that the president is a liar.

Maureen Dowd said in her New York Times column shortly afterward that she could just hear that word “boy” tacked on at the end, lingering unspoken in the air.

… maybe so.

But, OK, I have to admit, I thought George W. Bush was a big liar on more than one occasion. Does that make me a racist? Considering the color of his skin and the accent he likes to sport — which bears some similarity to my own — probably not.

And, Obama himself says while obviously his race is a big factor for some people when they consider whether to support his policies or not, for the great majority of Americans the intense debate of the current moment is simply part and parcel of a historic debate we have in this country about the role of government.

When he made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows this past weekend, Obama basically dismissed the issue of race. As though to say, we should have no truck with such a diversion. We have more important things to discuss. And he pinged the media for focusing in on such a divisive issue. Everyone loves a conflict, he said.

He may be right.

Some people think to respond to the racism at play in the political environment is to acquiesce to a strategic ploy to further inflame a particularly agitated sector of the electorate.

It’s all a ploy — this line of thinking goes — of the likes of Limbaugh and Beck, to cynically exploit the anxiety and fear threading its way through the populace due to the economic uncertainty our country is currently experiencing.

I can see this argument, and the desire to not play into it all. It’s undeniable that race and ethnicity have always been an incredibly effective divide and conquer tool. So, keep your eye on the prize instead, right?

But we have to include race in our discussion

In fact, the subject of race is incredibly relevant to how we fix both the tax code and our health care system.

For instance, we need to include the subject of race when we grapple with the budget crisis right here in New Mexico. We have a situation in which those in power say we’re going to have to cut our state Medicaid budget to some degree in order to plug our looming deficit. These same leaders also say, with their very next breath, that we will not raise taxes, not one penny.

Medicaid, of course, is the program that provides health care to the poorest of the poor. In New Mexico, that group is disproportionately composed of people of color. It’s off the charts, in fact.

This is what people refer to as institutional racism: a correlation between poverty and race that is no accident. Instead it’s the outcome of history, of decisions made in times past that have ordered our society in a way that makes access to wealth and educational success much more likely for white people. And the unequal legacy of that history will continually perpetuate itself without proper intervention.

One of the most effective interventions is an investment in health care. That’s because it’s very difficult for unhealthy people to effectively focus on their education or participate in the economy.

To acknowledge this is not racist. It doesn’t make you a communist or a Nazi, or un-American. Nor does wanting to remedy it.

Frankly, I think most people understand exactly what I’m saying. Most people want to change the trajectory of that legacy. Most politicians — both Democrat and Republican – -want to create laws that provide equity and opportunity, because doing so is not only moral, but pragmatic as well.

The problem is, we can’t include the subject of race in the discussion if we let demoguagues who would brand us as racists for doing so have their way. Which is to shut us up.

That’s why pushing back on them is important, as much as we may agree with Obama that we have bigger fish to fry.

Marjorie Childress

“So, what do you think about this health care reform business?”

It was a simple question, without a simple answer from the lifelong conservative I asked — my mother. Our conversation took place in the hospital where she was about to get treatment for an irregular heartbeat, paid for by Medicare.

It’s clear she thinks our country has a problem and doesn’t want to say she’s not for reforming our health care system. But it makes her apprehensive. That’s written all over her face.

“I’m not sure it’ll be good, it may reduce my benefits,” she said. “But I know something needs to be done.”

My mom is a lifelong Republican, although these days she’s more likely to refer to herself as an independent. I suspect this recent shift is because, although she didn’t vote for Obama, she’s been influenced for what may only be the second time ever in her life by a Democrat on the topic of health care.

The first time was in 1992 when she voted for the Clinton/Gore ticket solely due to their promise — their utter promise — that they’d usher in a health care system that didn’t cause unrelenting anxiety to middle-class folks like herself and my dad, whose high medical bills in the late 80s caused them financial stress for a good decade.

We all know the story of Clinton/Gore on health care. The bottoming out of Hillary-care ushered in a period of incrementalism that produced some good things — like SCHIP — but did nothing to right the trajectory of a health care system on a fast track to bankruptcy.

Then Bill Clinton’s personal peccadillos went public and my mother high-tailed it back to the Republicans. But still, she’s from a family that has had to do a lot juggling to cover the costs of varied health care needs.

Most Americans say health care reform is necessary

The health care reform message, ultimately, resonates with most Americans, including her. And here we are again, on the one topic that seems to generally bring convergence in my family, between the dyed-in-the-wool Republicans and those who embrace our yellow-dog Democrat heritage.

Despite the “tea party” activists who’ve successfully mobilized a very vocal, very public contingent of people expressing fear and demanding the “return of our country,” both here in New Mexico and nationally, the majority of Americans support a health care fix. And that majority includes moderate Republicans like my mother.

A CNN opinion poll conducted August 28-31 found that 52 percent of Americans want U.S. legislators to continue trying to find consensus on the current health care reform bills before Congress. Another 25 percent told CNN they want Congress to begin again, on entirely new bills that would be passed next year.

That’s 77 percent of the American public telling CNN that health care reform is necessary. 65 percent of those polled told CNN that the problems with the current health care system will eventually affect most Americans if they aren’t fixed. 59 percent said they understood the current health care proposals, up from 51 percent in June — which perhaps reflects the intense education that occurred during the congressional recess. And 55 percent favor a public health insurance option.

These numbers show that the momentum that Barack Obama leveraged to push Congress to take up health care reform includes members of both parties as well as that coveted set of self-described independent voters.

Where are the Republican senators?

The question, then, is where are the Republican senators? It seems there’s one, Olympia Snowe, who is willing to be a voice for my mother.

Where are the rest?

Systemic reform simply isn’t something that Republicans have shown a willingness to tackle, even when so many of their own party recognize the need for it. After all, they had control of Congress for 12 years, with six of those years being in conjunction with a Republican president. During that time, our health care system became progressively less sustainable.

Maybe that’s why on this topic, senators like our own Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall really are representing all Americans, not just those Democrats who make them their nominee in the primary.

I hope they and their Democratic colleagues take that to heart as they continue their debate this week. If they can’t find any Republicans in their body willing to represent all Americans, they should embrace the go-it-alone approach — and get us concretely on the path to a health care system that works.

Bipartisanship only takes you so far, especially in a country in which so many people don’t fit all that well in either party.

Childress writes about politics for the New Mexico Independent, and for m-pyre, a local blog founded in 2004. She also works for the SouthWest Organizing Project. Views expressed in this column are solely her own, and do not reflect the positions or opinions of any organization or person she is affiliated with. You can reach Childress at mrchili9@gmail.com.

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