At the Roundhouse: Checking the landscape

People keep asking me what kind of a legislative session it is.

I usually shrug.

Every session is different but they all start on time and end on time.

The Roundhouse turns into a pot of gold at the end of the Old Santa Fe Trail.

The building is crowded with supplicants and bills, gasps from budget cuts and sly smiles after sealing a deal.

And there’s another one every year.

But here’s my stab at identifying some of the things that seem to distinguish Legislature 2013.

It’s defined as much as anything by the 2012 election.

Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, facing the second half of her four-year term, campaigned to dislodge the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. She succeeded in some races but fell short overall, leaving bitterness behind.

Thirty-five new members were elected to the Legislature’s 112 seats, meaning this session always was going to take some time finding itself.

Longtime Sen. John Arthur Smith said it would take half the session for members to stop licking election-year wounds, figure out who’s who and start talking to each other.

And that’s to say nothing of locating the closest restrooms and private elevators, figuring out that comfortable shoes are the better part of legislative style and that you’re going to gain a couple of pounds a week if you try to make dinner a steady diet of special-interest canapés.

So far, Martinez has not been in the faces of Democratic leaders as much as she was in her first two sessions.

She probably needs to start showing she can pull things through partisan gridlock and can govern despite difficult circumstances.

She has not come down to the third floor to testify before committees. Her political advisers have not stirred up voters to flood the building with angry calls and emails about rejection of the governor’s agenda.

The tea party folks have not been much in evidence, either.

Senate Majority Leader Michael Sanchez sounded as combative as ever in the Democratic response to Martinez’s State of the State speech at the outset of the session, calling even more of her agenda a welter of “wedge issues.”

Sanchez had another coronary issue and treatment last week. He’s back at work now, but, if past experience is any guide, we won’t see any change in his tune or devotion to his job.

Over on the House side, a lot has been made of the election this year of Ken Martinez, a Grants Democrat, as the new speaker of the House.

But Martinez is hardly new. He’s been a House member since 1999 and his father, the late Walter K. Martinez, was House speaker in the 1970s.

Martinez is a lawyer and a veteran lawmaker. He knows the process, the history and the practice inside and out.

He also is very pleasant. He strikes me as the kind of guy who would be smiling at you like your best friend while quietly pulling the rug from under your feet.

But make no mistake about Martinez’s politics or  intentions.

The speaker of the House is the most powerful legislator of all, largely though control over the composition of committees and the flow of legislation.  He wouldn’t put liberals or progressives like Mimi Stewart (education), Gail Chasey (judiciary) and Miguel Garcia (labor) in charge of key committees by accident.

Despite the continuing partisan division, there are a few examples of bipartisanship at work — the governor’s economic secretary Jon Barela and Sen. George Munoz, D-Gallup, working on job-training legislation for one. And, with voters disparaging political standoffs in Washington and Santa Fe, both sides seem eager to show they can get things done.

Every legislative session, there is some unforeseen issue that rears its head and colors the year.

This year, after mass shootings in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown,  Conn., it is gun control.

And usually there are wrinkles in the making of the state budget, which is the central business of every legislative session, year-to-year.

This year, there are critical questions over spending money on burgeoning problems like public employee pension solvency versus perennial concerns like public schools, or cutting taxes to stimulate the economy versus investing in people, as Democrats like to say.

Meanwhile, the prospect of big federal budget cuts and their effect on the New Mexico economy has instilled fear in budget-makers’ hearts.