New Mexico lawmakers call for 'civility and respect'

SANTA FE — After a discordant year in Congress, marked by deep divisions and stalled progress on key issues for Americans, New Mexico lawmakers on both sides of the aisle kicked off this year's 30-day legislative session on Tuesday by sounding notes of cooperation and forward momentum.

"I know one thing that has already made this session a success is the hard work we have done in the interim," Senate President Pro Tem Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque, told fellow legislators on Tuesday. "We’ve had working committees — bipartisan, bi-chamber. We’ve really put in productive bipartisan work the last months, and it’s some of the most important issues in our state: healthcare, crime, budget."

On the other side of the Roundhouse, House Speaker Javier Martinez, D-Albuquerque, echoed Stewart, imploring lawmakers to maintain decorum during legislative debates.

"We can and we should have heated debates, while treating each other with civility and respect," Martinez told representatives and their guests who gathered in the packed House gallery as a mariachi band played.

The Legislature was not gathered to score "political points" and bolster politicians' egos, Martinez added, contrasting the state Capitol with Capitol Hill.

Congress saw a 43-day shutdown last year  — the longest in U.S. history — as Democrats tangled with Republicans over a host of issues including health care costs.

"The dysfunction that we see in Washington D.C. does not have to percolate down to our beautiful New Mexico," Martinez said.

Several members of the House and Senate followed their introductions into the session with a series of good-natured gibes and jabs, flattery and congratulations to fellow party members and their counterparts across the aisle.

That magnanimous tone extended to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham's final State of State Address, in which she poked fun at her own propensity for tardiness, enthusiasm for coffee and reputation for being the "shortest governor in the history of America — some of you may say the meanest," she joked.

"While the rest of the country is caught up in confusion, finger-pointing and anger, we're doing it differently in New Mexico — and serving as a blueprint for democracy that still works," she said near the top of the address.

While some bills that made their way to this year's "rocket docket" Tuesday afternoon seem ready-made to prove New Mexico's Republican and Democratic lawmakers can sometimes see eye-to-eye, others are sure to put their desire for a productive session to the test.

The governor's priorities for the session included a $1.5 billion road bonding package; $110 million for affordable housing and zoning reform; approval of medical compacts designed to attract more out-of-state doctors to New Mexico; medical malpractice reform; a first-in-the-nation universal child care initiative she's looking to fund; stiffer pretrial detention laws and penalties for juvenile crimes; and bans on both assault weapons across the state and cell phones in schools.

"It was great today to hear that the governor has changed her tune on a lot of things," Senate Minority Floor Leader William Sharer, R-Farmington, said to open a GOP news conference following the governor's address. "And she's actually with us on things like public safety and healthcare. That was amazing."

Sharer said the state's need for medical malpractice reform, for example, is "the core of the problem that we have with medicine today."

"We don't have doctors, not because of all the other stuff, but because they don't want to get sued into oblivion," he said.

On the other hand, Sharer and his Republican colleagues opposed the governor's call to ban "body-shredding" assault weapons, as she described them during her speech. Instead, Sharer said "cartels" were instead a more concerning source of violent crime statewide.

"We're not selling assault weapons to cartels through our local gun dealers," he said.

New Mexico Republican leadership also said they would fight the governor's ambitious push to fund free childcare for all New Mexico families, a proposal that would remove an existing income threshold of 400% of the federal poverty level.

"This is a massive recurring price tag — massive," he said. "I think this is irresponsible spending."

In an interview with the Journal last week, House Minority Leader Gail Armstrong, R-Magdalena, used a sports analogy to describe how Republicans, who are outnumbered in both the House and Senate, would combat certain legislative initiatives: "We're focused on playing defense, but we're also bringing forward ideas," Armstrong said in an interview.

Standing alongside the Republican leaders was former Lincoln County Commissioner Rex Wilson, a rancher and hospital administrator who was sworn into office on the Senate floor on Tuesday representing District 33.

Following Wilson's swearing in, Landon Kessler, an operatic tenor who joined Santa Fe Opera's Young Voices program in 2022, sang the National Anthem, one of several musical performances that heralded the start of the 30-day session.

Another melody, this one markedly darker in tone, also played near the northern entrance to the Roundhouse on Tuesday. A protest band featuring drums, an electric guitar and vocalist serenaded a crush of legislators, students, nonprofit executives, college faculty and other members of the public who streamed in to the building to hear the governor's remarks.

“We reject a future built on extraction that poisons the land, policies that treat our communities as disposable and raids that tear our families apart," a protester said after the band's performance, eliciting roars from the crowd.

Several protestors wore Palestinian keffiyehs and held signs protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Republicans said on Tuesday they plan to fight Democratic measure that would ban immigration detention facilities in the state.

Despite likely road bumps that might test the tone of bipartisanship struck to start the 30-day session, Gov. Lujan Grisham closed out her speech by saying that even disagreements between the two parties could be productive.

"Communicate. Listen. Disagree. And keep trying," she said.

John Miller is the Albuquerque Journal’s northern New Mexico correspondent. He can be reached at jmiller@abqjournal.com.