By: Jose Z. Garcia

I met John A. Smith early in 1980, probably at a Democratic Party function.  We had just been elected Democratic county chairs of Luna and Doña Ana counties, respectively.  John and I formed a small group of Democratic Party chairs from Hidalgo, Luna, Grant, Doña Ana, Sierra and Otero counties.  We would meet a few times a year and gossip about politics and at statewide conventions tried to maximize our weak clout within the party.

That year we faced a baptism by fire, a series of events that surely helped galvanize John’s resolve to think for himself in the face of heavy political pressure, a trait that would later earn him kudos as a statesman.  Harold Runnels, a conservative Democratic congressman from Hobbs, died of cancer in August; elections were in November.  Republicans, satisfied with Harold’s conservative voting record, had not run a candidate in the primary.  Despite strong public opposition and warnings from Southern party officials, the Democratic Party Central Committee—dominated by liberal Northerners—selected David King, from Santa Fe County, outside the district, to replace Harold as the only person on the ballot.  The public was outraged; Joe Skeen ran as a write-in, and won in a close race.  He remained Congressman until 2002.  The lesson from voters was clear:  voters are the constituents, not party officials.  Years later, when pressured by Roundhouse leaders, governors, and lobbyists to slip in a yes vote on a bill his constituents would not approve of, or the state could not afford, I pictured John remembering that moment of democratic action.

After he was elected to the NM Senate in 1988 John quickly made a name for himself as one of the few senators who truly understood where state monies were parked and the complex process by which a state budget is formed.  I was teaching a course on New Mexico government at NMSU and, realizing I knew no more about any of this than a chapter in the text I assigned, I asked him to explain to me and my students how it worked.  The notion that there is a huge difference to future budgets between a recurring expenditure and a one-time expenditure during a legislative session, was new to me, as it is today for many a freshman legislator, and I confess it took several visits to my class from John before I felt I had a basic understanding of the complexities by which funds in the state’s coffers are converted into which kinds of expenditures.

In 2002 Republican Joe Skeen retired from Congress.  John ran for the seat, opposed by Steve Pierce.  The Pew Foundation commissioned me to write about this race—they were interested in congressional races with no incumbent–so I had a ringside seat.  The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in return for promising a hefty sum of campaign money, forced John to select from five campaign managers they had vetted, all from out-of-state.  None had worked in New Mexico.  Hispanic voters comprised about a third of the vote then, and tended to vote Democratic, but needed to be approached differently in each region.  The managers he was offered knew nothing of this.  The race was close until the end and I was proud of John, who began the race with limited speaking skills, but toward the end sounded every inch a congressman.  The DCCC, however, reneged on their promise to send money during the last few weeks.  The DCCC-vetted manager from New Jersey effectively suspended the campaign the last ten days and the momentum was lost.  Pierce won the race and John went back to his senate seat in Santa Fe.

It was, I believe, Bill Richardson who came up with Dr. No as a nickname for John, quickly picked up by media.  Richardson, who grew up in Mexico City, was an early example of the recent turn to autocratic rule in the US.  Hugely talented, larger than life, hungry for headlines, and never hesitant to ask someone to throw him a fundraiser, Richardson insisted on big-ticket items like the Railrunner and the Spaceport—both long-term financial drains—and he managed to provide tax cuts for the wealthy.  When John—Chair of Senate Finance, one of the most powerful positions in the legislature—spoke truth to power in public about the state’s inability to pay for imprudent levels of spending, Richardson called him Dr. No.  I saw the nickname as a badge of honor:  it takes courage to say no when the pressure is on and when those who agree with you rely on you to say no.

When I became a cabinet secretary in the first Susana Martinez administration, I found John’s door always open.  Despite our long friendship, he treated me exactly as he had treated Richarson and everyone else.  When he disagreed, he was kind and friendly but he tended not to budge and he told you why.  It was clear he enjoyed immense respect from his fellow legislators, even when disagreements were sharp. 

In recent years hyper-partisanship moved stealthily into the Roundhouse.  Several legislators, faithful to the moderate-to-conservative views of their constituents, were targeted in primary races by fellow Democrats from the progressive wing of the party, often using out-of-state money.  John was one of the victims of this highly un-democratic movida from liberal Democrats, many of whom do not hesitate to complain loudly about un-democratic tendencies within national Republican circles.  John took his loss stoically, in stride, and with grace.  Vaya con Dios, John.

Shel Nymark
Embudo

In a full-page editorial subtitled “Be an Informed Voter,” your columnist Tom Wright writes that Donald Trump survived “assaults from the deep state and detractors.” The “deep state” is a paranoid, dark, Qanon conspiracy theory that the government is controlled by a secret cabal of military and financial elites.

If yours is a reputable news outlet and has evidence of the “deep state,” please provide it.

Concerning assaults, they occurred on January 6 when Trump’s supporters attacked Capital Police with flagpoles and other weapons. Trump’s family separation policy is an assault; some parents still don’t know what happened to their children and may never see them again.

New Mexico is blessed with many creative thinkers and writers. If you want to inform voters with facts, relegate Q anon Tom to the letters to the editor section and find someone else.

By Trip Jennings

I recently learned that in the months before his 1968 assassination Robert “Bobby” Kennedy Sr. changed his position on the death penalty after reading Albert Camus, the French philosopher and author of literary classics such as The Stranger and The Plague.

I’m not writing about the death penalty, although one of my most lingering memories of my conservative well-read maternal grandfather is of him expressing his opinion on capital punishment.

Born in the late 19th century and a product of small Georgia towns in the Jim Crow South where the death penalty was deeply popular, my grandfather admitted over Sunday lunch that he still struggled with whether it was moral for the state to execute people. He was in his late 80s. <n><n>   I’m pretty sure my grandfather’s politics didn’t jibe with Robert Kennedy’s. But the two men did share one thing: a love of reading. Like Kennedy, my maternal grandfather devoured books, usually ancient classics by Roman, Greek and Jewish writers such as Tacitus, Josephus, and Plutarch. <n><n>   I believe that my grandfather’s hesitance over capital punishment and his willingness to wrestle with how he felt about it was, in part, due to a fertile, inquisitive mind that he had fortified by reading widely and deeply over several decades.

I mention Robert Kennedy and my grandfather and their reading habits because last week was Banned Book Week.

Books have become a political hot potato in recent years in the latest paroxysm of moral panic that has led to impassioned calls to remove books from schools and local libraries.

I hate it.

Mine is not a political, partisan, or ideological position. I’m just a book lover who was reading before I even knew banning books was a thing who finds himself continually surprised at what’s on the list of exiled titles.

Some are beloved; others are deeply profound meditations on what it is to be human in an often-unjust world.  According to the archives kept by the American Library Association and the History Channel, here are a few books that have been banned at one time or another.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

To Kill a Mockingbird

The Bluest Eye

Of Mice and Men

The Catcher in the Rye

The Color Purple

The Bible (yes, this was banned somewhere by someone)

The Grapes of Wrath

Slaughterhouse-Five

1984

These days, I am an avid book lover, but I came late to it. Only after I graduated from college did the reading bug bite.

Turns out, I didn’t like being told what to read in class, but I loved reading when I was the one choosing the titles. In my 20s and 30s, you could find me juggling Anne Rice’s early vampire novels (Interview with the Vampire is especially good) with thousand-page histories on the civil rights era in the South and more obscure titles. John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy ( The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money) comes to mind, as does Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz’s 3,500-page Trilogy about the now-forgotten Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a powerful kingdom that vied for land and status in central Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Before long, I was dipping into philosophy, theology, ethics, and philosophy of science. I also began to diversify who I read — early on, it was mostly white men whom I picked up.

Because I grew up in the Deep South I’d always been fascinated by African American authors, so I searched out books by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. My wife, who’d read Latin American literature in both English and Spanish in college, helped me further diversify my reading, suggesting Mexican and South American writers to me. Reading them, in turn, triggered my curiosity about authors from nations in Africa and Asia, as well as Indigenous writers. <n><n>   As I became a more sophisticated reader, I learned it was important to learn something about the person I was reading because the perspective they were writing from, more often than not, was shaped by their own life experiences.

That led me to pick up more women and LBGTQ+ writers, not for ideological reasons but out of curiosity. Here were fellow humans writing from perspectives shaped by lives that were different from mine. However, in deep and profound ways, oftentimes I recognized myself in their books. Like me, they confronted age-old questions — where do you find meaning in a life that lasts only a short while? Where do you find love? How do we treat others in a world that is so often unjust?<n><n>   As I approach a certain age, I increasingly realize the irony that comes with a love of learning: the more I know, the more I know how much I don’t know. Not having all the answers isn’t troubling, however. I fit into a grand tradition preceded by a cloud of witnesses — as adults in my childhood church used to say — of people similarly infected by a sense of wonder and a passionate inquisitiveness. People like Solon, the ancient Greek lawmaker, who is said to have remarked “I grow old always learning many things” and the great Renaissance painter / sculptor Michelangelo Buonarotti who at 87 wrote to a friend: “Ancora Imparo – I am still learning.” <n><n>   Which brings me back to my grandfather and Robert Kennedy, Sr.

In a society where people are besieged by messages to think for themselves, I believe my grandfather’s decision to buck popular opinion on capital punishment in the Jim Crow South was a mark of his fertile, curious mind shaped by decades of reading. The same goes for Kennedy and his shift on the death penalty.

One final note. I am not saying everyone must read books to be able to think for themselves, I am saying that books were and are central to my own journey.

There are many ways one can learn to think for themselves. But it always involves curiosity and an urge to follow its meandering sense of direction.

Banning books represents the opposite. It attempts to short-circuit inquisitiveness before it can pose questions that could lead you to wrestle with a given subject and perhaps gain a deeper understanding of yourself and the world about you.

Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut where he reported on many stories, including the resignation and incarceration of Connecticut’s then-governor, John Rowland, and gang warfare in California. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican.  He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet that produces investiative, data-rich stories with an eye on solutions that can be a catalyst for change

By Nella Domenici

Across our beautiful state, fishermen, hunters, and outdoorsmen of all kinds, ranchers and farmers, and miners and oil and gas producers interact with public lands every day. Many New Mexicans live in places that are adjacent to or completely surrounded by public land. Many communities in New Mexico, including tribal lands, have econ- omies that rely upon use of the public lands.

No one is more invested in the long-term health and conservation of our public lands than the New Mexicans whose livelihoods rely on the sustained well-being of the land. Because New Mexicans are intertwined with the land, they know best how to preserve the land and their way of life. New Mexicans living in small towns and rural spaces are the ultimate conservationists.

To all of you, I extend my respect and admiration for your commitment to our lands.

Unfortunately, as I’ve traveled the state, you’ve told me repeatedly that you feel under attack from our current government agencies and state and federal elected officials:

• Ranchers in northern New Mexico with grazing rights that go back generations are often harassed with fines and threats of revoked permits.

• Ranchers in southern New Mexico are at risk of losing compensation for their losses caused by wolves.

• In eastern and southern New Mexico, the imagined habitat of endangered species not seen for decades prevents virtually any use of lands.

• Federal agencies are rewriting some rules and regulations with irrational radical Green-New-Deal goals that would allow those agen- cies to deny renewals of long-standing leases and permits owned by New Mexicans.

• Agencies often drag-out permitting applications for years for rural electric co-op rights-of-ways, oil and gas development, and other uses allowed in federal law.

• The Biden/Harris Administration and Martin Henirich are working against the interests of New Mexicans by too often turning public lands into off-limits wilderness or national monuments.

• And terrible federal land management practices have resulted in devastating wildfires and flooding in San Miguel and Mora counties in 2022 and just last spring in Lincoln and Otero counties. More than two years later, many families impacted by the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire are still waiting for compensation and have heard empty promises from Martin Heinrich.

• The wildfires caused by bad forest management means that many homeowners, businesses, and electric co-ops may not be able to secure required insurance coverage.

The Biden/Harris Administration is not with you.

<n>Martin Heinrich is not with you.

<n>They are pursuing a radical-left agenda and fail to recognize that the public lands in New Mexico are for New Mexicans. They want to use New Mexico as an out-of-view remote place to build green energy projects to provide power elsewhere — like Heinrich’s vanity-project, SunZia.

SunZia is the Heinrich-backed wind farm in central New Mexico that will have more than 900 enormous wind turbines generating 3.5 gigawatts of electricity. One hundred percent of this electricity will ultimately be routed to California via 353 miles of new, high voltage power lines across six counties from Torrance to Hidalgo. New Mexicans will not benefit from any of the electricity generated.

I am in favor of alternative sources of energy that benefit New Mexicans. But those sources of energy must do more good than harm.

We should cherish New Mexico’s National Parks and forests, and they must be properly maintained. Our authentic wilderness areas and scenic rivers should be preserved. Our historic, cultural, and wildlife reserves should be preserved. But the power of the Biden/Harris Administration and Senator Heinrich to make such designations is being abused, should be limited, include stakeholder involvement, and Congressional approval.

For too many of you in rural New Mexico it feels like the walls are closing in. The radical-leftists in the federal and state government want you off of our public land.

But I will be with you.

As New Mexico’s U.S. Senator, I will fight for you. I will fight for you in Congress, and I will hold the federal agencies accountable. I will not let them push you off New Mexico’s land, or undermine New Mexico’s economy, or our way of life.

You are the true stewards of our public land and you can be trusted to preserve it for future generations of New Mexicans.