How can Graham Platner, who might win the Democratic nomination for senator from Maine in next Tuesday’s primary election ever be seriously considered for such a job, given the amount of personal baggage he carries?

The answer is we have so lowered our standards and think so little of our politicians that, as the saying used to go, anyone can grow up to be president, or senator.

Platner has been accused of so many things that just one would have been enough to derail his candidacy in another era when character mattered. Today, power is all that appears to matter and the way in which one achieves power seems less important than the objective.

Corrupt politicians are nothing new because everyone has a flawed human nature. Some control it, others don’t. Just a few examples of those who didn’t exert self-control.

Randall “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA) is among those who didn’t. Cunningham was widely considered one of the most corrupt congressmen in American history. Given the levels of indictable and non-indictable corruption within the profession, that’s saying something. Cunningham was sentenced to eight years and four months in federal prison in 2005 after pleading guilty to taking at least $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors. The bribes included a yacht, a luxury mansion, private jet travel and expensive antiques.

The list is too long to name them all, but here are a few others. Corruption may be the last bipartisan activity in Washington.

William J. Jefferson (D-LA) was convicted in 2009 on 11 federal corruption counts, including bribery and racketeering. FBI agents raided his home and discovered $90,000 in cash wrapped in aluminum foil which he had hidden in his kitchen freezer.

James (“beam me up, Scotty”) Traficant (D-OH) was expelled from the House (a rarity) in 2002 following his conviction on 10 felony counts, including taking bribes, racketeering, tax evasion, and forcing his congressional staff to perform manual labor on his private farm.

On the Senate side Bob Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was convicted on all counts of a massive federal bribery scheme. Federal agents discovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, a luxury vehicle and more than $100,000 worth of solid gold bars hidden in his home. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison in January 2025.

In the late 1980s, five sitting U.S. senators – Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), Donald Riegle (D-MI), John Glenn (D-OH) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) – intervened with federal bank regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, a corrupt savings and loan executive. Keating had gifted the senators more than $1.3 million in campaign contributions. The subsequent collapse of his bank left thousands of investors penniless and cost taxpayers billions.

To demonstrate corruption is not a modern phenomenon, William A. Clark (D-MT), a 19th-century copper tycoon, literally bought his way into the U.S. Senate in 1899 by directly bribing Montana state legislators with envelopes of cash. The Senate refused to seat him, prompting Clark to declare, “I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.” A profound line and one every member of Congress should put over his or her office door.

John Hipple Mitchell (R-OR) was a sitting U.S. senator when he was indicted and convicted in 1905 for his involvement in the Oregon Land Fraud Scandal. He used his legislative influence to help a syndicate illegally seize thousands of acres of public federal land for private speculation.

Bipartisan committees have been established in the House and Senate to control such behavior, but members intent on gaming the system for their personal and professional benefit will not be deterred by ethics committees. If you don’t subscribe to a high code of ethics before coming to Congress, you are not likely to develop one when you get there.

An Article 5 Convention of States with term limits and a balanced budget would help rein in corruption. If Maine voters elect Graham Platner, it may be coming sooner than anyone expects.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).

Last week, the voters of New Mexico’s Republican Party made their choice, and I respect it completely. Gregg Hull ran a strong race, and I congratulate him sincerely. Politics is competitive, and in a three-way contest, not everyone can win. But I want to be clear about something: my faith in this state — in its people, its potential, and its future — has not dimmed by a single degree.

I got into this race late, and for reasons that were deeply personal. After losing my wife Mala to breast cancer in January of last year, my first instinct was to step back from the world and focus on my family. My children needed me. I needed them. But somewhere in those quiet, hard months, I kept coming back to the same thought: what kind of New Mexico were we leaving them?

It was actually my 16-year-old daughter who pushed me off the fence. She asked me if I would regret not running. She was right to ask. And no — I don’t regret a single day of it.

What this campaign taught me

I traveled this state from the oil fields of the Permian Basin, to Albuquerque’s South Valley to the ranches of Lincoln County. Everywhere I found the same thing: New Mexicans who are proud of where they live and frustrated that their state keeps falling short of what it could be.

We are a state of extraordinary natural wealth and human talent. We have one of the most culturally rich histories in the entire country. We sit at the crossroads of a rapidly evolving energy economy — one where oil and gas revenues are funding our schools even as the next generation of energy infrastructure is being built all around us. We have universities producing world-class researchers. And we have small business owners who are tough, creative and tolerant of our challenging business environment because they love it here.

And yet: our kids still rank near the bottom nationally in reading and math. Too many of our families are leaving for Texas, Arizona, Colorado — anywhere they feel their children will have a better shot. Our tax burden discourages exactly the kind of entrepreneurial energy that could transform our economy. We have been, for too long, a state that accepts mediocrity as the price of stability.

That is not the New Mexico I believe in.

What I hope this fall brings

I didn’t agree with Gregg on everything, but I watched him campaign with discipline and seriousness. The Republican coalition that showed up across this primary, including the voters in rural and southeastern New Mexico who supported our campaign, is broad and energized. That energy doesn’t belong to any one candidate but to the ideas we share.

And those ideas are worth fighting for. School choice isn’t a political abstraction — it is the most direct lever we have for breaking the cycle of poverty that has held too many New Mexican families back for generations. Meaningful tax relief isn’t a giveaway to the wealthy — it is an invitation to entrepreneurs and innovators who are choosing to build their companies somewhere else. Smart development of our energy resources isn’t a concession to the past — it is the bridge that funds our future while we build it.

These aren’t my ideas alone. They are what I heard from New Mexicans, in their own words, at every stop along the way.

A personal note

Running for governor while grieving, while raising three kids, while building a business — it was, to put it mildly, a lot. I am grateful beyond words for every volunteer who knocked on doors, every donor who believed in the vision, and every New Mexican who looked me in the eye and said: we need something different.

To my children: you watched your father bet on himself and on this state at a hard moment in our lives. I hope you saw something worth seeing. I hope you saw that showing up matters — even when you don’t win.

The New Mexico I see

Close your eyes and picture it. A state where a child born in Gallup or Hobbs or Espanola has the same shot at a great education as one born anywhere else in America. A state where a young entrepreneur with a good idea doesn’t feel the pull of Austin or Phoenix the moment she starts thinking about scaling up. A state where our breathtaking land and sky are stewarded wisely — not locked away, not recklessly extracted, but managed with the long view in mind by people who live here. A state that takes its seat at the table of the new American economy — in data infrastructure, energy, in advanced manufacturing, defense and security and more — rather than watching others build it somewhere else.

That New Mexico is not a fantasy. It is a choice. And the people of this state, given the chance, will choose it. Of that I have never been more certain.

Doug Turner ran for the GOP nomination for governor in the June Primary, losing to Rio Rancho Mayor Gregg Hull.

Thirty-two thousand young New Mexicans between the ages of 16 and 24 are neither working nor in school. That is not a statistic. That is a failure, and we need to own it.

A recent Legislative Finance Committee report laid out the numbers. But numbers do not capture what is really happening: a generation is being lost on our watch, and the leadership that has been running this state for decades has no serious answer for it.

We did not lower expectations by accident. We did it deliberately, gradually, and called it compassion. For generations, young New Mexicans worked after school, learned trades, helped on ranches, and understood that a life worth living required effort. Somewhere along the way, we decided that was too much to ask. We softened the standards, excused the absences, and built systems designed to catch people rather than challenge them. We shouldn’t be surprised by the results.

The problem is not a lack of opportunity. The problem is a lack of leadership willing to demand that young people seize it.

New Mexico already has Career Technical Education programs, generous scholarship funding through the Lottery and Opportunity Scholarships, and community colleges with real pathways into real careers. Businesses across the state in healthcare, agriculture, construction, and energy are begging for workers. Those jobs exist today. And yet 32,000 young people are not connected to any of it. That disconnection did not happen by accident. It happened because our state’s leadership chose, year after year, to lower the bar rather than raise it.

New Mexico deserves leaders who will tell young people the truth: that opportunity without effort is worthless, and that this state has been underestimating them for too long. We need earlier career exposure, more hands-on learning, more trade pathways, and leaders who are not afraid to expect more.

Thirty-two thousand is not acceptable. Not in a state that has poured money into education and workforce programs for decades. The opportunities exist. The failure is in the leadership that never demanded they be used. It is time for that to change, and time for the people who allowed this to get so bad to answer for it.

New Mexico Sen. Pat Boone represents the state’s 7th Senate District, containing portions of Curry, Harding, Quay and Union counties.

In January the president described New Mexico’s elections as “so corrupt it’s incredible.” He insisted he would “win by a lot” if they were cleaned up.

Amy Barela, chair of the state’s Republican Party, jumped in, claiming that the Secretary of State “can’t even comply with the most basic federal election integrity laws.”

Following national discussions throwing shade on election integrity, former Gov. Garrey Carruthers, a Republican, and two fellow members of the nonpartisan Observe New Mexico Elections advisory board wrote: “New Mexico’s elections are consistently recognized as among the most transparent and well-administered in the country… There is no credible evidence suggesting widespread irregularities in our state’s voting processes.”

Recent primary elections, by all accounts, were fair and efficient, thanks to the Secretary of State and the county clerks. So much so that when Amy Barela lost her race for Otero County Commission by 46 votes, instead of hollering about corrupt elections she told the Albuquerque Journal, “The people spoke – and that’s the way it works.”

This primary also anointed Gregg Hull, Rio Rancho’s popular former mayor, as the Republicans’ candidate for governor, giving the party its first serious chance at winning in 10 years.

But Hull will need his party behind him. For months the Republican Party under Barela has been too distracted by internal conflict to even field candidates, much less support them. The party must also come to terms with a candidate in the middle of the ideological spectrum when its current leadership is hard right.

At the center of the storm, soaking up energy and resources is Barela, a sitting county commissioner.

Jonathan Emery, her primary opponent (who won), and candidates Duke Rodriguez and Blair Dunn claimed in a lawsuit that she and other party officials violated the party’s own rules against choosing sides in contested primary races. Barela refused to leave the commission race even though the rules state clearly that when the state’s party chair “files as a candidate for public office and there is another Republican who has filed for the same office, the state officer shall immediately vacate the party office.”

Barela’s chief apologist is National Committeeman and state Sen. Jim Townsend, of Artesia, who argues, incredibly, that Barela wasn’t running against Emery – he was running against her.

Dunn, an unsuccessful candidate for lieutenant governor, said it was important to voters to “hold our own accountable.” Rodriguez, who hoped to be the party’s candidate for governor, said the lawsuit wasn’t about one person but about a small group running the party like a private club.

Days before the election a judge ordered Barela to step down as party chairwoman. The party is now appealing, but plaintiffs argue that Barela’s decisions as chair will affect the general election.

Meanwhile, the Journal reports, county leaders are trying to convene a state central committee meeting to elect a new chair. Robert Aragon, an Albuquerque attorney and central committee member who filed his own lawsuit to remove Barela, has said she doesn’t have the votes to continue. He and 246 other committee members supported a resolution in April saying Barela forfeited her chairmanship by competing in a contested primary.

Also weighing in, using his platform as a KKOB Radio talk-show host, is Brandon Vogt, who has hammered the party for not fielding candidates for three statewide offices and sliding with just a write-in candidate for the U.S. Senate race. Barela, he says, is an embarrassment. Because the Democrats have chased away their moderates and the Republicans are in disarray, “New Mexico is now being governed by the fringe left,” he recently wrote. “The GOP is in a coma.”

He’s right that democracy in New Mexico is poorer without two functioning major parties. And it’s more divided. Notice the GOP’s crack along the Albuquerque-southeastern New Mexico divide.

Now Gregg Hull enters the picture. His only path to the Roundhouse is to join Republicans with independents and pick up Democrat Sam Bregman’s supporters along with any other Dems who aren’t on Deb Haaland’s progressive bandwagon.

Although New Mexico’s Democratic Party is calling Hull the “MAGA mayor,” Hull has steered clear of the label. He says only that he can work with everyone. The Republicans can quibble over whether he’s MAGA enough to suit them, but the reality of his campaign is that a Trump endorsement would be the kiss of death. Is the Republican Party’s current leadership equipped for such a campaign? I don’t think so.

Sherry Robinson is a longtime New Mexico reporter and editor. She has worked in Grants, Gallup, the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Business Weekly and Albuquerque Tribune. She is the author of four books. Her columns won first place in 2024 from New Mexico Press Women.