Roundhouse

Democrats Kill Democracy and Protect a Criminal Presidency in New Mexico
Submitted by davidswanson on Wed, 2007-03-14 02:28. By Dave Lindorff

The unseen dead hand of national Democratic meddling seems to have killed a promising example of grassroots democratic activism in New Mexico that could have been a model for reviving the Democratic Party nationwide and in that key swing state.

While no one has yet come forward and identified the culprits, it seems evident from the behavior and explanations of some key one-time backers of a proposed legislative joint resolution calling on the US House to impeach President Bush, who at first supported the measure but then joined 17 Republican members of the state senate in killing it, that pressure was brought to bear on them to trade sides.

Only last week, the resolution, submitted by State Senator Gerald Ortiz y Pino, looked like a sure thing. It had breezed through the relevant committees with solid Democratic support and only needed to be accepted for debate by a full vote of the senate, which has 20 Republicans and 23 Democrats.

But then something strange happened.

Altamarino

Democrats came back the next day and demanded for a voice vote on the measure. It went down to defeat, 26-17, with Altamirano and eight other Democrats voting against it.

Altamirano later insisted that he had not voted against Ortiz’s resolution, which he improbably claimed to still support, arguing that all he had done was vote that the prior day’s controversial ruling declaring the measure dead by voice vote had been proper. He failed to mention that he was referring on his own ruling as president pro-tempore and chair of the session the day before.

Cisneros

“That’s pretty weasily,” commended Desi Brown, an aide to Sen. Ortiz. “The bill was killed and it cannot be brought back to the Senate floor, unless Sen. Cisneros knows something about senate rules that we don’t know.”

A third Democratic turncoat, Sen. David Ulibarri, failed to return calls to explain his reason from voting against the resolution after earlier backing it in committee.

Ortiz aide Brown said only two of the nine Democrats voting against the resolution represent majority Republican districts, a situation which might explain their taking a negative position on the resolution. Others of the nine represent fairly conservative Democratic districts, but of course, the Bush presidency is unpopular among Democratic voters of all political stripes, and among independents too.

Brown says that prior to the vote killing the resolution, five of the nine Democratic senators who voted with Republicans had been seen conversing privately, suggesting a coordinated strategy to kill the measure.

Brown and impeachment movement activists in the state insist that days before the debacle in the Senate, they had clear support for passage among senate Democrats.

Richardson

The Democratic National Committee has targeted New Mexico as a key battleground state for 2008, and given the national party leadership’s clear desire to avoid an impeachment battle in the House, it seems increasingly evident from the strange behavior of turncoat senate Democrats in the state, that pressure was brought to prevent the passage of a joint resolution that would have put the issue front and center in the US House of Representatives. This seems particularly likely given the overt pressure that has been brought to bear on state senators in the state of Washington by two members of that state’s congressional delegation. A similar joint resolution is facing a do-or-die vote in the Washington state senate today or tomorrow.

One curious aspect in this story is the behavior of senate Republicans in New Mexico. Last spring, when impeachment talk was first surfacing, national Republican leaders argued in the media that a Democratic-led impeachment campaign would be good for Republicans since it would “rally the base” of the Republican Party. Many Democratic Party leaders have bought into that theory, which is why they are afraid of the growing impeachment movement. But if impeachment is good for Republicans, why would they have acted in concert in New Mexico to kill Sen. Ortiz’s resolution? Democrats should think twice before joining Republicans in such efforts to kill off citizen impeachment campaigns at the state level. Clearly Republicans don’t really want to see an impeachment hearing in Washington, DC, which suggests that Democrats should be pushing ahead for those hearings, not helping Republicans to fend them off.

Grubesic

He added, “Our actions today showed where our priorities are, we forgot that the Constitution was not designed to serve government, but to protect the people. There should have been a debate, argument, uproar. Instead, we quietly gutted the sovereign power of the people with polite political procedure. When future generations look back on our time, the shock will not be because of the violent, impolite nature of the fight that preceded the destruction of Constitutional government, but by the meekness with which we watched it die.” (more of Senator Grubesic's text, here).

Erich Kuerschner, a local impeachment activist in the state, notes that at the state party convention held in 2006, 80 percent of the delegates endorsed a plank calling for impeachment of the president. “The party constituents made a pretty clear choice back then,” he says, “and it’s not being reflected by the actions of the party leadership.”

Entire Text from afterdowningstreet.org

Note: The original article spelled our local Senator's name incorrectly as: Carlos Cizneros. This has been corrected to Carlos Cisneros in this posting.

Note 2: There seems to be no photographs of David Ulibarri anywhere at all.