I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
On Friday, the front page of the Santa Fe New Mexican featured something you don’t see every day: father and son mug shots. (The online edition shows only Block, Sr.) Jerome Block, Jr., and his father, Jerome Block, Sr., had both stopped by the Santa Fe County Jail last week to be booked, fingerprinted and photographed after their indictments last month for election code violations.
As I wrote on my blog the other day, what bothers me the most about the Block case is not the theft of which the father and son are accused, but the underlying problems with New Mexico politics that the case throws into high relief.
New Mexico has public financing of state elections. This means that Jerome Block, Jr., an uninspiring candidate by all accounts — and one who nearly lost to a Green Party opponent in a County where Democrats pretty much never lose to anybody of any party — got to run for and win a cushy government job with taxpayers’ money.
The penny-ante larceny of which Jerome Block, Jr., is accused is small potatoes when compared with the great, hulking pork roast that is the public financing of campaigns. The few thousand dollars Jerome Block allegedly stole from his campaign funds is far less significant than the millions of dollars New Mexico extracts — with perfect legality — from the taxpayers to fund candidates like Block in elections all over the state. That is the theft we should be angry about.
I understand the rationale behind public financing of elections. It is supposed to reduce the influence of the wealthy in politics, and give ordinary citizens the chance to run for public office. It is supposed to give us better candidates, and better government. But does it? In the case of the Public Regulation Commission race, it gave us Jerome Block, Jr.
The same noble spirit of reform that brought us public financing has, in the 2009 legislative session, brought the citizens of New Mexico campaign contribution limits. This state law, just like the McCain-Feingold law on the federal level, limits the amount an individual can contribute to a candidate’s campaign coffers, and is supposed to reduce the influence of money in politics and give us better government.
Does it? I have seen no improvement in the quality of our elected officials in the years since McCain-Feingold passed, nor any diminution in the influence of moneyed interests on politics. The money just gets there in other ways. Contriubutions to individual candidates are limited, but not contributions to political parties, so that the power of the national parties has increased. This, of course, means more well-connected party insiders as candidates, and fewer outsiders and ordinary citizens.
Mr. Smith would have a very hard time getting to Washington these days.
Contribution limits also mean that if candidates want to win the next election, they must begin their scrounging for campaign dollars the minute the last election is over. Does that give us better government?
It is naive to think that the influence of money can be taken out of politics. Money and political power are inextricably linked. They always have been and always will be. Throughout most of human history, that linkage has been straightforward.
In the Roman Republic, for example, political magistracies were the exclusive province of the wealthy. Candidates financed their own elections, and served in office without payment. Moreover, magistrates spent their own money repairing roads, building aqueducts and putting on public entertainments.
Today, in times that purport to be more enlightened, candidates spend money forcibly extracted from taxpayers to fund their campaigns, are paid more taxpayer money in salary, and spend still more taxpayer money on public works projects once they are in office.
Are we better served by our representatives than the Romans were by theirs?
Sometimes I wonder.
