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…
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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.
U.S. Rep. Martin Heinrich
A regulatory overhaul of the financial industry is probably the next thing Congress will tackle, Congressman Martin Heinrich said Wednesday in an interview in Albuquerque.
President Obama outlined a major financial reform plan last summer (The Wall Street Journal has highlights), and public sentiment would seem fertile for a move to reign in big banks.
Heinrich said Tuesday he’s “optimistic that we will have a Wall Street reform bill in the next couple of months.”
But as Time’s Michael Grunwald noted today, reform is “Far From a Done Deal in Congress.”
Heinrich noted that the House passed a financial reform bill last year, but said there was “no coverage of the most fundamental financial reforms in 80 years” from the media — because the media was covering the health care debate going on in the Senate.
The Senate has been working on the financial reform bill for months and some speculate that the bill may be bogged down by the same Republican opposition that delayed health care reform for months. Although the Senate Finance Committee passed a version of health care reform legislation in October of 2009, it was not until Christmas Eve that the Senate voted on the bill. And the final piece of the legislation was not passed until March of this year.
If and when a financial reform bill passes the Senate, that version would have to be reconciled with the House version.
A similar timeline confronts immigration reform, which Heinrich said he thought probably wouldn’t come up anytime soon.
“I think the timeline is very challenging for [immigration reform] to happen before November,” Heinrich said. Since 2010 is an election year, there will be less time for Congress to work; every House seat and more than one-third of Senate seats are up for election this year.
Heinrich, however, said “the sooner we do it, the better” because he believes immigration reform is “long overdue.”
Asked about security along the U.S.-Mexico border, Heinrich said he was concerned about the rising level of violence. “I’m not worried about the border. I’m worried about the whole country. …”There is a level of violence there now that we haven’t seen in North America in the past,” Heinrich said.
