How chaotic is the leadership battle in the state House of Representatives at the moment? Have you got a hour or so to run through all the scenarios?

Here goes:

House Speaker Ben Lujan, D-Nambe, has reportedly reached out to some Republicans to shore up support in his bid to continue his run as speaker of the House, Heath Haussamen at NMPolitics.net reports today.

But so has Rep. Thomas Garcia, D-Ocate, Haussamen adds. Garcia, going into his third term as a state lawmaker, has been rumored for a couple of weeks as someone who was contemplating a coalition with Republicans to wrest control from Lujan as speaker. Haussamen reports that House Minority Leader Thomas Taylor, R-Farmington, told him Saturday that Garcia has indeed reached out to some Republicans about a possible coalition.

Garcia joins Rep. Joseph Cervantes, D-Las Cruces, on a list of Democratic state lawmakers whose names have been mentioned as potential threats to Lujan’s leadership.

Recent electoral results have shifted power in the House, which is causing the behind-the scenes battle for power. Democrats lost eight seats in the Nov. 2 elections, shaving their margin of control as a majority party in the chamber from 45-25 to 37-33, which is why GOP lawmakers ostensibly are being courted so heavily.

It’s unclear how supportive the newly empowered House Republicans are of a power-sharing agreement with Democrats, if it should come to that. I guess we’ll see in coming days if things progress that way.

There’s a reason the House Speaker post is at the center of all the political scheming. Whoever is Speaker of the House is the single most powerful lawmaker in the Legislature. That person controls if, and when, legislation comes up for a vote in that chamber and how easy or difficult a path a particular bill faces to win passage. The speaker assigns bills to House committees to vet the legislation. Some committees are viewed as the killing fields depending on the legislation.

The Speaker also selects lawmakers to lead House legislative committees, meaning the Speaker has an instant base of power beyond the inherent authority of the position. Committee chairpersons often support the person who put them in those powerful posts.

House Democrats will meet this weekend to decide who they will support as leader as a caucus. As many of the sources in Haussamen’s post tell him, it’s too confusing at the moment to know what will happen given all the potential scenarios.

Susana Martinez

For the past year on the campaign trail Governor-elect Susana Martinez has hammered away at the corruption and serial scandals that have plagued New Mexico since 2005.

Her response to voters was always the same. She’d treat corruption for what it was – a crime. And then she’d mention her idea of creating a special State Police unit charged with investigating public corruption instead of pushing for an independent ethics commission, a perennial loser with state lawmakers.

Now, with two months before her first legislative session, Martinez must convince state lawmakers of the worthiness of her idea.

There are signs it won’t be easy. Due in part to the state’s woebegone finances, creating a new police division appears unpopular with some lawmakers who worry about spending more money at a time when the state is broke.

Then there’s the wariness with which some state lawmakers view the executive branch, particularly given the constant tug-of-war the Legislature and Gov. Bill Richardson endured over a plethora of  issues.

It is not lost on some lawmakers that Martinez is talking about placing responsibility for prosecuting corruption at an agency under the governor’s control.

“Most people think there’s more corruption in the executive branch,” said Sen. President Pro Tem Tim Jennings, D-Roswell. “That’s what we’ve seen more of, where more of it appears to be.”

Martinez, the budget and where ethics fits in

Martinez has spent her first days as governor-elect calling or meeting with legislative leaders, mostly about budget matters. Fixing the state budget will rank as the top priority during the coming legislative session, meaning dollars and cents, and not ethics or corruption, likely will dominate discussions between Martinez and legislative leaders.

As of last week, Martinez said she didn’t yet have a sense of whether legislative leaders were open to an idea of a corruption-busting State Police unit. That hasn’t stopped her from lifting entire paragraphs of boilerplate from the campaign trail to continue lobbying for the idea.

New Mexicans want more than an independent ethics commission to guard against future corruption, she told a small crowd last week at an Albuquerque press conference. As she did on the campaign trail, Martinez dismissed an independent commission as “politicians who are looking at politicians who are then investigating politicians,” she said. “That is unacceptable to this administration.”

Martinez’s idea has caught on with some lawmakers, among them, Sen. Minority Leader Stuart Ingle, R-Portales.

“There is no doubt we need someone to investigate corruption,” Ingle said. Attorney General Gary King is supposed to be out in front in the fight of corruption, Ingle said, but “there’s nothing being done.”

But the Portales Republican acknowledges the state’s precarious financial straits when talk of how to pay for a new state corruption unit comes up.

“It’s going to depend on the extra money that is needed,” he said.

While support is hard to quantify, the idea already has picked up some powerful opponents. Rep. Luciano “Lucky” Varela, D-Santa Fe, and chairman of the Legislature’s budget arm, the Legislative Finance Committee, is clear where he stands on the idea, and it’s not behind it.

Chances are the state police might be uprooted from its current home, the Department of Public Safety, because of an ongoing government-restructuring effort, Varela added.

“I don’t have it in my mind where the state police should be,” Varela said. “We’re not there. I would suspect the Department of Public Safety would look differently once we get done with it.”

Corruption looms large in New Mexico

Corruption, and how to fight it, has been on New Mexico’s legislative agenda ever since 2005, when a string of several high-profile scandals began. Since then two former state treasurers, a former Senate president and a deputy insurance superintendent are among the public officials who either have pleaded guilty to or have been convicted of corruption-related charges.

Add to the mix at least two federal criminal probes of Gov. Bill Richardson’s administration, and how New Mexico’s public officials conduct business has become a matter of urgency for government reformers.

But all the high-profile scandals, and what appeared to be support of ethics reforms by an overwhelming number of New Mexicans, wasn’t enough to propel one of the reformers’ biggest goals into law — an independent ethics commission.

For four years Richardson and state lawmakers wrestled over how to set up such a commission, who would sit on it and how members would be appointed.  The concept has proved deeply unpopular at the Capitol, and never got close to passing.

This year, for example, reformers and advocates actively opposed an ethics commission bill after lawmakers added language that would have punished more harshly a person who publicly spoke of testifying before the commission than an individual found to have violated the public trust.

Ethics commissions across the nation

Despite Martinez’s dismissal of ethics commissions as the playground of politicians who have no incentive to punish wrongdoing, ethics commissions in other states such as Ohio and Connecticut have investigated and fined governors for ethical lapses, demonstrating that some panels have some bite and aren’t merely showpieces.

In fact, New Mexico is one of a handful of states without a commission. More than 40 already have one, including many of New Mexico’s neighbors such as Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Nevada, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Arizona, like New Mexico, does not have one.

Looking forward

But the idea of a commission appears shelved, at least for now, as Martinez takes the helm of the state and tries out her idea of bolstering criminal prosecution of corruption.

Jennings, the Democratic senate leader, however, offered a reminder of how potentially strewn with obstacles the path to creating a special State Police unit might become during the coming legislative session.

“Before we create new divisions, we better get rid of a lot of what we have and get our budget in control,” Jennings said of the state’s budget situation. “It’s easy to add government, but hard to take it away.”

Before it was all over Martinez was accusing the Richardson administration of playing “financial shell games” to hide the true size of New Mexico’s budget woes while the Richardson administration was questioning Martinez’s understanding of how state budgeting works.

The fireworks erupted Thursday afternoon after a top Richardson administration financial official gave the Associated Press a briefing of New Mexico’s budget that projected a $450 million budget shortfall for the year that starts July 1. That projection was based on certain assumptions and was, at the risk of oversimplification, a sort of worst-case scenario.

The $450 million figure is significantly higher than the $260 million figure the Legislature was briefed on earlier this fall. The lower estimate was based on a different set of assumptions than the scenario outlined to the Associated Press on Thursday.

But once the $450 million number was out, Martinez issued a blistering statement accusing the Richardson administration of playing hide-the-bad-financial-news.

“The revelation of a near half-billion dollar deficit is far worse than expected and confirms our suspicions that the Richardson/Denish administration has been hiding the ball all along with respect to the true budget deficit,” Martinez said in a statement issued Thursday afternoon. “This clearly has very serious implications for all New Mexicans.  I will work with the legislature to make the tough decisions necessary to balance the budget by getting spending under control.”

Martinez’s accusatory tone, in turn, provoked a sharp reaction from the Richardson administration, which released its own statement a little more than an hour following Martinez’s.

“It’s not surprising that Susana Martinez doesn’t understand the state budget and the growth of Medicaid since she ignored it during the campaign and has not yet accepted our offer for a thorough briefing,” Richardson’s deputy chief of staff, Gilbert Gallegos, said in a statement.  ”She can’t keep her unrealistic promises and still balance the budget.”

While running for governor, Martinez promised that she would not raise taxes in her first year at the same time she promised not to cut two of the largest areas in the state budget — public education and Medicaid, the government’s low-income health insurance program. Education and Medicaid make up 60 percent of the state budget.

Martinez’s campaign promises have given some state lawmakers pause, with some saying that to exempt that much of state government from cuts while raising  no new revenue is a recipe for pain.

Martinez, for her part, is sticking to her guns. She told reporters Wednesday that layoffs of state employees remain on the table as an option to balance next year’s budget, even though they aren’t her first option.

“The long-term solution to our budget crisis is to get our economy moving again and that is why I will oppose efforts to raise taxes,” Martinez said in her statement Thursday.

Either way, whether the state’s budget gap is $260 million or $450 million, or some number in between, there is no doubt that New Mexico faces a fiscal challenge when state lawmakers converge in Santa Fe in about two months.

Much of the growth in next year’s shortfall will be owed to the dwindling of federal stimulus money, which New Mexico used to pay for programs, such as public schools and Medicaid. The amount available to the state for next year will be much smaller, meaning the state must figure out how to replace the money or cut services and programs.

The new budget year starts in July 2011 and runs through June 2012.

Less noted is ongoing leadership fight among House Republicans.

Longtime House Rep. Larry Larranaga, R-Albuquerque, is challenging Farmington Republican Tom Taylor as that chamber’s top GOP lawmaker at this weekend’s House Republican caucus.

Larranaga’s challenge comes at an interesting, some say inopportune, time. The Republicans are a few votes shy of a majority in the House for the first time in decades. Add to that the fact that soon-to-be Republican Gov. Susana Martinez will give Republican legislators a powerful ally during the upcoming legislative session. And suddenly the House GOP is on the cusp of gaining a seat at the grownups table for major legislative decisions in a way that hasn’t been always true in in the past. Before last week’s election, the Democrats held a 45-25 majority over the GOP in the House.

Will a leadership battle threaten that increased power?

It’s hard to tell.

Some observers say part of their House Republicans’ strength will be in their ability to project a united front moving into the legislative session, which starts Jan. 18. A solid block of legislators perceived as working together has more pull than a collection of legislators who are viewed as battling amongst themselves.

Taylor, reached by phone Thursday, seemed cognizant of that dynamic.

“In the environment we are moving into where we have a chance to govern it’s important that we have a unified caucus,” Taylor told The Independent. “Whatever happens my outlook is that we are going to have a unified caucus.”

As for Larranaga’s challenge, Taylor said, “Larry would like to do the job. From my point of view we have an election to see how it comes out.”

A message was left for Larranaga, but he did not immediately return the call Thursday.

Updated at 4:24 p.m.:

Rep. Larranaga just told The Independent that he didn’t see any disruption coming out of the House GOP leadership fight.

“There is no animosity. We just want to have a discussion,” Larranaga said by phone. “There is no disruptive discussion or anything like that.”

Larranaga also said, “Some members said, ‘Let’s have a discussion and a choice and put your name in there.’ Tom’s a great guy. It is providing people a choice. I don’t have any idea of what the outcome will be.”

Attorney General Gary King, re-elected to a second four-year term last week,  told the Associated Press that there was “nothing inappropriate about the spending but acknowledged an accounting problem and special circumstances prompted the issue.”

State agencies must secure a contract for purchases over $5,000 by regulation. Independent auditors from a firm hired by the state Auditor’s Office expressed concern that without a properly executed contract, there was potential for payment of unauthorized expenses, the news service reported.

King told the Associated Press that his office didn’t know until too late that the registration fees would cost more than $5,000, which is why there wasn’t a contract.

Susana Martinez

Republican Governor-elect Susana Martinez said Wednesday that layoffs of state workers isn’t her first option, but she acknowledged that the possibility isn’t off the table.

“I would like not to have layoffs,” Martinez said Wednesday at an Albuquerque news conference. “People are already in furloughs in state government. We have to make sure we are providing the necessary core services and so I would never say they are off the table.

Fixing New Mexico’s state budget will dominate the legislative agenda as Martinez and state lawmakers learn to work together starting in January to close a $260-million gap in the 2012 budget after the state already has cut costs and raised revenue during previous legislative sessions.

Martinez made promises on the campaign trail that might prove difficult to keep.

The governor-elect  promised not to raise taxes in her first year at the same time she promised not to cut two of the largest areas in the state budget — public education and Medicaid, the government’s low-income health insurance program. Education and Medicaid make up 60 percent of the state budget.

Martinez said Wednesday that there were 3,000 vacant state jobs around New Mexico state government. But it was unknown how much of a savings New Mexico would net from eliminating those positions because it’s unclear how many of the vacant jobs are actually funded.

“Some are and some are not. We’ve received just yesterday a pile of documents about this thick,” Martinez said, indicating several inches of documents her staff will review to determine how many positions are funded.

Martinez already has said she wants to shrink the number of political appointees scattered throughout state government. But doing away with from 200 or 300 of those positions wouldn’t come close to filling the $260 million budget shortfall.

The governor-elect also acknowledged she still intends to sell the state jet, which became an issue during the governor’s race.

“I definitely do want to sell it,” Martinez said. “We have to look at what the market looks like and certainly looking at the planes and how many we have … I understand there are several helicopters. We want to take a look and see where we are with that.”

The relaxed, friendly mood described by the paper offers a striking contrast to the white-hot rhetoric that defined this year’s governor’s race. Martinez held up Richardson as the bete noire to good governance, repeatedly criticizing him and his administration as corrupt and spendthrift in her run against Democratic Lt. Gov. Diane Denish.

And Richardson definitely noticed. He said last week his only regret was not being able to defend his record during this year’s election. It was unclear from the stories about yesterday’s meeting whether Richardson raised the hard-hitting, sometimes nasty gubernatorial campaign.

Who knows? Richardson is an experienced pol, a veteran of decades of election campaigns. And he realizes how brutal some elections can be and how unappealing coming off as a sore loser might look. At least publicly Richardson appears not to be nursing any ill will.

Last week Richardson told Gene Grant on KNME’s New Mexico in Focus that the election is over and what New Mexico needs now is unity.

“It was a very bitter campaign,” Richardson told Grant. “The time has come to recognize that we need some bipartisanship now. As an outgoing governor I am prepared to be as helpful as I can, just as Gov. (Gary) Johnson was when I came in. He was personally helpful. It’s a tradition I want to continue.”

As for all those attack ads saturating the air and radio waves leading up to Nov. 2, Richardson suggested to Grant that Democrats and Republicans have to overcome any hard feelings, and get down to the hard work ahead.

“It’s over,” Richardson told Grant. “You get over it. It’s time to govern.”

Susana Martinez

Republican Gov.-elect Susana Martinez promised repeatedly during this year’s election to try to repeal a law allowing illegal immigrants to get New Mexico drivers licenses and to revoke thousands of already-issued documents. But interviews with state lawmakers this week make clear that undoing the law isn’t a sure thing when the New Mexico Legislature convenes in Santa Fe in January for one of the toughest sessions in recent memory.

For one, it’s unclear whether enough state lawmakers support the repeal effort to push it through both chambers in the Legislature, which Democrats still control despite losing eight seats in the House of Representatives during last week’s election.

Then there’s the potential for New Mexico’s budgetary problems to crowd out other large, controversial measures, some lawmakers said.

Fixing the state’s budget will dominate the legislative agenda as Martinez and state lawmakers learn to work together to close a $260-million gap in the 2012 budget after the state already has cut costs and raised revenue during previous legislative sessions.

On Tuesday a spokesman said Martinez remains committed to the goal in the upcoming 60-day legislative session.

“It was a top priority during the campaign and absolutely it is part of the agenda moving forward,” spokesman Danny Diaz said.

Citing a September poll that found more than 70 percent of New Mexicans oppose the state law, Diaz added, “There’s no disputing where the people of New Mexico are and they want the law repealed and licenses revoked.”

But veteran lawmaker, Rep. Luciano “Lucky” Varela, D-Santa Fe, said he wasn’t persuaded that state lawmakers will have enough time to juggle a potentially contentious debate over immigration with a wide-ranging, tough budget battle.

“We have so many important issues,” Varela said. Besides, he added, “I don’t know if we have the votes.”

State lawmakers have shown an ability over the years to juggle several substantial issues simultaneously, and there’s no reason to think they can’t this time too, responded the House’s top Republican, Minority Leader Thomas Taylor, R-Farmington.

“Just to think everyone is going to sit around and do nothing (except the budget) is ridiculous,” Taylor said. “I would think all of those  issues will be discussed and voted on.”

Pressure builds to repeal the law

About 10 states had similar laws on the books when New Mexico passed its drivers’ license law in 2003. But since then that number has dwindled to only three – New Mexico, Washington and Utah.

Combined with the national debate over illegal immigration, thanks to Arizona’s toughest-in-the-nation law, political pressure thrust immigration into this year’s New Mexico governor’s race.

From the start, Martinez took the tougher stance than Democratic Lt. Gov. Diane Denish, her opponent. Whereas Denish said she’d consider stopping the issuance of licenses going forward, Martinez vowed to work toward repealing the law and to revoke the tens of thousands of the state’s drivers’ licenses already issued to illegal immigrants.

Currently around 80,000 foreign nationals have New Mexico driver’s licenses, but not all are illegal immigrants, making it difficult to determine the exact number of illegal immigrants with state driver’s licenses, state officials said earlier this year.

State lawmakers are familiar enough with the issue, said Sen. Stuart Ingle, R-Portales, the state Senate’s top Republican lawmaker.  They’ve debated it in previous sessions and “people have answered lots of questions,” Ingle added.

“After an election like this, you’d think people would pay attention to what their constituents want them to do,” Ingle said.

The unknown is whether Martinez, working with legislative allies, can cobble together enough votes in the House and Senate to push through legislation repealing the law, and revoking the already-issued licenses, observers say.

Legislative Republicans won big in last week’s election, picking up eight seats in the House of Representatives. But Democrats still retain a four-seat advantage in that chamber, 37-33. Democrats enjoy a 12-vote advantage in the Senate, although enough conservative and moderate Democrats make common cause on key issues to sometimes nullify that advantage.

Legislative Republicans also likely will feel more emboldened with one of their own as governor, GOP lawmakers say. In Martinez they will have a powerful ally in the executive branch for the first time in eight years. Martinez replaces outgoing Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson.

“There’s a bigger place at the table. The governor tips the scale a little bit,” Taylor said.

But Sen. President Pro Tem Tim Jennings, D-Roswell, said while he understood that there’d be a push to repeal the drivers license law, he hoped the debate could wait.

“We have such a pressing issues on the budget that all the other side issues are just things we have to figure out how to deal with if the time is there,” Jennings said.

Then saying what other state officials have said across the nation, Jennings said, “We need to tell Congress to do their business and let us do our business. Congress is regulating how many drains you can put in a swimming pool, but they are not balancing the (federal) budget or taking care of immigration. We need to send them that message.”