Reviews for my just published memoir, Ten More Doors: Politics and the Path to Change, are beginning to come in. Here's what Marjorie Childress of New Mexico In Depth said about my take on the NM Senate circa 1997 compared to the US Senate now.
"People interested in how power plays out at the statehouse will find former Sen. Dede Feldman’s new memoir interesting. I was surprised, for instance, by how Feldman draws an analogy between New Mexico’s senate majority in Santa Fe in the early days of her career with Republicans in Washington, D.C. today.
I wanted so much to be a part of the Democratic team, even if the team was not so much a team as a rubber stamp. At least it was a rubber stamp for the liberal values I held dear. Or so I told myself,” writes Feldman, who became a state senator in 1997 when former Senate President Pro Tempore Manny Aragon, a Democrat, ruled the Senate much like a feudal lord.
A few years later Aragon was deposed by Richard Romero in 2001 with the help of two other Democrats—Cisco McSorley and Leonard Tsosie—and the Republican caucus, who banded together to elect a new leader over the strong objections of the rest of the Democratic senators.
Romero didn’t stay in the Senate long, and has since become a regular sight at the statehouse as a lobbyist. (I’d like to read his account of why he joined with Republicans and in doing so created a blueprint for conservative dominance of the state senate. He’s not a conservative, nor are McSorley or Tsosie. But the “conservative coalition” in the senate quickly formed after Aragon was toppled, with more conservative Democrats and Republicans having the power to anoint the senate president, who indirectly controls senate committee assignments and thus the ability of legislation to ever make it to a final vote. Two decades later, after a handful of powerful senators lost their seats during the 2020 primary, the Democrats have finally coalesced again behind a progressive leader, Mimi Stewart.)
Feldman doesn’t describe the wheeling and dealing behind Romero’s coup, but she does describe the fallout. A bitter year of acrimony among Democrats, with Romero and the two Democratic senators attacked on the regular.
I had just moved to New Mexico and wasn’t following the Legislature much in 2001. But I heard rumblings. I also heard good things about Manny Aragon. I was living and working in Albuquerque with people who considered Aragon a champion of low-income communities. Feldman agrees that he was. He was more aligned with her politics, she writes, and she had promised to vote for him despite the corrupt way he ran the Senate.
From her description, Aragon emerges as tyrannical, directing the finance committee on how to create the state budget “from a small scrap of paper kept in the pocket of his double-breasted navy blazer” and appointing the chairs of committees without consultation. He humiliated opponents or members of the administration who testified before his committees, belittling their appearance and demeaning their abilities. Aragon introduced over 50 bills per session and pushed them through single handedly, she writes, by holding other bills hostage and trading favors.
Feldman describes three senate colleagues who eventually went to jail or prison for corruption: Phil Griego, Dianna Duran, and Manny Aragon. “While I was in the senate, corruption was right next door and sometimes only a few seats away.” She writes generally about corruption, and the effort to create a state ethics commission. But in her piece about the toppling of Aragon, she dwells more on the perils of loyalty at any cost.
Senate Democrats sat silent under Aragon, Feldman writes, which she likens to Republicans in Washington, D.C. today, who put up with outlandish abuses by Donald Trump.
“Yesterday’s Democratic partisans in the New Mexico Senate stood in solid support of their leader of 13 years,” she says. “Even when his personal attacks, his bullying, and his sharp reversals left them hanging, they didn’t mind. They said no one could do the budget like Manny. No one could hold forth on the floor in defense of people with disabilities or people whose only sin was to be Hispanic or poor. He was a strategic genius, a chess master with daring plans. He knew each of the senators personally, the needs of their districts, their pet projects, their weaknesses, and their wives. It was part of his power.”
Feldman was relieved when Romero was elected. “I was ashamed that I didn’t have the courage to vote for him. He was sticking up for the process—the rules of the game—that Aragon had repeatedly swept aside in his quest for power.”
For years, a fair process hadn’t mattered in the Senate, Feldman says. Aragon took care of what Democratic Senators needed — their capital outlay needs, and their priorities advanced. But after Aragon was toppled, a better Senate emerged, one that made bi-partisan coalitions fruitful and allowed tough legislation to make ground. Feldman, the good government reformer, blossomed.
“Writing this now, recently living through Trump and his allies in the US Senate, it all seems so obvious,” she writes. “The rules of the game are thwarted regularly by a president who has no regard for democratic principles (with a small, not a capital, “D”).”
The Republican senators know better, she says, but are willing to go along with anyone who helps them retain power and move their partisan goals even if the former president led them to break long standing rules of the game.
Feldman says the Republicans under the leadership of Mitch McConnell remind her of the New Mexico Senate in the 1990s.
The longer it goes on, she writes, the harder it is for senators to resist. They’re “forced to swallow bigger and bigger lies, more acts of outright corruption, more firings, more racial dog whistles, calls to violence, betrayals of foreign allies, even infringement on their own power.”
Her condemnation of Republicans and Trump isn’t surprising given she is a progressive Democrat. More surprising is that she lumps herself and other Democrats in the 1990s in with that same behavior.
Similarly under Aragon, she writes, ”Manny was moving the ball down the field in the right direction faster than most leaders. But there was something wrong, something corrupt about taking bills hostage, damaging the reputation of any who oppose you, and bending the rules.” He had his enablers, apologists and beneficiaries, just as Trump and McConnell do, she writes.
It’s a cautionary tale for public officials, especially in a state with a dominant political party that controls the statehouse and governor’s office.
Feldman gives Richard Romero a lot of credit for understanding some things are more important than short-term political gain, and says his courage was an inspiration to her during the years she was in the Senate.
There’s more detail in her book. And more stories about her career in the senate, as an activist, and long ago, as a journalist. She dwells on the importance of “the long game” when it comes to social change, describing how long-desired achievements met with defeat years before they came to fruition. It’s a good reminder. "
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