Mary-Charlotte Domandi:
So are you back in New Mexico?
Teresa Leger Fernandez:
Yes. I’m so happy to be breathing New Mexico air.
MCD:
I wanted to ask you, I mean, what a baptism by fire this first week in office, and if you have any sort of thoughts and reflections looking back on it.
TLF:
Yeah. And I think that, that it’s really important as I was thinking about it, to recognize that it began with Republicans doing out-of-the-ordinary things, right. And it just resulted in that horrible, deadly crescendo that we saw Wednesday. So on Sunday, what should have normally been a swearing in ceremony that was, you know, altered due to COVID, had historical objections to the seating of the speaker who had been duly elected by the body. It had a motion to not seat those States for which there were objections because if the election was marred and had been stolen from the president, it was marred for everybody. So that, you know, instead of having this orderly swearing in, it was chaotic. It was not ordinary, right? The decorum wasn’t there, you know, McCarthy who had lost the vote gets up and gives a speech. And I keep looking over at my fellow Congresspeople saying, what is he doing?
And he does not stop talking. He’s the loser, the guy who lost the election speaks and speaks and speaks, and then repeats lies, just nonstop. And, you know, and the thing that gets me that gets me really mad is, you know, when they’re, We are the party of, somebody said yesterday, you know, the other night, uh, We’re the big tent party, like one of the Republicans said, “We are the big tent party.” And it’s like, how do they say these things that are so obviously false. And they take these positions and, you know, we all abhor violence. It’s like, you just created the conditions for violence. But this is Sunday. So Sunday, he says, we support our first responders and our fire protectors, you know, we’re their party. It’s like, you’re the ones who didn’t want to give them any funding and COVID relief, right?
So the hypocrisy is staggering. And I think I said it then, that all these things basically detract from what we need to be doing, that all of what Trump has done, you know, he had a very clear purpose and the Republicans had a very clear purpose of using him, right? We’re going to use this person that we don’t really like, but we want the power that he brings so that we can loosen regulations, and give away, you know, our seas to oil and gas companies and secure our Supreme court nominations—they were willing to make the deal with the devil. And now some of them are reconsidering it, but it began then. And it just went all through until what we saw on Wednesday. So it was, it was not smooth sailing. And then all of a sudden Wednesday, there was something ugly.
It started ugly and it just continued and continued and, and got, you know, increasingly the crescendo resulted in the violence and the death, the mob attack and everything else. But speaking of the death, I mean this man, Brian Sicknick, you know, he gave his life, he lost his life.
MCD:
The police officer.
TLF:
Yeah. The people that he was defending were all of us, right? And that symbol of our democracy. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a position where somebody has died in the performance of the duties where I am part of the cohort of those for whom they were serving. I’ve lost, I’ve had lots of tragedies in my life. I’ve lost so many people. I’ve given a eulogy at somebody who died to COVID; I’ve cried over, you know, our elders that we’ve lost and our native American communities; I cried over my sister’s death, my brother’s death, my brother’s death, my father’s death, my mother’s death, you know, on and on and on, but never did somebody get killed doing their job, and their job was to protect me. And all of us. So it’s a day after, it’s a day where for many of us just the emotional trauma and the rawness of it all, r-a-w, is sinking in. For those who were stuck in that gallery or in that room or under those desks or barricaded in small rooms, you know, hearts are breaking even more, right? So there were those of us who were stuck in places where we had freedom, we had lights, we had access to TVs. We didn’t have freedom in terms of, we couldn’t go anywhere we were, you know, one or two rooms, two or three rooms. And that’s it. Right. But there was no, we weren’t like the two congresswomen who were barricaded in the women’s lounge for five hours in the dark, being quiet so that the rioters wouldn’t hear. And it’s emotional.
MCD:
How did you secure your office?
TLF:
We just locked the door and we put stuff up against the doors.
MCD:
Still, the vision of putting desks over the doors, you know, across the doors in Congress, it’s, it’s pretty daunting and extreme.
TLF:
It’s really daunting, extreme. And we didn’t have, like I said, I don’t want to overplay the threat to us as compared to those who literally are off the rotunda and have couches that they have pulled across the doors with the rioters and the terrorists outside roaming and screaming outside their doors. I mean, our building was secured quickly.
MCD:
Well, I watched this afternoon that video in the Washington Post of the mob, literally breaking the glass and trying to push through the door where the congressmen were on the other side. And they, they exited. Um, but that was the moment where that woman, Ashley Babbitt got killed. And it was terrifying to watch this crazy mob of mostly men with these two helmetless, Capitol police officers trying to defend against this countless number of people.
TLF:
Right. And they were shouting and they had been on social media saying that they were hunting. Those were some of the words. We’re hunting. And even now, you know, the Cowboys for Trump had said, blood will run on January 20th. And Cowboys for Trump is, one of the leaders is from New Mexico and was there. And that’s the other thing that’s even after all of that, very few Congresspeople retracted their position. The Senators did. And it might’ve been because they were all stuck, they were all gathered together. So more Republican senators pulled back. And if you saw the vote on Pennsylvania, they went over there and they said, there’s been an objection, okay, what’s the vote, boom. And they didn’t do their two hours of debate. In the house, the Republican Congresspeople continued to kick up every single second of the debate.
They put a little words in front, “We abhor violence.” They put a few words at the end, “We abhor violence.” And then they said all the same lies all over again. They didn’t change it. And you know what? My sister Congresswoman from down South Yvette Herrell did that. She got up, she read her statement, never looking up, so none of them stopped, this is what we have caused. None of them took responsibility for what they have caused because Donald Trump didn’t do it alone. He did it with all of them saying, yes, we will support you because it’s a fraudulent election and it’s been stolen. And every single one of them were accomplices to what happened yesterday.
MCD:
What does this mean for your ability to work as a congressional delegation in the future do you think?
TLF:
I don’t know. I mean, I don’t want to really go into that speculation, other than the extreme—disappointment is too soft of a word that I have for somebody who’s representing New Mexico who would be so cavalier to what had just occurred and would not think and reflect and say, this is the time for me to step back and say, I don’t care if I’m going to lose my two minutes on the C-SPAN, but I’m stepping back. I really admire those Republicans who got up and said, We lost. We don’t like what that we lost, but that’s what happens with elections. That’s what happens with democracy, right? We lost. So there were those who were scheduled to say that and said it, they were going to say that even before the events, and those are the best ones, right? Because they were willing to get up and say, our democracy is more important than fealty to this man. But the other ones weren’t. They didn’t sit back from it. And what it says is a lot of other things we’ve talked about, what it says is they run in primaries where being as extreme as you can get, as what helps you win.
