Teresa Leger Fernandez:
So it’s Friday.
Mary-Charlotte Domandi:
It is indeed. And you’re in New Mexico
TLF:
And I am in New Mexico breathing New Mexico air and watching our beautiful mountains with a little snow on top. Not enough as we want.
MCD:
Right, right. I wanted to ask you today. So what do you do when you’re a New Mexico, both in terms of your work as a Congresswoman, but doing it in your district and just on a personal level.
TLF:
So because of COVID, in some ways, there isn’t as big of a distinction between district and DC in the sense that I had a—how did I start my day, I started my day with an interview with a Latinx publication, like interview. So I could have been doing that in. I could have been doing that here because it was all Zoom. I then attended a congressional, Hispanic caucus meeting. If we would have been in DC, we would have done that together. But because we couldn’t and we went over, you know, immigration is a huge priority. And so we had a very, very long session on, on the immigration legislation that we’ll all be pursuing that we hope we’ll be able to—I want to take that back—that we will get enacted over the next two years and some of it over the next two months, two, three months.
So that was a very, very deep dive and took a lot of time. Everybody was committed to doing the work on that. You know, I raised the issues I’m working on in that bill and then did some more work around that bill with my legislative staff. And then did you know, we have to figure out how to get our bills passed, given that the Senate has not decided to get rid of the filibuster. I am on the record of we need to get rid of the filibuster, it’s undemocratic. It comes from a time where we were trying to give slave holding States and people who were fighting reconstruction and Jim Crow filibuster comes from that time. We need to get rid of it because we cannot pass what the American people want without it, unless it’s in budget reconciliation. So once again, we were doing a, uh, a deep tutorial on how the budget reconciliation works.
Then I did some work with constituents in New Mexico. And once again, that was zoom and telephone. So it doesn’t look that different when you’re in New Mexico. And when you in DC doing COVID. Normally, if it weren’t, COVID, I’d probably be on the road to Clayton or Clovis or Las Vegas or Taos or San Juan County. So that’s, what’s really different. And of course in DC, when you’re in DC, I’m in the Capitol, we are voting and you know, so in DC, they’re going back and forth going in and out of the floor and voting is very different.
MCD:
You said a moment ago that you would be on the road going to different places. What kinds of requests are you getting from your constituents? When we talked about it last, they were sending you lots of congratulations and wonderful things. What are they asking you for? What do they want?
TLF:
Well, we got over 5,000 requests to impeach. So that’s one of the biggest things. You know, that’s huge. Yucca, the Youth United, has reached out and we’ve met with them and they want us to make sure we do climate change, and they are so amazing, the Yucca organizers, you know, they’re in high school. Some of them have already graduated from high school and are starting college. It’s a very multicultural, multiracial group and they are committed and they’re active. And they know their stuff. We have conversations with mayors who want help for their cities and communities. The immigrant community, you know, I’ve met with them and they were wonderful, Somos pulled together groups of immigrants. And it was great because it was community members who happened to be immigrants who happened to perhaps not have papers or some of them, did like somebody was trying for citizenship, but they made citizenship so expensive and so hard to get.
There are so many insidious ways in which Trump attacked our communities. And one was, let’s make citizenship really expensive and difficult to get. But they all spoke. They didn’t have the people who were working for the organization speak. It was the immigrants themselves who were making the case and telling me what they wanted. I’ve met with land grant and acequias. And they’re telling me what they want. I’ve met with the people from Clovis, from the air base who wanted to make sure I understood the role that the base played and what their challenges were and what they were trying to do. So, you know, it’s across the district. And so it ranges from, this is what we’re doing with PFAS—that’s the chemical that was used for the firefighting that has now entered into the ground water—to immigrants, meeting and telling me what they do. So it’s the range.
MCD:
And for anybody who might be listening, Yucca stands for Youth United for Climate Crisis Action. And it’s also a desert plant here in the Southwest.
TLF:
Yes.
MCD:
And I mean, this sort of leads into something that I wanted to ask you about anyway, which is, there’s so many voters who put so much energy into the general election and then again into the Georgia Senate race and now kind of election season is over and there’s a lot of people who are eager to stay active. I was just talking to a close friend who said, I need to stay active. What should I do? And we were sort of having a conversation about that. You’re the person that they talk to when you’re in the district, right. But people who are, who might be listening or who want to keep that kind of activist energy going, what do you think is effective?
TLF:
You know, I think you move it into policy, specific policy, you know, thinking about the policy, reading up on it, and then communicating back to us about that policy if you want to have impact on the legislative agenda. Cause there’s lots of different ways. I mean, you could really care about hunger and you can spend time at the various food depots and angels. And there’s a series of levels of how you do it. Or do you really work on saying, Hey, legislators, I think you need to do this. And actually maybe you do both because you have a better sense of what’s needed. What, I love is when you can hear from somebody who’s actually been on the ground level, then you actually know what it looks like. So when somebody could tell me, I gave out my last bag of groceries and I had to look at the family that didn’t get any, and this is what it looked like.
That is the most powerful story. So then being able to tell me that, cause then that’s the story that I take when I say we need to make sure that we address food insecurity. And these are the ways in which we address food insecurity. So maybe it’s doing both. Maybe it’s being very involved in the community. But for example, what I just said, the Senate is unwilling at this point in time to get rid of the filibuster. A lot of the Democrats want that, but they do not yet have the votes for it. Find out who’s not ready to get rid of the filibuster and send them a letter and give them a call. You know, I’ve heard different names. I mean, Manchin is one Senator Manchin, but go down the list. I mean, they’ll be step, go and research. Who’s not willing to get rid of the filibuster, find out who you know, in that community or call them yourself and say, we only have two years. We must undo what Trump did. And some of that is only through congressional action. You can only do so much with executive order. But it’s not just undoing what Trump did. It is re-directing the course of this nation and that needs votes in the Senate. And if we have the filibuster, we’re not going to be able to do what this country needs. So that’s our next goal. Get rid of the filibuster.
MCD:
It’s, it’s just sort of inconceivable to so many people who aren’t on the inside that an arcane Senate rule is the difference between hungry people eating or not, or climate change being addressed or not.
TLF:
It is. I mean, and that’s the thing it’s like, you know, that’s why I work a lot on democracy issues is because, you know, campaign finance reform and all those things are the difference between a lot of these things now. But now that we have this razor-thin majority, this Kamala Harris majority, right? uh, in the Senate, the only way we get this stuff done is if they agree, and they have the power. They have the power to change it. And there’s just a few Democrat senators who are worried about it. And I think that all of the Democrat senators need to hear, we will take the risk, because we are at a point in our history where if we don’t do this now, we are not going to make the change we need. It’s always the more perfect union, right, I love that theme in the inauguration where we are seeking a more perfect union and you do one thing and then you need to take that next step. And right now—the next step was Georgia. Now the next step is the filibuster.
MCD:
Well, and I think there’s a political calculation in there too, which is that if the filibuster goes away, then there’s a very good chance of passing the, for the people, the pro-democracy bill, which then will make it easier to vote and to, I mean, honestly, maintain a democratic majority.
TLF:
Exactly. I mean, and DC gets statehood, two more senators, right? When you think about, it and their worry is, well, what happens when we’re in the minority? It’s like, then we need to work hard to stay in the majority. That’s what you get when you win is you get to pass laws. And we just need to say, we are going to work hard to stay in the majority. And if we don’t sometimes, well, then we’ll just need to work hard to regain it. I mean, that’s part of the way democracy works.
MCD:
Are you eating chile?
TLF:
Of course, the minute I get back to New Mexico, I have chile. I have a stash in my freezer that I can just pull on out and defrost and have huevos rancheros. They were delicious. I had to go do my Covid testing. I always do my COVID testing immediately. I mean, what this last week I’ve had three COVID tests… Four?
MCD:
Good heavens.
TLF:
And so yeah, my nose is like, woo. But, you know, and, and I stopped and got some from Tortilleria Chavela. I got my fresh tortillas de maiz and I put that with my red chile and my eggs in my queso y huevos rancheros de casa. So there we go.
MCD:
There we go. Thanks. Bye.
