Teresa Leger Fernandez:
The support for the rescue plan has gone up to 77%—
Mary-Charlotte Domandi:
77% of the country.
TLF:
—59% of Republicans, right.
MCD:
And 0% of congressional Republicans.
TLF:
0% of congressional Republicans. Right. It’s just amazing.
MCD:
Well, this is something that I wanted to ask you today because there’s this question of, I mean, you have talked about how incredibly busy you are and what the schedule is like. And by the end of the day, you can barely remember what happened that morning. And you’re caught up in the work of being a legislator, but then sometimes you have this opportunity to step back and actually look at ideas. And I think it was yesterday that you had kind of an idea session in your caucus, is that correct?
TLF:
Yes. The caucus just finished two days of our idea conference. And what we do is—apparently normally it’s done where we have speakers and we’re all together, some her, but this time we had to do it virtually like everything else. So yesterday I moderated the session on economy and how do we build prosperity in every zip code? Because that is really what we were looking at. So we had a real range of people giving us their ideas from Ai-Jen [Poo] who looks at domestic workers and has a beautiful TED talk about how we do not value domestic workers. And yet they are the people who care so much for those we love the most, whether it’s your children, your parents, or grandparents. And then, taking care of your home to labor, carpenter’s union. And I could go through and just talk a lot about all the different ideas that were brought to us by these experts. Small businesses, Xiomara [Peña] talked about the importance of small business and I’m talking small businesses, not the SBA definition of less than 500, but those small businesses that are main street that are really creating the most jobs and that have been hurt the hardest in this. Another idea of like, we need to rethink the contract with workers, because the contract with workers that we used to have meant you worked and you had the good life. And now we don’t have the good life anymore. And we have to think about how do we really rethink about how work is done and how it’s valued so that you can indeed work and have the good life. So I was able to moderate that panel and it was wonderful. The questions that the Congresspeople asked of them, I wanted to ask, and I did get to have a conversation about how we measure success and progress in the United States. Because right now the measurements, everybody pays attention to are GDP, the market, right? And those are not the measurements that talk about what is the equity in our society? What is the inequity? How do we actually measure those things that lead to the good life, that lead to making a community thrive? So we had a wonderful conversation around that. We just finished, just a few minutes ago with president Biden, actually, who came to our ideas session and answered questions.
MCD:
Have you heard of the gross domestic happiness initiative?
TLF:
Yes. The gross domestic happiness initiative is, you know, that’s kind of where you think about it is like what really counts and how do you actually measure happiness? And if you look at the countries that have higher gross domestic happiness, they are not in fact, the wealthiest countries in the world. That’s the same ideas as like what should we be paying attention to? When we look at a neighborhood and a community, what’s important in that neighborhood and community, what makes people happy? And we look at Santa Fe, Las Vegas, so many parts of our beautiful state. What makes us happy is that we have fiestas, that we have music in the park, that we have rodeos that we have, you know, we have these community events. But we also want to make sure that we have affordable housing and that people have the time so then that working two jobs, so that they can coach the little league, those are things that lead to a community vitality. Those are important aspects of community vitality.
MCD:
I often think about what security means to people and in so many ways, it’s just so basic. It’s having enough money in the bank to get through the next few crises, needing new tires, needing to go without a paycheck if you lose your job. And stable housing brilliance has so much to do with stability. And being able to know that the next few months, the next few years are going to be okay, and that you can plan for the future.
TLF:
And that’s part of the good life, right? That you are actually building towards a future president Biden in answer to one of the questions today about inequity talked about the importance of making sure that people can afford a home and buy a home, not just to rent it, but to buy it because that is how so many Americans build equity. But that ability to buy a home has been denied, especially to Black potential homeowners, but to others as well. The GI bill left black GIs out of the ability to buy home. Luckily Latinos were able to take advantage of that. So part of his plan is a $15,000 down payment for new homeowners. That would make a lot towards—right there you’ve got $15,000 of equity in your home. And I am a big proponent of affordable home ownership. I worked on that for several decades, with HomeWise. So that to me is, it was wonderful to have him start taking apart all the different ways in which we need to build equity, starting with down payments. So that’s coming down the pike, everybody. It’s pretty exciting.
MCD:
Any other big ideas that came out of this that you’re thinking about?
TLF:
I mean, the thing is, is that we covered so many important areas—looking at systemic racism to you know, one panel, which is there is not a planet B. And really talking about what we need to do with regards to climate change, which is huge. Unfortunately, I had a question in there. There are so many questions, everybody’s so excited. But what was wonderful was that even though we were having to do it through this clunky virtual technology, the engagement of the caucus, I mean, they were attending it, you’d look up and there were 200 people online, they were chatting, they were asking questions, they were joking with each other. We also—big ideas—we had Michelle Lujan Grisham on our health panel.
MCD:
Over near of New Mexico, ladies and gentlemen.
TLF:
Yes. Governor Michelle Lujan, Grisham. She is doing such a marvelous job. And she’s already thinking about what do we need to do to address inequity in health and what do we need to do to bring the cost down? What do we need to do to make sure those States that are not doing the Medicaid expansion, what can we do to make sure they do? Cause we’re lucky in New Mexico, we did the Medicaid expansion. But if you’re in a state that has a Republican governor, that on the basis of politics said I’m not going to do that, you’re not covered. And that hurts children, that hurts families. So she had ideas on what are ways in which we can get that done.
MCD:
What was the big question that you didn’t get answered?
TLF:
Oh, I was going to ask a question of John Kerry, you know, and the top people on climate change, about the importance of thinking through the dilemma that we have in New Mexico, which is that we know the climate crisis is real and that we are going to be subject to a lot of hurt if we don’t address it. But we’re also very dependent on fossil fuels for not just jobs—because I think we can replace the jobs with renewable energy, with diversification—but for the tax revenue. And so I wanted to lay that out there and what are some of the ideas that we can start building on to replace the tax revenue? Cause that’s the challenge. But I’ll continue to be asking those questions. I’m trying to get some of New Mexico’s needs into the next package, the Build Back Better package. And so those are the kinds of things we’re going to be looking at. Pretty creative, pretty interesting, good time to be working on things that the American people really support. We just saw some numbers. So I’m being called to my next thing…
MCD:
We’ll see you tomorrow.
TLF:
Those alarms go off all the time saying, Hey, you got to go, okay. Bye bye.
