Hello fellow political junkies!

This year has been a year of unprecedented things from this being the hottest summer on record to events on Capitol Hill including the most recent episode of the house speaker saga.

Tuesday marked the first time a U.S. House Speaker was removed from the speakership. 

Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who won the position in January, after some members of the Republican Party expressed concern about the way that he negotiated with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown. Those members of the Republican Party joined Democrats in voting to remove McCarthy as speaker. 

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Florida, sponsored the resolution to remove McCarthy, who will remain a house representative for California. Gaetz was one of the House Republicans who refused to vote for McCarthy in January until the final vote after five days and 14 other attempts.

In June, the country came dangerously close to a federal debt default and last week a last-minute vote prevented a government shutdown.

This year does not exist in a vacuum. The last few years have been unprecedented.

Businessman and former reality TV personality Donald Trump was elected in 2016 to the presidency, which ended with a failed insurrection in 2021. The last time anything similar to that happened in the United States was in 1861 when Confederate troops fired on Ft. Sumter. 

Trump’s presidency was also marked by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which came to the US in March 2020.This was the first major pandemic in world history since the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918, sometimes referred to as the Spanish Flu.

Variants of the Great Influenza epidemic continue to affect people to this day causing flu cases ranging from mild to deadly as part of the H1N1 flu.

Historians, sociologists and political scientists describe the 2020s as a civil war. 

We are not in a shooting war, and hopefully will not be.  The Civil War of the 1860s was a war of words long before it became a shooting war.

“Americans had been ‘at each others throat,’ (sic) so to speak, for almost two decades,” Roger L. Ransom wrote in his book Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation, and the American Civil War. “The irritation, frustration, and tension of almost continual political crises made it relatively easy to stir up strong feelings on either side of the Mason-Dixon line.”

This week’s Interim Legislative meetings

• Interim Legislative Education Study Committee will meet Oct. 11-13 at Eddy Training Center, 700 West Stevens Street in Carlsbad.
• Interim Legislative Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee will meet Oct. 10 at Southeast New Mexico College Main Building, Room 101 1500 University Drive in Carlsbad.
• Interim Legislative Economic And Rural Development And Policy Committee will meet Oct. 11-13 in Taos, Los Alamos and Santa Fe. 

Upcoming interim legislative meetings

• Interim Legislative Health And Human Services Committee will meet Oct. 16-18 at the Stan Fulton Athletics Center’s Villanueva Victory Club New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
• Interim Legislative Revenue Stabilization And Tax Policy Committee will meet Oct. 19-20 in Room 322 at the State Capitol. 

For more information about interim legislative committees visit nmlegis.gov.

We are about 106 days until the New Mexico Legislature Opening Day.

Other local and county meeting schedules

• Albuquerque City Council meets at 5 p.m. on the first and third Monday of each month.
• Bernalillo County Commission meets at 5 p.m. on  the second and fourth Tuesday of each month.
• Doña Ana County Commission meets at 9 a.m. on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month.
• Las Cruces City Council meets at 1 p.m. on the first and third Monday of each month.
• Rio Rancho City Council meets at 6 p.m. on the second and fourth Thursday of each month.
• Sandoval County Commission meets at 6 p.m. on the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month.
• Santa Fe City Council meets at 5 p.m. on the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month.
• Santa Fe County Commission meets at 2 p.m. on the second and last Tuesday of each month.

2023 New Mexico Local Elections

The Nov. 7 local elections are for your village/town/city mayors and councils/boards of trustees, school boards, municipal judges and other local boards.

A complete list of local election candidates can be found here.

Early/absentee voting begins Oct. 10 and ends Nov. 4.

For more information on the local elections in your community contact your local county clerk’s office which can also help you check on or update your voter registration, a process that can be done online at NMVote.org.

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