New Mexico in Focus; Episode 711 Tape # IF-711; 711; Taking Stock: U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman

Welcome to Infocus, I'm Kate Nelson. What happened to the Democratic Party? Over the past decade, they lost control of the U .S. House of Representatives, the U .S. Senate, and of course the White House. Currently the nine Democratic candidates for president are busy trying to tear each other apart while Republican plans for Medicare, the environment, and the national budget seem to pass with ease. There have been some successes. Senator Jeff Benjamin recently helped Democrats stop a Republican energy plan authored by New Mexico's other Senator, Pete Domenici. It's likely Senator Benjamin has a more positive outlook on the fortunes of the Democratic Party, but there is no denying Republicans hold the better cards. We are very pleased. Senator Benjamin joins us from Las Cruces to discuss recent events and his plans for the coming months. Welcome Senator. We have a lot we want to talk about today, Medicare, the energy bill, the silvery minnow, but let's hop into this political question. Why can't the Democratic agenda find its legs? Well, I think the Democratic agenda is not

as well defined as some of us would like it to be. We obviously have a very vigorous primary going on, set of primaries going on around the country right now to choose the Democratic nominee until we have a Democratic nominee who can speak with a clear voice and rally the party. I think it will appear that we are extremely disorganized, which to some extent we are. The candidates have been coming to New Mexico a lot. We are, of course, having an early presidential caucus for the first time for any of us that we remember. Do you plan to get involved in that? Will you be endorsing a candidate? I don't plan to endorse a candidate. As you know, three of the candidates at the current time, there were four senators that were running. Now, three of the senators I serve with are still running. And I don't expect to endorse before we have our

primary or our caucuses in New Mexico. I hope after that I'll have a better sense of who the people in New Mexico at least are lining up behind and maybe then I can do some good by supporting one of them. There's a lot of talk that by having this caucus, New Mexico becomes more of a player in the national scene. Do you see it that way? Are we really important in the outcome of this election? Well, because of our small population, we're not one of the big determinants in who wins. But I think we're going to have a lot of candidates coming in here between now and those caucuses. We're going to get more attention. I think all of that's to the good. But that said, none of those candidates to my ears anyway are addressing Western issues. They're not talking about growth or water or the health of our forests. Do you see them addressing the West? Well I think that understandably they are now addressing issues they think will resonate in a national

environment. They're trying to pick up support in a lot of different parts of the country at the same time. And I think when they are here, when they're actually making appearances in the state, I would expect them to address Western issues. And I think we need to be ready to ask them their positions on those Western issues. Let's get into some of the issues that you've been handling lately, starting with the new Medicare bill. Good or bad? Well I voted against the bill. In my view, it's substantial disappointment. I had thought when we talked about adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, that was essentially what we were going to try to do. And that is add additional benefit to the traditional Medicare. This bill does a very different range of things. This bill puts an enormous amount of federal money into trying to move people out of traditional Medicare into the private health care system. And in fact, it calls for us paying more to private health care providers to

provide those services to our seniors than, in fact, the Medicare system has to pay. So I thought it was a bad proposal in that regard. It also does nothing to control the cost of prescription drugs. The congressional budget office estimates that the effect of the bill will actually be to increase the cost of prescription drugs. So again, I was disappointed with that. How many of your colleagues do you think were that aware of all the ramifications of the bill? How many of them even read it? Oh, I don't think any of us read it thoroughly and understood it by the time the vote occurred. As you know, the bill was brought up in the House of Representatives and sort of rushed through or they had a vote in the wee hours of the morning and kept the vote open for three hours, so they could round up enough people to pass it by a very few votes. In the Senate, we had over the weekend to look at it, but it was 700 pages of legislative tax plus another 400 pages of explanation.

And I'm sure I didn't understand all aspects of it, and I'm fairly sure most of my colleagues didn't either. Sounds like a remarkably bad way to make bad law, can it be fixed? Well, it is a bad way to make bad law, and I don't know if it can be fixed. I know that some senators have already introduced, even in the final days of this session of the Congress, have introduced bills that they want to see considered in this next year to change certain parts of it. It's got a provision in the bill which says that Medicare cannot negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for lower prices for prescription drugs. Now, that's something a lot of us think should not be in there. That was something the pharmaceutical industry lobbied very hard for and got included in the bill. So there will be efforts this next year even to revisit some parts of this bill. I don't know if they'll be successful. One of the particular pains in Medicare for New Mexico

has been the disproportionately low amount of reimbursements our doctors and hospitals receive compared to other states. This bill doesn't address that either, does it? Well, it doesn't address it in any significant way. We had some provisions that were in the Senate -passed version of the Medicare bill that would have significantly increased New Mexico's share of funds in this allocation formula that takes place, particularly for so -called disproportionate share hospitals. Those are hospitals that have a disproportionate large number of their customers or patients who are not insured. They would get additional federal funds. We had a provision in the Senate -passed bill that would have increased that funding substantially. It was largely gutted in the final version of the bill. So most of the problem that we faced before we still will face even after the enactment of this bill. Democrats have been

successful in stopping action on other efforts, judicial confirmations, the energy bill. Why couldn't they put it up on this one? Were they just afraid to be seen as against a so -called Medicare reform? Well, I think that some Democrats of course supported this bill and felt that it was a step in the right direction and I understand that argument. Many of them said they understood there were problems with the bill, but this was a beginning and they had been working for years to actually get something done on this subject. So that was their rationale for going forward. I didn't think it was an adequate rationale to justify supporting and passing the bill. I think came down to a question of how many votes were there for the bill and how many votes were there against it and clearly there were enough votes to pass the bill and most members a majority at least felt we should go ahead and exceed to what had come back from the conference committee, which I've

said repeatedly I thought was quite objectionable. Let's move on to that energy bill. When your party was in the majority, you worked very hard on developing energy policy for the nation. What didn't you like about this bill that Pete Domenici came out with? Well, the bill we had passed through the Senate. We passed a bill in the 107th Congress two years ago. We passed another bill this year. It was the same bill essentially and it did try to maintain a balance between increasing production of energy and increased efficiency, increased conservation. I thought that balance had been lost in the bill which finally came back from the conference. Most of the provisions that would help us with increased efficiency and many of those were gone. Many of the provisions related to alternative fuels had been watered down. There were also added to the bill in conference a lot of provisions that had not been there

before, some that we can environmental laws, some that shielded certain corporations from liability in their activities. There were a variety of things added that many of which did not have a whole lot to do with energy. Again, for that reason, I thought the bill should not be passed in that form and I did not support going ahead. There were two schools of thought on this. One was we need an energy policy so badly, let's go ahead and pass a flawed bill, come back and fix it. Later the other was, of course, let's just not get this thing passed. Why not go ahead with the flawed bill, come back later and try to fix it? Well, the reason I didn't favor that course of action is, I think historically you look back and say how often does Congress get around to dealing with energy legislation in a significant way. The last time we did it was 1992. Here we are 11 years later doing it again, trying to do it again.

I think it's likely to be, once a bill is passed, once a bill becomes law, it is likely to be some period, maybe another decade before Congress comes back and deals with the issue again. So, I didn't think it made sense to put in place provisions that we didn't support during this year and then have to live with those for another decade. Let's put this in terms that the average New Mexican can understand. Why is an national energy policy important? How will it affect their lives? Well, I think my own view is that there are a lot of things we ought to be trying to do. A lot of directions we ought to be trying to move in in our energy, both in energy production and in conservation. There are new technologies that allow us to produce energy much more effectively and much more efficiently than we have in the past. There are also new technologies that allow us to save substantial amounts of energy. We need to have incentives in place for those new technologies to be adopted.

We are more and more dependent upon foreign oil. We need to find ways to reduce that dependence. Most of that occurs in the transportation sector. We tried hard in the Senate. We were unsuccessful, but we tried hard in the Senate to enact a provision to call for more efficient requirements on vehicles in this country, but we were unsuccessful with that proposal. There are a lot of directions we should be moving in. Unfortunately, the administration has not embraced many of those and what they have proposed as an energy policy. And accordingly, we have not been able to get the Congress to muster the political will to move in those directions either. That said, Senator Domenici has vowed to continue pushing this bill. Is it likely he will get the votes he needs in the next Congress to pass it? I just don't know. I think he fell a couple of votes short of getting the needed 60

votes to move ahead in the Senate. He may be able to persuade a couple of senators to go ahead and change their vote and support the bill. If not, my suggestion would be that perhaps we go back and take out some of the objectionable parts of the bill so that we could get a majority to support it. And hopefully I could support it. We might also identify particular parts of the bill that we have broad bipartisan support for and pass those. There are provisions related to reliability of our electric transmission system. That should be enacted. And I support that. And I think most senators and most congressmen would. There are provisions on energy efficiency, on research and development. All of those are areas where we have a strong consensus and we ought to enact legislation. Let's move on to an issue important to New Mexico, particularly to its national laboratories. There is a new push now to develop new

nuclear warheads, the mini -nukes, the bunker busters, and so forth. There's a very recent memo urging both of the labs to go crazy coming up with new ideas. Is this hypocritical or condemning other nations for developing weapons of mass destruction even as we're encouraging our own scientists to do the same thing? Well, I think it's unwise for us to be starting down this road. I voted against funding for this effort. It seemed to me that we're better off trying to maintain our nuclear deterrents, which I strongly have supported, ensure the reliability of our nuclear deterrent, but not proceed to develop weapons, particularly weapons, which could be used to accomplish purposes that conventional weapons might also be used to accomplish. So I think it's an unwise course. I hope that we can head it off before we get very far down this road. How wise a course do you feel

President Bush is pursuing on environmental issues? Well, I think on environmental issues, we've just seen a chipping away at the environmental laws that we have in place in the country. I think that's unfortunate. I think most Americans favor strict enforcement of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the various acts that have been put on the books in the last several decades to improve the environment and to maintain a healthy environment. I think the administration is trying as best it can to find ways to make exceptions and write into law delays in the implementation of those acts, and that's not good public policy, in my opinion. There are environmentalists who would accuse you of having participated in the chipping away of those environmental laws. In particular, the Environmental, the Endangered Species Act, as it related to the Silvery Mino and the health of the Rio Grande, why did Albuquerque and New Mexico

deserve a pass on adhering to the regulations within the ESA? Well, the main thing that we changed with regard to this Silvery Mino and the Rio Grande was to make it clear in the law that the water that was brought into this basin, into the Rio Grande basin, through the San Juan Chama Project, that that water was not available to be essentially taken by the federal government for meeting the needs of the Endangered Species Act, its water that was never in this basin to start with, it was water that was brought in and contracted for my particular communities for their needs, and we were protecting their right to have access to that water. But certainly, you must have some concerns that other senators, other congressmen were watching that effort and saying, hey, I can try that in my state too. Well, I

obviously have some concern about that, but the truth is, this is a fairly unique situation where you have water from another basin, another geographic basin that is pumped into over the continental divide and into this basin as the San Juan Chama water is and is brought into this basin to meet particular needs of particular communities. That water we felt should not be subject to being taken by the federal government for this other need, and I think that is a unique circumstance. I'd like to get your thoughts on some of the veterans issues. We have a huge population of military veterans in this state, some concerns lately about their benefits, not being as generous as perhaps a nation at war should make them, particularly with a large number of veterans coming back from the conflicts we're involved in right now, some of your thoughts on how well we're treating our current veterans. Well, I think that again, we've seen a

pattern of trying to skimp and reduce expenditures for four veterans in the veterans health care system in particular, and I think that's unfortunate. Clearly, we have more and more veterans who are getting to an age, particularly World War 2 veterans, who are now getting to an age where they need fairly extensive health care assistance. And for that reason, I think we need to budget that into the process and recognize that. Unfortunately, we don't seem to be doing that in the budgets that the administration is sending to the Congress. We'll get a new budget in January, and we'll see how generous the administration proposes to be in January as regards veterans. I think up until now, I would not give them very high marks. On another military issue, there's a call now to downsize the bases. Can New Mexico evade the acts one more time? Well, I think New Mexico will evade the acts. This base realignment

and closure commission that you're referring to is to be appointed after the next presidential election, so not really in 2004, but in 2005. And once that commission is appointed, then they will make recommendations about any downsizing or realigning or closing of bases that they think are appropriate. I think our, I think, Curtlyn Air Force Base, Cannon Air Force Base, Holliman Air Force Base, White Sands, Missile Range, those are our major defense facilities in New Mexico, and I think they all serve a very useful function. And I would not expect this new commission to propose closing any of those. That said, the rumors that I hear bubbling around New Mexico are that we can make a pretty good case for saving Curtlyn, but that Cannon and Holliman become tougher and tougher arguments as the years go forward. Well, based on what I know, there's very important training that goes on at both of those bases. In

fact, there's not only training for our troops, but in the case of Holliman, we also make available facilities for the German Air Force to train. In the case of Cannon, we make facilities available for Singapore. So I think that there's justification for all of those, both of those bases remaining. Other topic, New Mexico continues to rank among the poorest states in the nation with all the social problems that accompany ingrained poverty. You've been an elected official for many decades now. Why are we still 49th in everything? Well, the reasons why we're 49th are numerous. Clearly, we don't do as well in education as we would like to. Our health care delivery system is deficient in many respects,

and we're working on that, at least at the federal level we're working trying to find ways to get more federal funds into the state to meet our health care needs. In the economy, we have not had the success in attracting private sector employment that we would like to have, and we continue to work at that. I know the governor works aggressively at that. He calls on those of us in the congressional delegation to do so as well, and we are ready and willing to do that. But I don't think there's a single issue you can point to and say, this is the reason or a single deficiency or failure of me or any other elected official that you can point to and say this is the cause of the problem. But how much should we hold our elected officials accountable for addressing or not addressing those problems? Well, I think we should, we should clearly hold our elected officials accountable for working on those problems and taking the steps that we can identify that have to be, or that will lead

to solutions. But the truth is, there are major obstacles to overcome. The demographic situation we have in the state does give us a lower per capita income than other states, most other states, and we are struggling to correct that situation, and doing so is a long -term project. Senator, we're on the cusp of a new year. Here, tell us what your number one priority is in the next session. Well, I'm persuaded that one of the things that's happening to our country and has been happening the last couple of years is that we are losing our leadership and high technology, research and development and manufacturing, and that some of that we see in New Mexico, but we see it all over the country. We need to redouble, we need to have, first of all, develop and implement a effective strategy to increase research and development, increase funding for science and technology education in the country, and

then and also put in place incentives so that some of that high technology related manufacturing remain here in this country. There's a tremendous competition going on between ourselves and the Far East, Far Eastern countries, particularly China, to capture more and more of that high technology activity, and we need to be sure that we are competitive in that regard. I don't think we have been competitive in the last couple of years, and we need to do some things to correct that. Senator Binghaman, is New Mexico too dependent on federal money? Well, we are very dependent upon federal money, and I would like very much to see us broaden the base of economic activity in the state, and get more private sector economic activity occurring here. I think for the next several years, that dependence on the federal government will undoubtedly have to continue, and we need to do a better job than we have in the past of leveraging the

investment that's being made here each year by the federal government to create jobs that are not dependent upon that government. And very quickly, a final question, Senator Binghaman, what grade do you give President Bush? Well, I did not support President Bush before. I don't expect to support him this year, this next year, when he runs for re -election. ABCD or F. I would give him a low C at best. Okay, thank you, Senator Binghaman, for joining us. That's our program for today. Join us again in the new year for another episode of Infocus. I'm Kate Nelson. Take care. Major funding for Infocus is provided by the McCune Charitable Foundation, enriching the cultural life, health, education, environment, and spiritual life of the citizens of New Mexico. Ms. Nelson's apparel was generously provided by articles for her located at 85 -10 -month just east of Wyoming. To respond to this program

or to find out more about Infocus, visit the Infocus webpage at www .canmtv .org. To purchase video cassettes or transcripts of this or other episodes of Infocus, call 1 -800 -328 -5663 or write to the address on your screen. Please specify date and subject of the program. Okay, good job, Kate. Thank you.