{"id":110101,"date":"2015-12-20T17:24:41","date_gmt":"2015-12-21T00:24:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=110101"},"modified":"2015-12-22T17:38:19","modified_gmt":"2015-12-23T00:38:19","slug":"this-new-mexican-accepts-gov-martinezs-apology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2015\/12\/this-new-mexican-accepts-gov-martinezs-apology\/","title":{"rendered":"This New Mexican accepts Gov. Martinez’s apology"},"content":{"rendered":"

COMMENTARY:<\/strong> It’s never appropriate for a person with\u00a0power in our\u00a0government to use her position to influence, pressure, or intimidate law enforcement.<\/p>\n

\"Heath<\/a>

Heath Haussamen<\/p><\/div>\n

And yet, Gov. Susana Martinez did just that a week ago, after the front desk at a Santa Fe hotel asked\u00a0police to remove a noisy group from a room where Martinez and others were gathered.<\/p>\n

You can listen to the entire conversation<\/a> between Martinez, a dispatcher, and a police commander, but it can be summed up with Martinez’s beginning and ending comments:<\/p>\n

“Hi, this is Gov. Susana Martinez,” she said. “… There\u2019s no necessary \u2014 no necessity for your officers to be here. Thank you. You can call them off. Goodbye.”<\/p>\n

This\u00a0isn’t the first time\u00a0we’ve seen such an abuse of power. Former Gov. Bill Richardson\u00a0justified speeding<\/a>\u00a0in violation of traffic laws. Former House Minority Whip Terry Marquardt, R-Alamogordo, convinced a judge to dismiss two speeding citations<\/a>\u00a0against him because he was a legislator.<\/p>\n

And former Senate Majority Whip Mary Jane Garcia, D-Do\u00f1a Ana, used her official position to haul officials from Santa Fe to a meeting in Mesilla, at taxpayer expense, where she and others accused\u00a0them of Gestapo tactics<\/a> after her bar was cited<\/a> for serving an intoxicated person.
\n<\/p>\n

Richardson, Marquardt and Garcia all acted inappropriately. So did Martinez. But, while the others never gave New Mexicans the courtesy of apologizing for their abuses of\u00a0power, Martinez spent Friday doing the right thing.<\/p>\n

“I apologize to the people of New Mexico for having done that,” Martinez was quoted by KOB-TV<\/a>\u00a0in Albuquerque as saying. “I should have never talked to central dispatch the way I did. Um, and I own it. It’s my responsibility and I apologize to the people of New Mexico for the way I handled it.”<\/p>\n

She repeated the apology in interviews with several other news organizations.<\/p>\n

The severity of Martinez’s transgression is amplified by her own rhetoric. In a 2010 commentary<\/a> for NMPolitics.net, during her first campaign for governor, she complained that “Some in state government feel they are above the law. They have abused their positions and the public trust and left our state weakened and vulnerable in pursuit of personal gain.”<\/p>\n

Martinez set the bar high. She\u00a0promised “bold change.”<\/p>\n

Many will argue we haven’t seen the change Martinez promised. I’ll\u00a0leave that debate for another time.<\/p>\n

For now, I want to be clear: Martinez’s actions were wrong.\u00a0I’d hammer the governor\u00a0if she hadn’t owned up to her abuse of power and publicly apologized.\u00a0I don’t expect perfection from my elected officials, but I do expect apologies\u00a0when they make mistakes.<\/p>\n

This New Mexican accepts Martinez’s\u00a0apology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gov. Susana Martinez abused her power. Her promise to bring “bold change” amplifies the severity of her transgression. I don’t expect perfection from my elected officials, but I do expect apologies when they make mistakes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55852,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1192,10],"tags":[203,107,208],"class_list":["post-110101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-haussamen-columns","tag-law-enforcement","tag-roundhouse","tag-susana-martinez"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}