Corrupt GOP tries to distract, confuse voters

New Mexico Republicans once positioned themselves as defenders of good government who were making a righteous stand against pay-to-play corruption.

And with good reason: By the first decade of the 21st Century, corruption among Democratic elected officials in this state was epic and awful. The number of Democrats who were charged, convicted, incarcerated, and left office in disgrace was staggering. Wrongdoing included pay-to-play, electoral fraud and more.

How things have changed. With Donald Trump and Elon Musk engaged in astonishing graft at the federal level, the Republican Party’s minions in our state are increasingly betraying the good-government ideals they’ve fought for in the past.

The latest example is Rep. Alan Martinez, a Republican from Rio Rancho, misusing the word “corruption” to cheapen its meaning and muddy the waters as Trump and Musk destroy the systems and norms that protect us all and preserve the public trust, which is sacred in a democracy.

Martinez, the House minority whip, authored a column published by the Albuquerque Journal that tosses the “corruption” label at a scandalous immigration case involving a former judge who is a Democrat.

Former Doña Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano is charged with tampering with evidence and accused of smashing a phone and disposing of it. Cano says the federal charges against Venezuelan national Cristhian Ortega-Lopez, 23, are “highly sensationalized and without merit” and says Ortega-Lopez and two other Venezuelans who were living on his property were “a meaningful part of our extended family.”

The feds haven’t accused Cano of benefiting from protecting Ortega-Lopez or doing anything else for personal gain.

And yet, Martinez wrote, the case is evidence that law enforcement in New Mexico is rigging the system by picking which criminals to shield. “Under one party rule in Santa Fe, corruption festers with little fear of accountability,” he wrote.

The courts will decide if Cano did something illegal. The evidence that’s been presented publicly suggests Cano made a terrible choice to protect a young person he believed in. The allegations don’t involve Cano misusing his position as a judge.

What he did may be illegal, but it isn’t corruption.

Real corruption

Transparency International has an excellent definition of corruption: “abuse of entrusted power for private gain.” Wikipedia describes corruption as “the use of powers by government officials or their network contacts for illegitimate private gain” and lists bribery, lobbying, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, and embezzlement among forms of corruption.

Martinez’s political party is supporting corruption that may be unprecedented in scale, and he is instead complaining about a person who, unrelated to his position as a judge, provided housing for three men who may or may not have been in a gang, folks who neighbors praised as members of their community.

The hypocrisy is glaring, but not surprising. Muddying the definition of corruption makes it more difficult for the public to recognize actual graft. Republicans like Martinez are attempting to provide cover for Trump and Musk as they destroy democracy for their own gain.

To clarify, here’s what real corruption looks like:

• Musk spending almost $300 million to buy the president and gain permission to take a chainsaw to government, then using his power to systematically destroy the agencies that regulate his companies so he can make more money.

• Trump selling access to folks who invest in his family’s cryptocurrency, which has made his family nearly $3 billion already.

• Trump’s plan to accept a luxury jet from the royal family of Qatar that would be, in the words of MSNBC’s Steve Bennen, “the largest foreign gift in the history of the United States, which he intends to keep after he exits the White House, in defiance of the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”

• The Trump Administration pressuring the African nation of Gambia to increase business for Musk’s satellite internet company Starlink.

• Trump’s FBI dismantling, in the words of The New York Times, “a squad that handles investigations into members of Congress and fraud by federal employees,” after also taking a hatchet to the Department of Justice’s public integrity unit.

• Firing the inspectors general who would root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, as Trump has done, so your misdeeds can’t be tracked.

I don’t hear Martinez complaining about any of that. I didn’t hear state Sen. Jay Block, another Rio Rancho Republican, complain about it either. Instead, Block tried to copy Musk, ignored the fact that New Mexico already has a state auditor, and sought funding for a wasteful, duplicative effort to root out waste, fraud and abuse in state government.

It was another effort to distract.

There is actual corruption in New Mexico. The rigged judicial system Martinez complained about is real in Bernalillo County, where police officers from multiple agencies were accepting illegal payments to make drunk-driving charges disappear.

But Martinez didn’t choose to write about that. He went after someone who helped immigrants instead. Gotta keep the public focused on the bogeyman.

About those guardrails

State lawmakers from both parties spoke a lot during this year’s session about including “guardrails” in proposed legislation to ensure accountability. Republicans in particular loved talking about guardrails.

That word has come up a lot in recent days in the context of Trump’s actions.

“The framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized that democratic government was a new departure from a world in which the world’s monarchs made deals amongst themselves,” Heather Cox Richardson wrote on Substack. “They placed strong guardrails around the behavior of future chief executives to make sure they would not sell the American people out to foreign leaders.”

Richardson was writing about the Trump family’s ties to Qatar.

“This is corruption, and not just in the sense that a government official is getting a payoff,” Richardson wrote. “It is corruption in the old-fashioned meaning of the term, that the body politic is being corrupted — poisoned — by a sickness that must be cured or it will be fatal. That corruption is the old-world system the framers tried to safeguard against, and it is visible anew in the relationship of the Trumps with Qatar.”

The New York Times used the word guardrails, too.

“The second Trump administration is showing striking disdain for onetime norms of propriety and for traditional legal and political guardrails around public service,” an article about Trump’s corruption states. “It is clearly emboldened, in part because of the Supreme Court’s ruling last year that granted immunity to presidents for their official actions and because of the political reality that Mr. Trump’s hold on the Republican Party means he need not fear impeachment.”

Vote these cultists out of office

Trump’s control of the GOP makes it a cult. Folks like Martinez don’t actually care about guardrails. Their interest is protecting their cult leader.

So they argue that the president of the United States literally corrupting the public trust he swore to uphold is not corruption. There has to be another villain. Corruption is a guy who made a bad choice while helping an immigrant who was trying to make a living, because immigrants are the enemy.

I wrote in 2019, during Trump’s first term, that GOP leaders in New Mexico don’t really care about corruption, no matter what they say. That’s even truer today, when Trump has upped the graft to unprecedented levels while retaining the support of the vast majority of Republicans.

If you only complain about corruption when the other party is guilty, you don’t really care about corruption.

This is why I became a Democrat. The guardrail is us voting these morally bankrupt frauds out of office and stopping the cult’s authoritarian takeover before it’s too late.