Expecting big things in lawmaking

If you’re interested in seeing how this nation is changing, look to the states. If you look to Washington D.C., you’ll only find deterioration.

With the start of the new year, a lot of changes came through new state laws — with New Mexico in the thick of it all.

On Jan. 1, Illinois became the 11th state to legalize recreational marijuana, and it looks like a race to see who will become the 12th. According to Newsweek, governors in six states where recreational pot is still outlawed support legalization — including our own Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. She’s putting it on the legislative call for the upcoming session and will likely push it through.

If it’s passed legislatively (rather than sent to the voters for popular approval), legalization in New Mexico could take effect as early as July 1 — which might just make us No. 12.

State minimum wage increases, however, had a more pronounced impact with the start of this new year. Wage hikes went up in 21 states on Jan. 1, as they did in dozens of major municipalities around the nation.

New Mexico’s minimum wage went from $7.50 to $9 an hour (with another rate hike, to $12 an hour, scheduled for 2023), while other states are raising their wages considerably higher.

Not surprisingly, the highest minimum wages are on the west and east coasts. Washington now has the highest across-the-board minimum wage, at $13.50 an hour, while Massachusetts just upped its minimum wage to $12.75.

Ironically, in our nation’s capital, where there’s been no national minimum wage increase passed in more than a decade, the city itself increased its minimum wage to $14 per hour on Jan. 1. That will go up to $15 on July 1 — which means D.C.’s minimum wage will be more than twice the national minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

Other new laws are growing out of heightened environmental concerns, with state and local governments passing laws more closely aligned to the Paris agreement than today’s federal policies. And again, that includes New Mexico, where our own “green new deal” was passed last year to wean ourselves off fossil fuels sooner rather than later.

What to do with the environmentally obnoxious use of plastic bags is a bone of contention these days. Oregon is now the third state to ban them altogether (the other two are California and Hawaii), while a growing number of cities have been banning or taxing them — including Santa Fe and, now, Albuquerque here in New Mexico.

That’s just a sampling of the new laws on the books this year, all products of state legislative actions in 2019. Whether 2020 will be another banner year for lawmaking remains to be seen, but I kind of doubt it, given the monumental election year that’s about to bear down on us.

Here in New Mexico, however, we’ve got a 30-day session around the corner. With pot on the agenda and state coffers flush with money, I’d expect some big things anyway.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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