Candidate Q&A: U.S. Senate

Editor’s note: A New Mexico U.S. Senate seat is open after Tom Udall decided against running for a third term.

Candidates are Republican Mark Ronchetti, a former television meteorologist; Democrat Ben Ray Lujân, assistant speaker of the House of Representatives, and Libertarian Bob Walsh, co-founder of Rocky Mountain EMS.

Candidates were asked the same questions on the spot via telephone or online meeting software.

The election is Nov. 3. Early voting continues through October:

Ben Ray Lujân

What do you believe should be the role of the federal government?

The role of the federal government is to ensure that there’s support to keep our country safe, to provide health and safety to people throughout the United States, to be a driver of not just national security issues but economic security issues, and also to be a leader when it comes to protecting the rights of the American people and upholding the United States Constitution. I believe included in that, not just supporting our military and our troops and military families, is also the delivery of healthcare and healthcare security as well, and economic security.

What makes you the best qualified candidate for this seat?

I’ve been honored to serve the people of New Mexico in the U.S. House of Representatives. I’ve been working every day now during COVID to deliver resources to help every family in New Mexico that has been hit hard by COVID, including our small businesses to recover and to rebuild. I’ve been proud to deliver investments into New Mexico, which help create economic opportunities and have also been instrumental in our national security efforts. That includes efforts to make investments in our national labs, like Sandia, Los Alamos, the Air Force Research Labs, and also Cannon Air Force Base, Kirtland Air Force Base, Holloman, and White Sands.

I’ve been proud to lead initiatives on important infrastructure like water pipelines in different parts of New Mexico. Working to make sure that we’re able to have increased access to healthcare in our state, including in rural communities. I’m very proud that we’ve continued to move legislation to lower prescription drug prices, to expand benefits to Medicare beneficiaries, while we work together to protect Medicare and Social Security for the people of New Mexico.

Look, I was raised on a small farm. I learned on that small farm the value of hard work, and to roll up my sleeves and to get the job done. Those are the values that I take with me everyday to the United States House of Representatives.

What are your key concerns for eastern New Mexico?

Eastern New Mexico is a very special place, and a place that I have been honored to represent in the Third Congressional District. I think there are so many important priorities as we look at infrastructure. Infrastructure to ensure that we have water, water systems, water delivery, in every one of our communities.

The importance of investments when it comes to agriculture. I’ve been proud to lead initiatives to increase access to resources for our farmers and ranchers through the Farm Bill. I have also been very proud to go to bat for dairy families and dairy farms when it came to PFAS and PFOA, to make sure that we were able to work with the department of defense to get that cleaned up — that’s an ongoing project, and that’s an important priority.

And then looking at what we can do to expand economic opportunities. Added value with agriculture and use of the Farm Bill as a tool. And driving those investments to close those broadband divides as well so that we have access to internet in every one of our rural communities, and we close that digital divide as well.

Also, now that we’re faced with COVID-19 it’s going to be very important that we continue to drive investments to help our local businesses through more loans and grants that we have. Direct funding to local governments, like the city of Clovis, county of Curry, Portales, Clovis, Quay County, every one of the counties in eastern New Mexico.

I’m very proud that recently there was an award of $4.2 million for small business grants and partnerships with local governments to Clovis. As well as I think $240,000 in emergency grants to local governments. Those kind of investments to local governments are going to be essential as well.

And then supporting Cannon Air Force Base, I think that’s instrumental. Not just for our national security but for our local economy. That’s another area where I’ve been proud to partner, not just through learning through the leadership of the Committee of Fifty, but also with local governments and leaders that have been supportive of our important installation in New Mexico.

What concerns do you have about the pandemic in 2021?

I’m very concerned that there has not been a national strategy coming from the president’s administration, and delivering a national strategy to delivering testing to PPE. That’s been absent. States like New Mexico and local governments have been left to bid against one another to try to secure the necessary testing and PPE to keep their communities safe, to help safely reopen their schools. That’s why I’ve been fighting for resources everyday, and we’ve delivered five important pieces of legislation that provided direct payments to people in New Mexico; $1,200 payments to folks making $75,000 or less. There were unemployment benefits for those who lost their job through no fault of their own, along with loans through PPP and grants for small businesses.

We need more of those important investments to support our local businesses, to support people living in New Mexico, and to make sure everyone has those resources to recover and to rebuild.

As part of that I would say it’s also important that an infrastructure package we already passed out of the House of Representatives that would invest in our roads and bridges, water and waste water, and transmission corridors, school modernization, that would include eastern New Mexico; that’s already passed the House of Representative. It’s sitting on Mitch McConnell’s desk. That’s also going to be important as we work to rebuild and strengthen the economy. Not just for New Mexico but throughout America.

What assurances could you provide that you will not simply be an obstructionist to the other party and a rubber stamp for yours?

One thing I’m very proud of is the work I have done on a bipartisan basis to pass pieces of legislation that matter to us here in New Mexico. That includes investments to our national labs and to our bases. I’ve been proud to be a co-lead with my Republican colleagues on the National Lab Caucus, which drives investments to Sandia, Los Alamos.

I’ve been proud to be a leader and a co-lead with my Republican colleagues on the Cleanup Caucus, which includes efforts to clean up areas that have been contaminated, which also include areas in and around Cannon Air Force Base.

I was proud to lead an initiative of working with my colleagues on a bipartisan basis including investments for closing the broadband divide in rural communities and tribal communities. I’m also very proud that when I was serving in the minority, and my Republican colleagues were in charge under President Trump, the 10 bills that I authored and co-authored were included in an important package which provided support for patients in communities in response to the opioid pandemic, in response to providing more support for mental and behavioral health.

I’m proud to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and I’m willing to take anyone on and stand with anyone for the good of New Mexico.

Please tell us something you support regarding President Trump.

I very much appreciate that President Trump has the same focus with initiatives that were important to us here in New Mexico. President Trump signed into law a piece of legislation to provide more support, that included efforts to provide programs in our communities when it came to the challenges that thousands of families are facing with opioids, and with addictions, and with mental and behavioral health. That included 10 bills that I authored or co-authored, so that was an honor to work on that effort for the good of the people in New Mexico.

Please tell us something you support regarding former Vice President Biden.

I’m very proud of the work that Vice President Biden did when he had the responsibility to help rebuild America’s economy as he was tasked with by former President Barack Obama through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And especially now as we look at the devastation that has been caused by COVID-19 from a health pandemic and also the economic crisis that we’re now facing under President Trump. I believe that skill set and the work that Vice President Biden did in helping to lead the creation of millions of jobs across America and driving those investments through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is something that is going to be needed.

The other thing that I appreciate about Vice President Biden is that he takes time to get to know folks. He cares about people. He treats people with respect and dignity, and Vice President Biden he aways reminds us that he learned from his father who was a blue collar worker — my dad was a union iron worker — that taught him the importance and dignity of a paycheck and the importance of being able to retire with dignity as well. That’s something that I appreciate that I know Vice President Biden has in his heart, to value working class families all across America.

Mark Ronchetti

What do you believe should be the role of the federal government?

I think the federal government’s most important role is to protect the rights of its citizens, first and foremost. They should make sure that all its citizens are equally protected and they can pursue the American dream. I think we get into this thing with the federal government sometimes where they expand too much, and they try to have too much of a role in peoples’ lives and they end up taking them over. I think when they take them over they sacrifice the very freedom of the people who they’re supposed to protect.

To me that’s disappointing, and I think too often that can happen.

The federal government also has a very important role of making sure that we have a social safety net. We have things that help people when they need them, absolutely. But more often than not we need a federal government that protects our rights.

What makes you the best qualified candidate for this seat?

I think what we’ve seen in Washington is this splitting, and this hyper-partisanship. I just don’t operate that way. I have no interest in the politics of this. I’m not a politician, and I never will be a politician. I want to be the person who goes there and reaches across that aisle and does what we need to do to get things done, instead of shouting back and forth at each other.

I also think that I more accurately reflect the values of the people of this state. I think we’re a state that has values where we value that freedom, we value our faith, we value our families. But too often the far left does not stand for those things. I will bring more of a family, faith-based, sensibility back to New Mexico and to the U.S. Senate.

What are your key concerns for eastern New Mexico?

I think a fight for water is one of them. I think for our dairies and our ranchers — we have a water crisis. Someone’s got to go to battle to get more water across the east side of the state here.

Now there’s a bunch of things that we could do for that. We could transport water more efficiently. I would love to see our water compacts redone with Texas. I would love to see us look at everything from desalinization, everything that we need to help with the water situation in this state.

What worries me most is that rural New Mexico is going to be under the gun if we don’t somehow figure out the water crisis. To me, that has not been dealt with nearly enough in the past 10 years and I think it’s absolutely critical.

I also think the rural way of life is in danger. I feel like government more and more protects the cities. Government more and more protects those that are clustered around the higher population areas.

Well we need to make sure we get educational opportunities for the rest of New Mexico. We need to make sure that once our kids graduate from high school out there, they can either get a job, go to vocational school, or go to college. Schools like Eastern (New Mexico University) are critical in that. Vocational schools are critical in that, but there has to be some investment there. Because I think the heart of this state are our rural communities. I love spending time there and I really think that’s something we need to look out for. I just feel like right now our representation doesn’t represent our rural communities at all.

What concerns do you have about the pandemic in 2021?

Well I have significant concerns obviously. I think there’s a lot we need to do to make sure that we’re handling this the right way. We need to make sure we mask up. We need to make sure we socially distance. All those things are critical there’s no doubt, but also we need to make sure that we’re able to keep people financially viable.

We need to make sure that people have jobs and that they’re able to go back and get their lives back. I think that there’s been a tremendous cost here to families across this state, and across eastern New Mexico if you look at what happened to business. We have to first and foremost keep people safe but then we’ve got to get people back to work. We’ve got to get ourselves in a position where we can allow people to get their kids back to school.

I mean these are things that are critical in all of this, and when you look at the mental health of our communities and what’s going on right now that concerns me hugely. I mean it really does. It’s a big concern, and I think that there are a lot of these collateral costs like mental health — down the road — like healthcare, and longterm job prospects that are going to be a real concern. So we’ve got to take first and foremost the safety of this thing very seriously, but then getting people back so they can provide for their families.

What assurances could you provide that you will not simply be an obstructionist to the other party and a rubber stamp for yours?

I think that could be the best question you could possibly ask, because that’s where we are. That’s the tendency in Washington is to go and be a rubber stamp, and it’s just not who I am. I’m not somebody who is just going to blindly follow along with my party. You can’t, and I think one of the benefits of this state is you have such a diverse electorate. You have so many different viewpoints here that I don’t think representing New Mexico means that you go and vote one way, no matter what party you’re in.

You can’t support your party and you can’t care about your party more than you care about the people you represent and I will never do that.

Please tell us something you support regarding President Trump.

Let me give you one really direct example in New Mexico, and that was when the president went in and said “I’m going to help with law enforcement in Albuquerque.” You know, this state, Albuquerque, we have real problems with violence. He came in and said we are going to give you 25 officers, federal officers, to help fight crime. Then they also brought in and paid for 40 officers to fight violent crime in the Albuquerque area, and they’re going to fund those officers in the Albuquerque Police Department for the next three years.

That’s critical. That was really important. That was looking at a problem that we have, forgetting about party, and saying, “Let’s do this; let’s fix this problem.” The problem is that on the other side, is that when our leaders heard about that ... their first response was, “No thanks, we don’t need it.” That is not what we need. That is the exact kind of partisan stuff that we have to get away from.

Please tell us something you support regarding former Vice President Biden.

I think Vice President Biden is somebody who has been in Washington a long time, so initially you look at that and you say, “Well, I don’t know if I want someone who has been there that long.” I don’t support him for that reason. But I do think he means well and that he tries to be somebody who would like to bring people together.

And so you say that, but the problem I run into with the vice president is that his policies hurt the state of New Mexico. I think he means well though, I really do think he means well. I think when he comes out he genuinely means well. I just worry about his policies as they relate to the state.

Bob Walsh

What do you believe should be the role of the federal government?

The federal government is not defined by the Constitution, not defined by the Declaration of Independence. But it’s a matter of morality. The Declaration of Independence tries to codify that morality to some extent and the basic things to think about are the extent of individual rights and the limitations on government power. The Declaration of Independence agrees with my morality, and I think most people’s morality, that our rights are not limited by what we’ve said they are, but they include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In the Constitution, the Bill of Rights says that just because a right isn’t mentioned here doesn’t mean the people don’t have it.

On the other hand, the idea is that government power should be limited by listing the things for which it could be used. The Declaration of Independence only says that governments exist to secure our individual rights, and it gives no other reason for governance to exist.

The Constitution provides a little more latitude but it does attempt — originally attempted — to limit powers by listing the things that the government could do, and saying, again in the Bill of Rights, that powers not listed were reserved for the states and for the people.

The 20th century in particular we had, internationally, experiments in which people wanted to use the power of the central government to achieve social goals. So we had attempts at socialism, sometimes going under the name of progressivism in the United States. We had communism. We had nazism. We had various ideas for achieving social goals.

My position, and I believe the position of our founding documents, is that social goals are not part of the role of the government. Social goals are to be achieved by voluntary organizations in which people volunteer their wealth and volunteer their labor. And we have lots of those.

We have Doctors without Borders, we have Habitat for Humanity, and those people do good things and we acclaim them for doing those good things. We just don’t think that our government should be doing it. In fact, a lot of us think that government is a bad name for what is really an apparatus to protect our individual security.

We want it to provide that protection; we don’t want it to govern our lives. We want to have liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

What makes you the best qualified candidate for this seat?

We have to remember that the Senate is a place for mature and reasoned debate. And something like (last month’s presidential debate), it’s almost like it’s a game show and the first person to press the button and say “What is Aleppo?” wins the prize.

The newly elected senator will be in the Senate after the current term of the president that will be elected this November has expired. The Senate goes on for longer; it only gradually changes. And it is where we consider an issue, we examine what people have said about the issue, we examine the existing law, we refer back to legal precedence, we compare it against the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and basic morality before we come to a decision.

I think I am the best qualified because I am the one who is willing to go back to first principles and not be swayed by whatever is the hot topic of the day.

What are your key concerns for eastern New Mexico?

What we have to worry about over the next couple of years as we get over the current pandemic, and I think we’re going to get over the current pandemic by having it just play itself out which typically takes two to five years. The concern will be having our economy recover.

Things that I would do in the Senate to try to recover the economy are one, to deregulate more businesses. When we deregulated air travel we had a boom in air travel. Which not only made jobs for the airlines, it made jobs in airports, it made jobs in companies that were transporting people to the airport. When we deregulated telephone calls, long distanced calls suddenly became free. We created jobs we would have never imagined we would create.

People created apps for our smart phones, and we wound up with phones that we are carrying around with us that are encyclopedias.

So we need to get government out of the way, because the government tends to try to maintain the status quo, and it therefore is the opponent of innovation and invention. That’s one thing.

Another thing I would do is try to remove all tariffs. Tariffs are a known cause of depression. It is widely thought by the economists that the depression of the 1930s was brought on by tariffs.

Economists agree that free trade is a benefit to everybody. The economy is not a zero sum game. When people trade, if I trade with you, you’re getting what you consider to be something of greater value than what you’re giving me. And I consider that what you’re giving me is of greater value than what I’m giving you, so we’re both coming out ahead. So free trade is very important.

Another thing, I think we should be encouraging immigration. Especially immigration across our southern border. Cities that have been recipients of immigrants have thrived economically - Boston, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco. The idea that immigrants are taking away jobs is really not thinking the thing through. People want to come here to work hard and buy nice things. So they’re going to stimulate the economy. They will create more higher level jobs because they will need higher level services, and those higher level jobs will be better filled by people who are already here and already speak the language and are familiar with the communities.

Another thing is I would deregulate employment. Labor laws restrict employment. In fact, any tax, any rule, tends to restrict whatever it is being applied to. So if we are taxing employment, if we are restricting employment because there are minimum wages, or because you have to follow certain rules, then we have less employment. We get more jobs by getting rid of those rules and getting rid of those taxes. So that’s what I would do for New Mexico.

What concerns do you have about the pandemic in 2021?

My concerns are primarily personal. I am 83 years old. I have a history of asthma. I have had open heart surgery. You want to talk about older people with comorbidities, I qualify very well. So I have not been going out very much. In fact, I don’t even own a car anymore. In fact, I’m contributing to keeping down emissions even though I have no faith in what’s passing for climate science these days.

As I said already, I don’t think we’re likely to come up with a very effective vaccine before this thing runs its course. We will come up, and are coming up, with some treatments to help the people most affected.

I think the federal government interferes with testing and treatments in a way that causes more deaths. I think we have seen in this pandemic the failures of the CDC and of the FDA. Those are the kind of things that have already been causing people deaths from other causes, by restricting tests and restricting treatments.

There hasn’t been an uproar about it because they’re mostly rather rare diseases. And so when somebody dies from a rather rare disease they don’t get much press. I don’t think we need the FDA or the CDC, and I would be in favor of abolishing them.

Talk about party politics.

You know, it looks like there might be a very evenly divided Senate. So it might very well be that I might be a deciding voice on a lot of issues. One thing I can do is be a restraint on one-party government. If it looks like the Congress and the presidency will all be by the same party, I can act as a bulwark against single-party government, which is the kind of tyranny that the people don’t really want. We kind of routinely, in years that are not presidential years, we tend to vote against the president’s party. Just because we want to have restraints.

Please tell us something you support regarding President Trump.

President Trump, for all his bombast, has done a very good job of restricting regulations. He wants to take credit for having improved the economy by reducing regulations. The economy is so complicated that it’s really hard to place benefit or blame on the president for the current state of the economy. But I agree with making it much harder for regulations.

Organizations like Housing and Urban Development, they don’t build houses. They take our tax money. Mostly income taxes, or money that’s borrowed that has a way of being a tax on our wealth by reducing its value. And they give it back — except they keep some. But they give some of it back to the states and to the people. With restrictions, reducing our choices and what we can do in the way of housing. Usually, trying to hold us to some East Coast idea of what a neighborhood should look like.

I happen to live on a dirt road. In fact, many people have the aspiration to live in Santa Fe on a dirt road in a dirt house. I can’t afford a dirt house. But I live on a dirt road and we do not have sidewalks. I know if sidewalks come in, they’ll be required to look like the sidewalks in Annapolis, Maryland, because there will be some federal money and therefore it will have to meet federal standards.

Similarly, Health and Human Services does not provide health nor human service. It just transfers money, keeping some of it that we sent to Washington, and returning it to hospitals, hospital administrators, who charge outrageous fees if you don’t have insurance. Otherwise the money goes to insurance executives.

These are the reasons that the wealthy are getting wealthier, faster than you or I are.

Please tell us something you support regarding former Vice President Biden.

That’s more difficult. He would probably be less bombastic as president. He would probably make more of an effort to make sure that his statements are backed up by actual facts and not by his current notion of what’s actually going on.

You haven’t asked me about my candidate. Jo Jorgensen is the Libertarian candidate on the ballot for president of the United States along with her vice presidential candidate. She would bring home the troops. She would substantially reduce political spending. She pretty much has the same positions that Gary Johnson had when he was running for president. He was a very good governor, and he managed to reduce the budget in New Mexico without significantly reducing services, and reducing taxes.

— Compiled by Staff Writer Lily Martin