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Notes -
AP News reports:
The summary, if anything, understates the brazenness. There's a delightful video of the release press conference that starts out with Grisham highlighting the emergency order as a state-wide message to "start arresting people", and "just arrest everyone", and goes downhill from there to outright state intent to violate her oath of office! For an order she does not expect criminals to obey. The order declares the city off-limits for public carry, nearly exactly mirroring a specific hypothetical from Bruen.
I went to bed on this last night after trying to find a way to discuss it at a deeper level than 'boo, outgroup', and I'm still hard-pressed this morning. It's not like this is some unique and novel approach: I've written before on the prolonged efforts to provide massive resistance to Breun, or to otherwise violate the law, exploiting the nuances of standing and court timelines. Federal administrations have played footsie with overtly unconstitutional or illegal actions at length as delaying tactics over any coherent principle for matters as serious as the rental economy and as trivial as cancelling Easter. There were even a few efforts from the Red Tribe in early COVID days.
There's some tactical and logistic discussions that can be had, here. Most obvious, there's a ton of fun questions involved when the state can throw around multi-thousand dollar fines against people with no more warning or notice than a press conference late Friday night, should it ever come to that, though it's not clear that the specific stated punishment here matters. There's no evidence that the shooters in any recent murders motivating this order were carrying lawfully. There will almost certainly be open carry protests by mid-week, a completely foreseeable result that someone who actually worried about bunches of lawful gun carry causing violence would at least have planned around; the people going should plan around what happens if and when they're arrested and cited, but it's not clear that will actually happen.
The Bernalillo County police have already stated that they have not been charged with enforcing this: a sufficiently cynical reader should expect that the state police may not consistently 'enforce' the order either rather than tots-unrelatedly harassing the hell out of anyone who disobeys it.
Grisham signed a law abolished qualified immunity in some cases, but the precise text of that law and the New Mexico constitution make this unlikely to apply in the specific nexus of carry. The 11th Amendment makes federal 1983 lawsuits particularly complex, and unlikely to be renumerative or punishing.
They're also pretty boring. So I'm going to make a few predictions. Maybe I'll be wrong! Hopefully!
Grisham will not be impeached for a very simple reason. She will not be indicted, and I think it's more likely than not she never pays in her personal capacity. There will be no grand jury leaking embarrassing details, or FBI investigations doing the same, whether honestly or fraudulently established. New Mexico allows citizen grand juries, and it won’t matter Grisham will not be frog-marched before a tipped-off news media for a predawn raid, nor will we have arrest mugshots on national or local news. There won't be a long series of supposedly-unbiased news programs calling her a fascist, no baldly coordinated smear campaign to distract from someone else's failures, nor will some random employee become a minor celebrity by breaking the law to embarrass her and then claiming
prosecutionpersecution. There will not be a New York Times article or The View segue fearful about how this undermines reasonable public health policy, nor will Lawrence Tribe be writing a characteristically incoherent argument about how this disqualifies her from any future elected office.We will not have an injunction today, or a temporary restraining order the same day as a complaint was filed, to mirror the DeWine overreach linked above. The courts will not make a final determination before the order expires, even if the order extends beyond the thirty-day window. If the courts issue a TRO or preliminary injunction before the policy expires, people will still be harassed for carry, and no one will find themselves in jail for contempt of the court's order, even and especially if they Tried To Make A Message out of their disobedience. There will be a perfunctory mootness analysis when asking whether the state will do the same thing again, and in the unlikely even that threshold and standing can be achieved, the courts will instead notice that no colorable relief can be granted.
We will instead have taught a city's portion of gun owners that they can and should violate the supposed law, at length; that the government will quite cheerfully do the same and get away with it; and that the courts will shrug their shoulders and ponder what can you do thirty days later. And that is what happens if they are lucky.
When the arbitrary and unconstitutional "public health orders" for things like mask mandates and business closures started coming down, many argued that it was a slippery slope towards the Government making up any orders they felt like any time they felt like it and successfully enforcing them. Well, here's us starting to slide down that slope. Make up any rule you want, call it a "public health order", and just maybe it will stand and actually be enforced.
I really hope this doesn't stand, because it will only accelerate us towards a regime of government executives actually ruling by decree without regard to the Constitution. And what'll happen if a Red team executive in a Red state copies the pattern, maybe doing something like closing down all gay bars and other meeting places as a "public health order" to stop Monkeypox or Aids or something.
It makes me wonder what the governor’s motivations are. I don’t know anything about New Mexico politics (besides the fact the the state is inexplicably left wing). This seems like a totally bizarre thing to do in an off election year for a politician who can’t possibly aspire to an office outside of New Mexico. I wonder if she is trying to get ahead of a scandal or something.
Charitably, people who don't care about guns or are anti-gun to start with sometimes might have seen a recent few high-profile incidents that Hit Close To Home and suddenly justified everything. This model's kinda the dark mirror to the "conservative is a liberal who's been mugged" deal: there's a lot of people who were once willing to live-and-let-live (or at least had better places to spend their political capital) who become true believers over some incident that made things too salient for them. The resulting policy proposals aren't always this hairbrained, but you're picking from a group that's by definition not considered the space at length in the past nor been heavily exposed to other people who have. Some people are people do really believe what they're doing.
But Grisham has been in this game for a while. The more cynical analysis is that she's term-limited (New Mexico governors can only serve two terms; her second ends in 2027) in a pretty Blue and increasingly blueing state (between Californian exodus, and the aftermath of the last decade worth of redistricting), and she's been working in (otherwise unemployable parts of) the .gov since 1992. There's three major career paths available where this sorta trial balloon is a major resume-burnisher even and maybe especially if it flops: either moving to federal politics, managing state-level politics, or going into the bureaucratic activism or non-technically-state-just-state-funded activist groups.
It's possible she's gunning for Lujan's seat -- he had a stroke last year, and while he's recovered might take it as a sign to retire -- or perhaps the VP slot for 2028. But more likely I'm thinking the last option. This is the sorta thing that absolutely blocks any chance of a cabinet-level position or other place requiring a senate confirmation, short of a wildly stacked Dem Senate, but it's an excellent advertisement for Acting whatevers or bigger names at think tanks or commentary positions, where this hugely visible commitment is useful to know who's likely to stay bought.
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It got me to wondering, why is New Mexico more left wing than the surrounding states? I had two hypotheses: indigenous population and government employment.
Looking up indigenous population, New Mexico is third in the nation, at 10.86%. And looking up government employment, New Mexico is also third in the nation at 22.2%. The combination of the two seems initially compelling.
Looking at other states, however, seems to refute both hypotheses. In terms of both, Alaska trounces New Mexico, taking the top spot in both at 19.99% and 24.6% respectively despite being significantly less left-wing. I can buy that it's kinda sorta a special case. But at second place are Oklahoma at 13.2% and Wyoming at 24.1% respectively. (Oklahoma is 6th in government employees at 20.6% and Wyoming is 8th in indigenous population at 3.5%).
Curious if anyone has other explanations.
New Mexico/Colorado have always been kinda libertarian in a vaguely blue way(eg drugs and weird sex stuff and not too attached to guns). New Mexico is also super duper Hispanic.
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Many of the government employees are military and fairly reddish, I don't think it's government employment.
All I know is back in the 2000s, people were complaining about all the Californians moving in. And the state moved from a Red, to a Purple, to a Blue state in the time following. I don't have any actual statistics on how many Californians moved to New Mexico, I just know that was a complaint people were making.
A lot of filming started to take place in New Mexico, the Albuquerque government began courting studios.
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I mean instead of checking 1 by 1 you can plot and check for correlations
Harder to do on a phone, though, and I try not to open my computer on weekends. Maybe I'll do it at work on Monday.
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I think that sounds very compelling, I would also add a little to the government employment aspect (especially with respect to large # of very well compensated scientists working at sandia and Los Alamos), is substantial, but who knows, the hard sciences are usually split more evenly.
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New Mexico is a very urban state.
Urban is a bit underspecified, but some statistics about the urban population:
Arizona 89.3%
Colorado 86.0%
Nevada 94.1%
New Mexico 74.5%
Texas 83.7%
Utah 89.8%
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/mapping-us-urbanization-by-state/
NM is more urbanized than AK, OK, and WY though.
Is this using a system like the census where they define urban as an arbitrary density cutoff that includes things like small farming towns that are ruby red? That kinda undermines everything people mean when they say urban.
I mean, it's kinda justifiable for the census. Their data presumably have some hand in planning things like plumbing infrastructure, but it's really not helpful for a thread on the culture war where urban tends to imply blue tribe.
At least for Texas the vast majority of the population lives in definitely urban environments in a few major metros(DFW and Houston combined have just over half the state's population, add in San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso there's a supermajority), so I think the data is directionally correct.
How many of those residents would self-identify as "suburban" instead of "urban"?
Because there's a pretty big difference between the political behavior of suburbanites and urbanites.
From what I remember, there was an article from a while back about the majority of Texas identified as suburban. Let me see if I can dig it up.
Edit: Found it. I was thinking of an old 538 article from 2015. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-suburban-are-big-american-cities/ it's ~8 years old at this point, so the percentages could have swung a couple points, but I think the general point still stands.
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It's mostly wasteland, so very desolate and unproductive outside cities. So it's urban in that sense, but only a tiny sliver of the geography is actually urban.
Or in other words, the state is just Australia in microcosm; political implications and all.
Interesting, because Oz is perhaps surprisingly more woke and lefty despite the "pioneer spirit" which would lean very much the opposite. But, I suppose, now that the vast majority are softies in the cities, it makes sense.
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Could be she’s angling for a possible Vice President nomination. Correct-thinking Latina governor in a border state? You may recall when Susana Martinez, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, was a serious VP contender for Mitt Romney, and she spoke at one of the RNC national conventions one year.
As far as the state being ‘left wing’, it really isn’t. Not in the Vermont/Bernie Sanders/Portlandia way. New Mexico has for some time been a majority-minority state. American Indians make up 11 percent of the state’s population, the third highest in the United States after Alaska and Oklahoma. The median household income in 2021 was on the level with Alabama, making it 45th out of 50 in the United States. To put it bluntly, the modal New Mexican citizen is a poor, lowly educated Hispano-Indian who correctly perceives the Democratic Party as the party of handouts. The state is about as far away from the Gray Tribe, Bay Area rationalists and the Sanders socialists as can be!
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