A Senator wants my Vote

The 17^th Amendment Predicament

A Senator wants my Vote

Disenchantment with Enchantment

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            Ft. Bayard was a polished island amongst enclaves of dirt streets, landscaping voids, and adobe walls.

            The McClellan saddled horses and the bugle calls of the Buffalo Soldiers had long disappeared into history, but Ft. Bayard remained different from the rough hewn habitation of the Grant County of my youth.  By that time, it was a VA TB sanitarium. It was manicured with federal dollars and we marveled at the mown lawns, the pruned Siberian elms and the paved streets.

            In the evenings, we would drive through and watch the Coues deer as they browsed in the safety of sprawling yards. Occasionally, we would see a herd of elk at the golf course or the immaculately maintained military cemetery.

            Our mothers would ooh and ah over the gleaming white officer quarters and the convenience of the centrally located commissary. Ft. Bayard was much different from the dusty and tumbled neighborhoods we lived.

            It was not just the visual impact. The dominion of government ruled.

When then three year old future president of the New Mexico Cattle Growers, Bebo Lee, was drug by his ear off the famous Rudolph the Red nosed Reindeer that greeted visitors at the main gate each holiday season, his grandparents faced the commandant’s wrath. The Colonel was not thrilled that Rudolph was being subjected to young Lee’s bronc riding practices. Lee’s grandfather, a federal civilian employee, was told in no uncertain terms to control the young ruffian or his job was in jeopardy.

            Years later, I, too, had an experience that remains burned in my memory. My friend Phillip Mortensen’s father was hospitalized with a chronic lung condition. Phudley and I visited him. As we wondered through the halls of the veteran’s hospital, we took a wrong turn and wound up in a ward of amputees. We both stood in silence as we observed a World War II veteran lying on a bed with only a towel covering his lower extremities. He had no legs, and … no arms.

            His contribution to our American model was permanent reliance on our government. The immensity of that symbolism remains with me.

            Decadence of Ft. Bayard

            When Ft. Bayard was abandoned by the feds, it was given to New Mexico. The state used the hospital facility variously, but it became largely an indigent care facility. After years of not seeing the place, the decline in the quality of maintenance and care was striking. It was no longer a gleaming island. It looked more like the opening salvos of an inner city ghetto expansion. No deer were seen. The beautiful lawns were dying. The stately officer quarters were sagging while make-shift clotheslines were strung across once grand porches. Windows were broken, the elms were unpruned and dying, and gleaming white paint was long gone replaced by shades of grey and exposed wood.

            It was depressing.

            In recent weeks, Grant County has learned that the state, unable to fund and maintain the facility, is offering it for sale. It cannot be sustained, but there is more.

Ft. Bayard emerges as a symbol of grandiose and yet conditional and temporal government largesse. It is a precursor of most things predicated on the transfer of public wealth. When a foundation isn’t created by local relative advantages or investment, the risk of eventual decline is inevitable. There is no permanence.

            Ft. Bayard is only one of many examples across the state. By far the best known begins within range of a Buffalo Soldier’s pistol shot northward. The Gila National Forest lies adjacent to Ft. Bayard and sprawls beyond the horizons for 5,200 square miles.

            The forest was promised in public trust with the requirement for a reliable lumber supply for the nation. Its governing agency was also charged with maintaining quality downstream water flows. In order to maintain similar economic advantages as private property to the residents, multiple use management was pledged. That promise was always conditional and it has only diminished.

            There is no full time logging industry left on the forest. Water flows, being scavenged by fifty times the tree populations relative to historic stands, are hovering at half the comparable 1970 measurements.

            Grazing is represented by about 36% of the livestock numbers that existed in 1965. In the designated wilderness areas, the promise as set forth in the Wilderness Act of 1964 stipulating “the grazing of livestock, where established prior to September 3, 1964, shall be permitted to continue subject to reasonable regulations …deemed necessary by the Secretary …” is yet worse. A whopping reduction of over 90% of the cattle numbers from 1960 stand in juxtaposition to the promises made by Washington.

            Standing for reelection

            If it wasn’t for the immense contribution to the state’s general fund from oil and gas royalties from three counties, New Mexico would be in dire straights. Its Achilles Heel is revenue sourcing that relies on federal transfers. Over a third of the state’s budget comes from such transfers. When congress accepts its responsibility for dealing with the debt, those moneys will be in jeopardy.

            Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) is running for reelection.

            One of his priorities has been the designation of 240,000 acres of desert wilderness and 258,000 acres of accompanying national monument in Dona Ana County. He has stepped up the effort, and many locals believe his vigor in getting it done as quickly as possible stems from his desire not to have to face the issue at election time. Knowing he won’t get it done legislatively in this congress, he is maneuvering to convince President Obama to intercede and accomplish the action by presidential proclamation. If that should happen, the senator would escape direct confrontation at the time of most intense reelection campaigning.

            Udall knows the problem of reduced property taxes in counties with federal land holdings. That problem is the reason PILT is in place. PILT, government speak for federal transfers of money known as ‘payment(s) in lieu of taxes’ is the welfare proxy for reimbursing states for the absence of property taxes when federal ownership of land dominates the landscape. PILT funding has been buffeted by federal budget woes, and only recently through the Farm Bill has a temporal source of such payments been reinstated. Udall has taken credit for successfully burdening the new farm bill with those payments.

 PILT funding is very important to both Udall senatorial cousins. They both know their crusade for the retirement of federal holdings into permanent nonperforming landscape through monument and wilderness designations cannot pass local muster if all forms of funding are erased. Tom Udall has recently written to his constituents saying, “New Mexico deserves consistent services, and local governments need to be able to count on the (PILT) funding for long term planning.”

            Cousin Mark Udall (D-Co) is taking it a step further by crafting legislation to permanently fund PILT payments. The approach from both cousins can only be interpreted by the onerous suggestion that, in trade for their environmental agenda, they pledge permanent offsets for their counties which must “host” federal lands. What Americans of all walks of life should find horrifying in the premise is the state of permanent welfare that is implicit in their actions.

            What they are really saying is “If you will let us maintain our environmental agenda, we’ll get you welfare payments to make up for the absence of revenues emanating from private property tax generation.”

            The 17^th Amendment reminder

            The emergence of the Udalls and their colleagues is a reminder why the 17^th Amendment has consequences. The amendment altered the seating of senatorial leadership from a matter of state legislature authority to a popular vote. What it gave to us is an elective that reports to its largest donors rather than its state legislatures. States do not have vested senatorial representation. They must compete with other interests for Washington influence.

            With state legislative oversight, a senator like Tom Udall could not stand in the Roundhouse chambers as the primary caretaker of his state’s rights and inform legislators he was going to retire huge chunks of state territory from future income streams. He doesn’t report to the state legislature, though, and he gets away with his environmental agenda as long as PILT exists. An expanding, permanent welfare class emerges through his actions.

The analogy is like the war veteran amputee who had no choice other than permanent reliance on government. It also conforms to the Ft. Bayard story and what is yet to come. When tax payer hijacking halts and the Gila model falls into a deepened state of despair … local customs, culture, and industry will be incapable of picking up the pieces.

            Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “The farm bill forces states to accept a broadened food stamp program for assurance of PILT payments … that is tyrannical.” 

 Our Founding Fathers set up a system where the people elected members to the House, the state legislatures elected the Senate and the states elected the President through the Electoral College.  To protect the smaller states each state was given two Senators no matter their population.  Ron Paul has written, "The Founding Fathers sought to protect certain fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of speech, against the changing whims of popular opinion. Similarly, they created the Electoral College to guard against majority tyranny in federal elections. The president was to be elected by the 50 states rather than the American people directly, to ensure that less populated states had a voice in national elections. This is why they blended Electoral College votes between U.S. House seats, which are based on population, and U.S. Senate seats, which are accorded equally to each state. The goal was to balance the inherent tension between majority will and majority tyranny. Those who wish to abolish the Electoral College because it’s not purely democratic should also argue that less populated states like Rhode Island or Wyoming don’t deserve two senators."

The Founding Fathers were very suspicious of a strong central government and that is why they designed the system the way they did.  Under the original design, where the state legislatures elected the Senators, the states had a direct linkage to the federal political process and their ability to elect and remove Senators served as a check on federal power.  The main purpose of the Progressive Movement was to increase federal power which is why they brought us the income tax, the federal reserve and the 17th amendment.