What to know about New Mexico’s special session this week

The House Chambers inside the Roundhouse on Jan. 10, 2024. (Photo by Anna Padilla for Source NM)

The New Mexico Legislature is set to convene in the City Different later this week for a special session called by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to address criminal competency, among other issues.

Special sessions called by the governor can last up to 30 days, but typically run only a few days to about a week long.

The New Mexico Constitution requires that special sessions are strictly limited to address what the governor lays out in a proclamation. The proclamation isn’t set for release until Thursday morning before the session’s noon start, according to members of the governor’s office.

Unlike regular 60-day or 30-day sessions, bills will not be available ahead of time. Instead, the legislation will be made public on the website as they are being read into the record on Thursday.

Special sessions also throw a wrench during election season. Under state law, legislators cannot accept campaign contributions during the session.

The lead-up to the session has been strained.

Lawmakers from both parties have been skeptical that there’s enough time and consensus to address the issues. Just last week, Lujan Grisham rejected the call by 41 advocacy groups to cancel the special session, even as one of the top priorities still has no sponsor.

But special sessions have often inflamed tensions at the Roundhouse, said former legislators and longtime observers.

“Special sessions are usually pretty controversial,” said Steve Terrell, a now retired Roundhouse reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican. “These are so-called citizen legislators and their lives are interrupted by these sessions.”

The Senate has a history of adjourning early under previous governors, as recently as 2016 when addressing former Gov. Susana Martinez’s budget requests and the death penalty.

“Officially sine die-ing before the governor wants you to is pretty unusual, but it’s happened,” Terrell said.

Terrell pointed to times during former Gov. Bill Richardson’s tenure, where the chambers split at special sessions called in 2003 and 2008. The House – led by then-Speaker Ben Luján (D-Nambe) – went to work in the special sessions, but the Senate only met to adjourn.

Leonard Lee Rawson, a Republican state senator representing Las Cruces from 1993 to 2008, said there was a shared mood that the issues could wait until the regular session.

“In 2007, the governor called a special session, and the Senate wasn’t really interested in moving that direction,” Rawson said. “It was universal – nobody, nobody in the Senate wanted it – didn’t matter which party.”

Even as the rules required the Senate to convene every three days, “it didn’t mean the Senate had to do any work,” he said.

Rawson said the built-in tensions between the House and Senate and the executive and legislative branches can worsen, when special sessions are perceived to have poor planning.

“Has it really been enough time to bring together the legislature and the governor in terms of what the outcome needs to be or close to the outcome? If not, we’re just wasting people’s time, and expenses,” he said.

John Arthur Smith, a Democrat who represented Deming from 1989 to 2020, said special sessions worked best when there was consensus ahead of time on the goals.

“Where there wasn’t agreement, then it was chaos,” he said, speaking of Richardson special sessions.

He said his concerns about holding a special session in the middle of July raises concerns for costs during the Santa Fe’s tourism season. Special sessions cost tens of thousands of dollars, often ballparked around $50,000 every day.

Smith said without three-fifths agreement by the chambers to enact the laws right away, called an emergency clause, he said that the laws are then enacted 90 days after their passage.

“If you can’t get the emergency clause on, you might as well have just waited if you’re going to have it this late in the game,” Smith said.

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