Republicans, who held one of the state’s Senate seats and two of its House seats, lost all of that last year. But expect to hear mayor-elect Richard Berry tipped as a candidate for the swing House seat anchored in Albuquerque in 2012, and expect to hear this mentioned as a piece with a Republican comeback if the party scores more victories next month.

Democrats disagreed, arguing that it would create an additional barrier preventing the nation’s poorest citizens from accessing care.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) characterized the Grassley proposal as “a solution in search of a problem.” Similar requirements, he said, have kept citizens from getting Medicaid coverage for years, particularly on Indian reservations where the poverty is endemic and ID documents scarce. The fraud in Medicaid is not patient fraud, but provider fraud, added Bingaman, a former attorney general who claimed to have plenty of experience tackling the problem.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) echoed those concerns, wondering aloud how many kids have photo IDs? “This puts children at risk,” he concluded.

There is good reason for the Democrats’ concerns. A 2005 law created strict new proof-of citizenship requirements for Medicaid eligibility, forcing potential beneficiaries to produce original-copy citizenship and identification documents. Sponsors said the change was designed to protect taxpayers by preventing illegal aliens from accessing the federal-state program. But Medicaid directors nationwide have said the hurdles have kept many more citizens than illegals from receiving coverage.

The committee vote to kill the Grassley amendment was 10 to 13, strictly along party lines.

Gov. Bill Richardson [D], his chief of staff Brian Condit, budget secretary Katherine Miller and security officers were gone within minutes from the scene of an accident Saturday in which a houseboat was sideswiped and another was smashed into at Elephant Butte State Park, according to an eyewitness.

State officials have cited Condit with operating a vessel in a negligent manner and damaging another person’s property. He was at the helm of the houseboat that caused the accident.

Within three minutes of the houseboat docking the governor’s party took a small boat to shore. There they got into two vehicles and left, said Carl Shaw, Jr. whose houseboat was grazed in Saturday’s accident. [...]

The investigating officers interviewed several witnesses at the marina the same day the accident happened. Many of them appear to recall the same sequence of events, which is recounted in the incident report:

A man later identified as Condit was seen operating “Bloody Mary,” a houseboat owned by Leon “Skip” Fay of Rio Rancho. Condit piloted the houseboat into the marina, but came too close to C-dock, sideswiping Shaw’s houseboat. Then the “Bloody Mary” accelerated. At this point Fay took control from Condit, but it was too late, witnesses said. The houseboat, thrust by momentum, headed across the slip toward D-dock and smashed into a second houseboat, “The Floating Irish.”

According to the incident report, Condit, who called police to report the accident two days later, denied consuming alcohol prior to the crash. Richardson’s office did not respond to The New Mexico Independent’s request for comment. Fay, the owner of the houseboat, and his wife remained at the scene to talk to police.

This post has been updated.

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New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former high-ranking members of his administration won’t be criminally charged in a yearlong federal investigation into pay-to-play allegations involving one of the Democratic governor’s large political donors, someone familiar with the case said.

The decision not to pursue indictments was made by top Justice Department officials, according to a person familiar with the investigation, who asked not to be identified because federal officials had not disclosed results of the probe.

“It’s over. There’s nothing. It was killed in Washington,” the person told The Associated Press.

A federal grand jury began an investigation in 2008 into a possible pay-to-play scheme in which lucrative work on state bond deals went to a Richardson donor.

News of the probe forced Richardson to withdraw his nomination to be President Obama’s commerce secretary in January.

Update: The New Mexico Independent, which has been following this story from the beginning, has the background.

Also of note, Bingaman said he would join fellow Democrats to pass reforms using the budget reconciliation process if Republicans successfully filibuster the bill.

He also said that while he still hopes to craft a bipartisan bill in the Senate, if that effort fails he would support pushing a health care reform bill through this year using the budget reconciliation bill.

Reconciliation is a special process through which the Senate deals with budget issues. Only 51 votes are needed to pass a budget reconciliation bill on the floor of the Senate, whereas all other bills are susceptible to a filibuster which requires 60 votes to overcome.

“We made a provision in the budget resolution [earlier this year] that it [the reconciliation bill] could be used to try to enact health care provisions related to health care reform,” he said. “There are restrictions to what you can include in that … but I would support it if that’s the only way.”

The [New Mexico] Independent sought to view documents from the governor’s office from January through August 2006 that would have divulged with whom he had met in the months prior to the costly investment that benefited the son of the governor’s friend to the tune of millions of dollars.

But the governor’s office isn’t saying or allowing access to the documents. Its rationale: The governor’s calendars, datebooks and other documents that would shed light on his schedule are protected by executive privilege. [...]

The Independent’s goal was to see if Richardson had met with Marc Correra, the son of Anthony Correra, a Richardson friend, in the months prior to two state boards investing in $90 million with Vanderbilt Financial Trust. The state lost all $90 million in the investment. Correra is said to have been paid $2 million as a third-party marketer, a kind of middleman in the investment world.

In case you’ve forgotten, executive privilege is the legal principle that exists to ensure the quality of the advice some government officials (such as presidents or governors) receive by shielding advisers from being forced to testify about the advice they give. It was frequently cited by the Bush administration to prevent adviser Karl Rove and White House Counsel Harriet Miers from testifying before Congress on the firings of nine U.S. attorneys.

Richardson, a former Clinton administration official and presidential candidate, is currently embroiled in a federal pay-to-play investigation.

You can stay up to date on all the happenings in the Land of Enchantment over at The New Mexico Independent.

After leaving the Marine Corps, I joined the monumental fight to end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, bring our troops home to defend America, and restore a Constitutional foreign policy. Having won the public to our side, it is time we take the fight to the capitol, to the real enemies of the Constitution. Posturing against war while voting to fund it is unacceptable! Tragically, we still have a government that behaves like it owns us, rather than serves us… We need rallying points to keep our movement invigorated and growing, and if a run for Congress from my home town of Santa Fe can serve as one, I will gladly step up.

The 3rd district is safe Democratic turf — President Obama carried it by 23 points over Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) while new Rep. Ben Lujan (D) carried the open seat by 27 points. But it has a history of big third party votes, and an anti-war independent candidate won 13 percent of the vote in 2008. Kokesh has enough of a national following (he has spoken at many Ron Paul events) to attract some attention, but unless he raises a lot of money, this might be the latest example of the Democratic base moving on from Iraq War politics and supporting a Democrat despite the slow progress in ending the war.

TWI’s sister site, The New Mexico Independent, has the story.

In a dramatic move yesterday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) withdrew the air quality permit it issued last summer for the Desert Rock coal-fired power plant, which is slated to be built on the Navajo Nation in the Four Corners region just southwest of Farmington, N.M. [...]

The EPA found that the permit was issued prematurely, before complete analysis could be conducted of hazardous air emissions like mercury, or the impact of the facility on endangered species, or the impact on soil, vegetation, and visibility in the region. The permit also didn’t adequately examine particulate matter.

You can read the full story here.

Richardson heads the State Investment Council (SIC), which manages the state’s investments. In October 2005, the SIC voted to invest $20 million with Quadrangle Group LLC, according to minutes of the meeting. At the time of the 2002 and 2006 campaign contributions, Rattner was a managing principal in the company, which he left in February of this year to take the auto-bailout job.

Though he hasn’t been charged with any wrongdoing, Rattner has been identified by national media outlets as the unnamed person in federal documents who allegedly arranged in late 2004 for Quadrangle to pay $1.1 million in exchange for business with the state of New York.

While neither Quadrangle nor Rattner have been accused of any wrongdoing in New York or New Mexico, this certainly doesn’t look good for Richardson.

You can read Heath’s full story here.

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The New Mexico Independent and TWI are members of the Center for Independent Media network.