New Mexico state Sen. Mark Moores told Breitbart News this weekend that his opponent in the upcoming June 1 special election in New Mexico’s First Congressional District is “absolutely radical.”
Moores, the GOP nominee for the First Congressional District race to replace former Rep. Deb Haaland (D-NM) who is now President Joe Biden’s interior secretary, faces off against Democrat Melanie Stansbury on June 1 in the special election. The district, which leans Democrat, is considered competitive this time around because it is a special election and because the Democrats have complete control in Washington. Moores appeared on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel on Saturday morning to discuss his campaign.
Host Matthew Boyle, Breitbart News Washington political editor, spoke with Moores about the upcoming special election for the congressional seat. New Mexico Republican Party leaders recently picked Moores to be their party’s candidate in the election in early March. Boyle said this is the only special election in the country before the midterm elections, as of now, that the Republicans have a chance of flipping. Boyle added this can be a major victory for Republicans and set the tone for what the country will see from Republicans in the midterms.
“This is a huge race, and you’re absolutely right. I’m a state senator, been for nine years, and you were just talking about candidate recruitment and that’s really important,” Moores said.
Moores added, it is important to “have someone who’s able to actually get it, hit the ground running in a special election, and run. And, quite frankly, we’re going against an incredibly progressive liberal candidate that is just out of touch with New Mexico. And my family — I’m actually Hispanic on my mother’s side — but the family’s been in the states since the 1600s. So, when you talk about recruitment of candidates like you were just doing, that’s what’s so important: Having someone who knows how to run races. And why this matters in this race, as you just mentioned, we’re so close because of the success that [House Minority Leader] Kevin McCarthy had in the last election, of picking up seats, and we’re so close to actually flipping any getting rid of [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi, and this seat is in play when we flip this seat.”
Moores said when mentioning Pelosi, this next election could be the year for Republicans to win the House back. He brought up, “We’re now talking about Pelosi only having a couple-vote margin in the House of Representatives — make it an even that much harder for her to get her radical agenda through. So that’s why I need a lot of help because Pelosi is not giving this seat up without a fight.”
He encouraged everyone to visit his website and help out where they can in the fight to retire Pelosi’s speakership. Moores mentioned, “We need to raise the resources, we need the volunteers, the phone callers, the money to make sure that we’re taking on this Pelosi machine because when we flip this seat, we’re gonna make it much more difficult for her to get her radical agenda through.”
Boyle brought up some of the issues going on in the district and the country. He mentioned the crime in the district. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, he said crime is very high right now, suggesting the crime is partly due to cities being run by leftist politicians and movements like “defund the police,” which has had major impacts on people in the cities.
Moores said, “This is absolutely out of control, and what we’re seeing is the Obama administration put the Albuquerque Police Department on one of those ‘consent decrees’ before the Trump administration, and it has absolutely stifled law enforcement. And this ‘defund the police’ agenda that my opponent supports — in fact, she actually came out and said that we need to take the guns away from the cops, and we live in one of the most violent cities in the state for a city our size.”
The Republican continued, “We’ve had 34 murders since the beginning of the year. The previous record was 19. And so this ‘defund the police’ agenda and taking guns away from cops is actually sending a chilling message. And our law enforcement officers — I am proud to go to the state senate to stand by the blue, and I’ll continue to fight for them, giving them the resources and the money and the support they need to actually try to turn this around.”
During the interview, he explained, “The consent decrees from the justice department really stifled our ability to fight crime in the city, and what you’re seeing is there’s more cops doing paperwork.” He mentioned how the police department has 60 cops that go to work and just deal with paperwork “instead of being on the streets fighting crime,” adding that the police department is actually “policing the police and not policing the criminals.”
Moores spoke about being one of the states on the border and being in Albuquerque, close to the southern border.
He explained, “The crisis that’s happening down there with the smugglers — you know we all were disgusted when we saw those smugglers throwing those three- and five-year-old girls over that wall down there.” Moores added, “These are the same people who are driving the gang violence and the drugs the four hours from the border, right into Albuquerque. We have to secure that border and get that crime happening just four hours to ourselves in check because that is percolating this way up to our communities.”
Boyle said to Moores that it seems like the consent decree from the Obama administration really is what started the defund the police movement and spread across the country from there. Boyle added the people in the district should be electing Moores into office over the “radical leftist democrat opponent, who wants to further restrain law enforcement by taking away their weapons to disarm them.”
Moores said, “It’s such a radical idea that they have [to disarm police], and you’re absolutely right. My liberal democratic opponent is just absolutely radical, and that is their agenda. And that’s what has happened here in Albuquerque with these consent decrees, the defund the police movements, and we are just really suffering. And, of course, that has a huge impact on economic development, schools, in the community as a whole because who is going to come here and start a business when we have 43 murders and three months.”
He explained, “My opponent is just absolutely radical.” This is why Moores is trying to have everyone go out and help him win this special election fight to really “prove that we can flip a blue seat into red.”
Boyle asked Moores to speak about the complications the Biden administration has caused in the district due to his ineffectiveness to get anything done on the southern border and his mistakes he made by undoing many Trump-era policies on immigration.
Moores said, “You know what one of the biggest problems that we’re having in New Mexico, and it directly relates to what the Biden administration did on the border, is my wife and I are actually in the healthcare industry. We run anatomical pathology laboratories, and so we’ve actually been working on COVID and fighting COVID for the last year. And in New Mexico, actually, still has one of the most restrictive COVID shutdowns in the nation.”
“Our businesses are still closed, our schools are still at limited capacity, and what the Biden administration is doing is letting all these people in and they’re releasing them into New Mexico, Texas, Arizona without COVID tests. And here we are, we’re still shut down, our small businesses are still under the orders of the governor to keep close or a limited capacity, and yet we’re knowingly releasing people who we know have been exposed to COVID into our state. That kind of decision by the federal administration — the Biden administration — is furthering the economic damage that this shutdown has had in New Mexico,” Moores added.
Moores said that arguably, “New Mexico small businesses are paying the price by staying closed because of the Biden administration’s decision.”
Boyle brought up more of the mistakes Biden has made regarding energy through his executive action. Boyle said, since taking office, Biden has had a direct effect on New Mexico, like ending the Keystone XL pipeline and ending the oil and gas exploration, which all have major effects on the state of New Mexico.
Moores responded by saying, “My opponent is a radical environmentalist, supporting the AOC New Green Deal all the way down the line.” He continued to add, his opponent “is for closing down all fracking and development of natural resources on federal and tribal lands. Now in New Mexico, your listeners might not understand this, fifty percent of New Mexico’s land base is owned by the federal government: the military, and tribal lands for service BLM (Bureau of Land Management) — 50 percent of our landmass.”
Moores continued, “When you go to Texas, very, very little is owned by the federal government. And so the Permian Basin, which is our huge oil reserves that is under the southeast part of New Mexico and into Texas — when you’re in New Mexico, it’s mostly federal land, in Texas, it’s private land. So by the Biden administration shutting down that exploration in New Mexico on federal land potentially takes 134 thousand jobs away from New Mexicans. Forty percent of our state government and revenue comes directly or indirectly from oil and gas industry. That’s forty percent my opponent wants to take away from the state government [needed] to fund schools, and law enforcement, and our highways, and our infrastructure.”
Moores posed the question, “Without a plan, how are you going to make up that money?” Moores said the far-left is so “hostile to the industry, but they sure love spending the money that the industry brings in.” He claims that this makes a huge impact on the country at a national level, including American’s national security and being energy independent.
Boyle brought up, the radical left’s so-called infrastructure plan that will cost the taxpayers $2.3 trillion. Boyle also mentioned the plan does not actually have to do with infrastructure, adding Pelosi will need to have all the votes she can to pass, including his radical opponent. Boyle explained, if the district elects Moores as their representative, it will destroy Pelosi’s plan to pass the package as the left will have to work with the Republicans to pass the massive bill.
Moores said Boyle is “absolutely right.”
He added, “When we flip this seat, congress becomes even that closer. The Pelosi agenda has to be able to negotiate with the moderates in her caucus and also with the Republican caucus to get anything past. So, it’s really gonna have a huge impact on eliminating her radical agenda like the Green New Deal that she’s hiding into the infrastructure plan.”
Moores further explains what he has done during his time as a state senator. “I have a lot of experience working with Republicans and Democrats on infrastructure. That’s what we do. We build bridges and roads, and sewer systems as a state government and we help local communities. So, we have to sit down together as Republicans and Democrats and actually work on what we are going to do. What roads are we going to build? What sewer systems are we going to build? That’s something that is very appropriate and critical to the health of the nation and the state. But by slipping all these radical agenda items in there in exchange for, ‘hey, I’ll build you a highway, Congressmen X, but you are going to have to vote for this radical liberal agenda.’ That’s not the way to run her republic, and that is what Nancy Pelosi is trying to do.”
By flipping the congressional seat in the special election, Moores thinks “we’re really going to limit her ability to do that. I’m willing to sit down and talk with Republicans and Democrats on infrastructure, highways, sewers, airports, ports — although we don’t have ports in New Mexico, of course — but we were able to work on those infrastructure plans that are going to create jobs and improve our economy. But adding all this radical agenda in there is really against what we all believe in.”
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. Eastern.
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