So Pete Domenici and the Congresswoman I love to mock, Heather Wilson, have found themselves in something of a pickle with this U.S. Attorneys scandal.  It’s a shame that this issue didn’t come up four months ago when it might have saved us all some trouble and brought Wilson’s re-election bid crashing to the ground.  But let me say that if the scandal did bring about the political undoing of Domenici and Wilson, no one would be happier than I.  Domenici has had an undue and unhealthy influence on Republican Party politics in New Mexico, most especially in his boosting of Wilson over Bill Davis after the death of Rep. Steve Schiff in 1998.  He imposed Wilson on us, and some of us who never wanted her as the Republican candidate have been trying, without success, to get rid of her ever since.  Before the majority was kicked out, Domenici was also Budget Chairman and so was deeply implicated in all of the spending excesses of the old majority.  She, however, is ill-suited to run a statewide race to succeed Domenici, since the only reason she has managed to stay in office is that the First District is so unusually favourable to Republican candidates for a medium-sized city and its environs.  This is at least partly a function of Kirtland AFB and the tech corporations that now have operations in Albuquerque.  Once she has to campaign in northern and western New Mexico, even against a weak Democratic candidate, she will have a very hard time defending her reflexive Bush loyalism.   

The scandal, such as it is, is not enough to bring her down now that she is safely ensconced once more in her House seat, and Domenici is untouchable in New Mexico.  People love him back home.  He has been a fixture in state politics for my entire life, and I find it hard to believe that he is going anywhere unless someone finds something truly damaging.  Only in the event of his retirement does it become a contested seat, and I am betting that he will not retire.  In any case, the Democratic bench is pretty weak, battered by intra-party fights in the Roundhouse and scarred by the bribery scandal of recent years.  There is always Tom Udall, who could easily be replaced by almost anyone to hold NM-03 for the Democrats, but if both he and his cousin (Mark Udall in Colorado) run for Senate in the same year people might suffer from Udall overload. 

You didn’t need Ryan Sager to tell you any of that–you could have just asked me.