Every year, New Mexico families sit down at the kitchen table and do the math. Groceries cost more. Gas costs more. The bills keep coming, and the paycheck doesn’t stretch the way it used to.
Meanwhile, in Washington, members of Congress have quietly built a different kind of math — one where their portfolios grow no matter what’s happening back home.
This week, the House voted on H.R. 7008, the Stop Insider Trading Act. It’s a simple, common-sense bill: members of Congress and their spouses would no longer be allowed to trade individual stocks while in office. No more buying and selling shares in companies they regulate, companies they fund, companies they get briefed on before the rest of us ever hear a word.
This isn’t a partisan idea. Every Republican who voted, voted yes. Thirteen House Democrats crossed the aisle and voted yes too. The bill passed 232 to 198.
Our own congresswoman, Teresa Leger Fernandez, voted no, as did congress members Melanie Stansbury and Gabe Vasquez.
She had the chance to stand with a bipartisan majority of her colleagues—Republicans and Democrats alike—and tell New Mexicans that her financial interests would never come before her duty to represent them. She chose not to.
That vote matters more when you look at her own finances. When Teresa Leger Fernandez took office in 2021, her disclosed net worth was $1.38 million. Her most recent filing shows $2.19 million, an increase of nearly 60 percent. That’s her business, and I’m not here to tell any family what their bank account should look like. But when you’re a sitting member of Congress with access to information the rest of us don’t have, and you vote against a bill that would simply require you to be transparent about how and when you trade, people are entitled to ask why.
It gets harder to answer that question right now, because her financial disclosure for last year, which was legally due back in May, still isn’t public. She requested and received a 90-day extension, pushing the deadline to mid-August. That’s her legal right. But New Mexicans deserve to see the full picture if she’s asking for their votes.
I grew up working the land in this state. I know what it means to earn every dollar the hard way: through weather you can’t control, prices you don’t set, and years that don’t always go your way. I don’t think that’s too much to ask of the people who represent us in Washington: that they play by the same rules of transparency they’d expect from anyone else.
New Mexico’s Third District has been trending toward common sense for three election cycles running. I believe that’s because people here are tired of representatives who talk about accountability but vote against it when it counts.
We deserve a congressman who answers to the people of this district, not to their own stock portfolio.
Martin Zamora is a third-generation New Mexico farmer and rancher, a state legislator, and the Republican candidate for New Mexico’s Third Congressional District.
