We have written previously about the voting record of Congresswoman Heather Wilson of New Mexico’s First Congressional District and of her efforts to present herself as a moderate Republican. [See “Heather’s Stealthy Performance” below.] These efforts are exemplified by a recent mailing , presumably directed to seniors, that arrived in local mailboxes recently. This slick piece of election-year literature purports to explain the benefits of the Medicare drug benefit bill passed recently by Congress (and written to drug industry specifications by a congressional subcommittee on which Heather Wilson serves.)

Beginning in 2006, the bill will provide modest relief to Medicare recipients. Persons who spend $1,500 per year or so for drugs (the average expenditure of Medicare recipients) will save about $600. But what is not revealed in the brochure is that the $600 in annual savings may well be eaten up by price increases, since the bill forbids the government to negotiate bulk prices for medicines, and provides massive subsidies to private health care organizations to undercut the Medicare program. In other words, the law is, and was intended to be, a direct assault on the Medicare program. [See the article above for a fuller discussion of this bill.] Furthermore, it turns out now that the bill will cost $550 billion in its first decade, rather than $400 billion, as first advertised by the administration. And this will all be borrowed money.

Now we learn that Heather has voted with the Republican majority in the House for the so-called “reform” of federal bankruptcy laws. This reform would make it almost impossible for ordinary citizens to file for bankruptcy, while retaining the rights of corporate interests, such as Enron or Worldcom, to use the bankruptcy laws to manage, if not to write off entirely, their often-massive debt.

The bill in question was written by credit card interests to protect them from the consequences of their relentless promotion of unsolicited high-interest credit cards to persons of limited financial capacity. (The industry distributes about 900 million credit card solicitations annually.) When such persons build up unmanageable debt they can, and often do, file for bankruptcy. Bankruptcy filings have soared in recent years as millions of lower-income Americans find it impossible to meet payments on large credit card balances or on usurious loans from credit companies. (There were almost 400, 000 bankruptcy filings in the last quarter of 2003, the highest in several years.)

The financial institutions would like to put a stop to this, but they are not willing, in return, to put limits on their relentless promotion of credit cards to persons who have neither the resources, the sophistication, or the long-range security to manage credit card debt.

Wilson voted against proposed amendments to this bill that would have discriminated between obvious malingerers and persons who are caught in circumstances beyond their control, that would have required credit-card companies to moderate their promotions to marginal populations, as well as several other amendments that would have softened the impact of the law.

One interesting factor in Heather’s career has been the support afforded her in the news columns of New Mexico’s largest newspaper, The Albuquerque Journal. The Journal does publish a once-weekly, un-annotated report on the votes of the state’s congressional delegation on major bills, but it provides almost no coverage of Heather’s activities in shaping legislation, such as her votes on amendments. The Journal’s Washington correspondent seems to restrict his coverage to social events, while ignoring the substantive political aspects, such as committee work, of the congresswoman’s performance. Moreover, The Journal misses no opportunity to publish cute pictures of Wilson or her banal statements on insignificant public issues. The apogee of such coverage was the recent cut-out color photo of Wilson at the very top of the front page accompanying a story on her bold statement castigating the TV networks for vulgar programming, which she even suggested might have a commercial motive! Talk about political risk-taking!

Heather, as she likes to be called, is among the more conservative persons in the congress. She consistently votes the party line as defined by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, and as a result is handsomely rewarded, not only with re-election financing from the party, but also with substantial campaign contributions by special interests, such as drug companies, financial institutions, health care organizations, and energy firms. The evidence shows that she is not a moderate, but a toe-the-line right-wing ideologue.

So Heather Wilson has a lot going for her: the support of the rich and powerful; a huge campaign fund supported by the interests she serves in Washington, which enables her to distribute expensive, if misleading, mailings such as the one discussed here; an attractive (if skillfully manipulated) political image; but most important of all, a carefully concealed right-wing voting record. This may be what the voters of the First Congressional District want in their representative. We’ll never know, unless some way is found to get the word out about the real Heather Wilson.