One Way Street

Bipartisan: marked by or involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties. 

Oh, how we love that word! How we love that concept. How often we invoke the desire to see our elected officials reach across the aisle and get things done, because surely bipartisanship is the way things happen.

If we dig a little, we learn that it has happened a few times. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil famously worked together to protect Social Security. John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi teamed up on passing the ACA. Of course, that was after Boehner and McConnell announced their intention to block and delay everything coming from that oft-touted other side of the aisle, in their effort to make Obama a one-term president. Oddly, no one in the media seemed to call them out on their stated goal of ignoring and subverting bipartisanship. It was no big deal that Republicans had no intention of reaching across the aisle. By this time, we didn’t expect it from them anymore. By this time, bipartisanship was a one-way street, populated only by Democrats.

That’s where it remains. 

Democrats are expected to fall all over themselves to compromise. In fact, they’re expected to completely cave in to GOP demands. That’s what we call bipartisanship, but it could be more properly referred to as capitulation. There are whole “bipartisan” groups dedicated to this philosophy. No Labels claims to be dedicated to bridging the divide. In 2017 they launched the No Labels “problem solver caucus,” comprised of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats who would work together on ambitious bipartisan proposals. They also gave out “Problem Solver Awards.” They gave one of those awards to Donald Trump, who has never solved a problem in his life. No Labels always seems to be advocating for the position of the right. I can’t think of a time when they’ve taken the other side. Nope, they want to do things like gut Social Security and Medicare, policies that aren’t popular with most people from either side of the aisle. 

We’ve seen similar antics in Concord. When the Tea Party Junta took over the State House and installed Bill O’Brien as Speaker, all possibility of reaching across the aisle flew out the window. That was when the Republican Party began the slow descent into the kind of madness that caused them to elect an incoherent game show host as President of the United States. 

Yes, this is New Hampshire, a state where the media default setting is GOP, and so since the new Democratic majority at the NH House elected Steve Shurtleff the media focus has been on bipartisanship. A Seacoast online headline read, “Speaker Shurtleff Offers Refreshing Bipartisan Message.” I guarantee you this headline would never have been written if the Republicans had kept the majority.

It took nearly a week for the speech made by Representative Dick Hinch, the new GOP minority leader to get any media attention. It was not a “refreshing message.” Hinch began with a little lip service about unity and working together for the benefit of the state, then quickly moved on to his real message. Hinch told his caucus that their primary duty is to make sure they take back the House in 2020 so that they can gerrymander districts to ensure they keep the majority for the next decade. He urged the caucus to be disruptive at every opportunity.

This speech didn’t even merit a mention in most of the NH media. Those that did carefully danced around Hinch’s speech, sanitizing it for GOP protection. The exception to the rule was long time NH political reporter Garry Rayno who reported on the content of Hinch’s speech, at Manchester Ink Link. Why didn’t other NH media cover it? GOP is the default setting of the NH media. They are always protected and never held to the same standards that Democrats are. Stories of GOP bad behavior seldom splash across the headlines unless the story is picked up by national media, as we have seen time and time again, most recently saw with (former) Representative Porn Star. 

Republicans aren’t expected to behave in a bipartisan way. They will not be held accountable for the kind of disruptive, delaying tactics they’ll be engaging in on the House floor this year. Those tactics won’t even be mentioned in the news coverage of House sessions. The further north one travels in the state, the less likely one is to get any coverage of the goings on in the state house. Democrats are supposed to knuckle under to the demands of the GOP, because doing their bidding is their definition of bipartisan. 

Most of us want to have a representative body that will work hard to do what is best for New Hampshire. If we’re going to cling to the myth of bipartisanship, let’s insist that it be a two way street – in the legislature and in the media. 

Published as an op-ed in the December 14 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper. 

Live Free - Don't Vote Absentee

Ever since Democrats started winning elections in 2006, the NH Republican Party has been spinning the myth of voter fraud, a myth that has increased in strength and shrillness with each passing year. On a national level, as the old school Republicans were replaced with rabid ideologues, the howls of voter fraud began echoing from sea to shining sea, despite a regrettable lack of evidence. 

This means that every year, around a dozen voter bills are filed by our Republican legislators. All of them are aimed at making voting more difficult and exclusionary. This year, HB 1264 is aimed at preventing student voting. The NHGOP has apparently decided that preventing college students from voting is easier than convincing them to join the GOP. After all, if gerrymandering can’t ensure a Republican majority, all that is left is to eliminate undesirable populations from voting.

The focus has been on disenfranchising the young for so long that we haven’t been paying attention to the latest targets:
the old. We’ve watched our Secretary of State refuse to allow towns to postpone town elections in the event of a serious storm, with the approval of the GOP. This year, the State House was shut down early for the safety of staff and legislators - because of snow - but Grandma was supposed drive to town hall to vote. The term “local control” has ceased to have any meaning in our state, where the majority party is working on a variety of levels to eliminate it.

We’ve heard, endlessly, about busloads of voters from Massachusetts. We haven’t heard anything about voter fraud by absentee ballot, but that hasn’t deterred the NH Senate. HB 527 is intended to “establish additional procedures for verification of absentee voters.” What are the existing procedures? And how do they fit those buses in an envelope? 

You may not be aware that our town clerks and moderators are expected to be handwriting experts, in analyzing the signatures on absentee ballot envelopes with the absentee ballots themselves. If a person with disabilities is being aided in filling out a ballot, the person who is assisting has to sign a number of forms to prove that they aren’t signing from the bus. As a result of this amateur handwriting analysis, hundreds of votes are discarded every election – without ever telling the person who has been disenfranchised that his or her ballot was shoved in the trash.

Some of these people are elderly voters who may have tremors, have Parkinson’s, or other health issues. Some may be people who have disabilities. This could easily happen to me. A side effect of back surgery in 2014 is some nerve damage in my right hand. My signature can vary from day to day, especially in cold weather.  I could very easily be one of those people whose ballots were tossed by the amateur graphologists.  

Voters are not informed that their penmanship was rejected. Days or even weeks after the election, their names are posted on a website no one knows about, then the website is scrubbed 90 days after the election. No effort has ever been made to inform voters that this website exists. Still, website or no, voters have no recourse – once their vote is discarded, it’s gone.

HB 527 is aimed at slightly modifying the signature practices that were enacted last year for mailed absentee ballots. If the voter has assistance, and the person who provides assistance signs an affidavit saying they witnessed and provided assistance, then the moderators and clerks will take their word for it. The unassisted will continue to take their chances with the local officials. In other words, if you have unreliable handwriting, you’d better get a responsible party to sign off on your absentee ballot, or else it may end up in the shredder.  That’s really something in a state with the motto: “live free or die.”

It’s a misdemeanor to vote absentee in NH without being entitled to do so. There have been zero prosecutions in the last decade. This whole signature verification business is a solution that lacked a problem. NH’s signature match law is the harshest in the nation (despite there being no evidence of voter fraud by absentee ballot). Courts have struck down similar laws in other states. ACLU NH is currently suing the state on behalf of some voters whose ballots were tossed in 2016. The NH signature match procedures are almost certainly a violation of the ADA. Another taxpayer funded lawsuit brought to you by the NHGOP. 

The Senate passed SB 527 by a voice vote, meaning there is no record of how your state senator voted on it. Be sure to ask him. The bill is now before the House Election Law Committee. Be sure to ask your state reps how they will be voting on continuing the disenfranchisement of elderly and disabled voters. 

PS: This remains unclaimed:

Published as an op-ed in the April 13, 2018 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper

Empire in Decline

This isn’t what I set out to write. It isn’t what I originally wrote.

But - the world as we know it has just changed a great deal, and I feel a duty to write about that. 

This election is about anger. The anger is real. I believe it is misplaced, but that really doesn’t matter now. The angry people have spoken, and the rest of the nation and the rest of the world will be living with the consequences for a long time to come.

Some social media snapshots from friends around the world:

From the UK: “World leaders are in shock. Apparently, Marine LePen is the only politician outside the US who has congratulated Trump, which is unprecedented.”

From Australia: “Come on, it's pretty funny that the USA has elected a clown, an actual one with makeup and wig, to govern. If you don't laugh you will go mad.”

From the UK: “Welcome to the Brexit Club, America.”

From Panama: “On several levels, it's the end of an era for the USA. Geopolitics and economics are generally forces for continuity, but in case you haven't noticed, the United States is not the power it was. Other countries' leaders and people who shift money to and fro around the world surely notice.”

From Australia:

“So it's looking like Donald Trump will be the president of the USA. What does that say about a political system that endorses a candidate like this lunatic? It is ok to be a bully? It's perfectly fine to be a misogynist? To be racist? To be a billionaire and not pay any tax? It's no problem at all to be a liar? It's ok to deceive people with conspiracy theories and manipulate opinions with empty statements that cannot be substantiated? To my American friends who I know did not vote for Trump. I'm so very sorry.”

Sorry, world. The US has just officially become a rogue nation.

The recriminations have begun. The Clinton supporters are blaming the third party voters. The third party voters are (in some cases) blaming the DNC for misreading the political climate. The Democratic Party has moved so far to the right since 2000, that they’re no longer the friend of the working stiff, in a year when it was terribly important to be that friend.

Republicans are not friends of the working class, either – they just have better PR. People with stagnant incomes hear “tax cuts” and they think that will mean more money for them. They do not understand that those cuts will be for the wealthy. People heard Trump talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back to this country. That was a cruel message to people who badly need good paying jobs. Manufacturing is never coming back. Trump’s own products are manufactured overseas. We’re a nation and a world on the verge of big economic changes, and we’ve chosen an ill-informed carnival barker to lead us into the future.

As a nation, we’ve never gotten past racism. We tried a few times, but it’s not over. As a nation, we have never confronted our misogyny. We just elected a guy who has said awful things about women, and admitted to assaulting them. A man who says we need to build a wall to keep out Mexicans. He mocked a reporter with disabilities. He was cheered on by angry people who applauded him for “telling it like it is.”

That’s what we do here. When the economy is lousy for us, when we are fearful for our future, we blame THOSE PEOPLE. Whoever they are. The politics of hate, anger, and fear have won the day. What do we tell our girl children about what just happened here?

The media deserves a great deal of blame for this – but not the kind that we began to see at the end of Trump’s campaign. Men showing up at Trump events with t-shirts suggesting that lynching reporters was a good idea isn’t funny. Somewhere along the way the second amendment has become the only one that matters to a large segment of the population.

Nowhere is that truer than NH, where the politics of guns and pledges have won the day. NH has just chosen another Sununu to govern our state. Jumping on the Trump train worked for him. We can now look forward to 2 years of businessman Chris Sununu telling us why it’s a mistake to invest in our own state. He’ll be aided and abetted by the great visionaries of our legislature, whose idea of the future is firmly planted in 1952. 

Guns aren’t going to fix our roads and bridges – and neither is our new state government. Instead, the demonizing of the poor is likely to be ramped up, along with MOAR GUNZ, less access to health care, business tax cuts, MOAR GUNZ, right to work, eliminating bodily autonomy for women, and plenty of other stupid that has yet to reveal itself.

As I write this, the US Senate race between Kelly Ayotte and Maggie Hassan is still undecided. Congresswoman Ann Kuster kept her seat, despite a last minute surge of support for challenger Jim Lawrence. Carol Shea-Porter was reelected in the first district, despite the best efforts of the independent candidate. He might have swayed the election to Guinta, had it not been for the rats. That was just a bridge too far (and too bizarre) for many people. New Hampshire did manage to fend off some of the damage that was done in the rest of the country.

There are some bright spots in the darkness. In Las Cruces, NM, a young woman I met at a conference in 2012 was just elected to her state legislature. Angelica Rubio describes her campaign as being “built on a foundation of community and inclusion, speaking to values that unite us all.”

We need more of this.

Published as an op-ed in the November 11 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper. 

Led by the Dead, Part 2

This week, it’s time to wrap up the series on NH gubernatorial hopefuls by taking a look at the Democratic candidates. There are five of them. I’ll be reporting on their various positions as shown on their websites.

Mark Connolly is a former Deputy Secretary of State, and former Director of the NH Bureau of Securities Regulation. Connolly wants NH students to have a world-class education, with more emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.) He doesn’t mention K-12 education funding. He would, however, like to return the funding of our state university system to the pre-2011 levels. This would certainly improve the situation, but even if he tripled the level of funding, NH would still rank a firm 50^th in the nation for funding post-secondary education. Mr. Connolly would like to modernize our state government, which is certainly a worthy goal, and quite necessary. He wants to strengthen our campaign finance laws. He supports renewable energy and expanded passenger rail. He mentions the need to repair NH’s infrastructure, notably the rural roads and bridges. His site does not mention Northern Pass.

He’s taken The Pledge.

Derek Dextraze has a website. It is not a good one. There are too many fonts and too many paragraphs written in capital letters. There is no biographical information. Digging deeply into the site, I was able to discover that Dextraze is from Dover. He supports raising the minimum wage to $15. He favors legalizing marijuana, and wants tougher laws for heroin dealers. Dextraze wants to lower property taxes. He has taken The Pledge, and favors a constitutional amendment to prohibit an income tax. He also wants to keep the DMV open later in the evening and possibly on weekends. My daughter recently spent nearly 2 hours on hold with the DMV. The reason for this is that NH doesn’t raise sufficient revenue to fund our state agencies and/or run our state as if it mattered. Mr. Dextraze doesn’t seem to understand the role that taxes play in funding our state government. In any case, the real goal of his website seems to be selling his children’s book.

Ian Bernard Freeman does not have a website. Ian Bernard moved to NH as part of the Free State Project. He’s since changed his name to Freeman, an affectation that is common amongst Free Staters, who seem eager to adopt new names once they move to a new state. Ian has been the leader of the Free Keene cult, but has had some problems this past year. The FBI raided his house and took a bunch of computers, amidst rumors of a child porn investigation. This is the house that he’s repeatedly tried to get tax free status for, claiming it is a church. No arrests have been made as a result of this raid, but the raid brought up the old stories about Ian’s views on the age of consent for adult/child sexual relations. He doesn’t think there should be one. This made life a little embarrassing for the new corporate Free State Inc. so they decreed that Ian wouldn’t be welcome at their large public gatherings. Ian has no website or Facebook page for his gubernatorial race. From the NH Liberty website, I learned that Ian wants to legalize marijuana and end enforcement of victimless crimes. He wants equal ballot access for all candidates regardless of party affiliation. He wants NH to secede, and he wants to make all taxes voluntary.

Steve Marchand has been an auditor, auditing municipal, county, and state governments around the country. He served on the city council in Portsmouth, and also served a term as mayor. Marchand supports legalizing marijuana. He’s opposed to the death penalty. He supports paid family leave. He opposes Northern Pass. He’s in favor of eliminating the cap on state education grants. He lists restoring school building aid as an infrastructure issue, where it merited 5 paragraphs. The red listed bridges got one paragraph. He does include municipal and state employees as part of the NH infrastructure, and emphasizes the need to repair the retirement system for these employees. Roads got nothing. Telecommunications infrastructure got nothing. He thinks that college/business partnerships will bring down the cost of college tuition. Marchand had nothing to say about education funding. He refuses to take the pledge, but is opposed to a sales or an income tax. This sounds a little bit like Kelly Ayotte saying she will support Trump, but not endorse him. The late Antonin Scalia might have called this, “jiggery-pokery.”

Colin Van Ostern was a business manager at Stonyfield, Inc., helped launch the College for America at Southern NH University, a college that helps adults get a college education with little to no debt. He’s also served two terms in the Executive Council. He has the best organized website. Colin mentions a lot of issues that the other candidates did not. He believes that NH needs to expand access to rural broadband! He opposes Northern Pass. He points out the need to safeguard NH’s drinking water. Van Ostern also supports fully funding the NH Alcohol fund. If he succeeded, it would be the first time it’s happened since the initial appropriation in 2003. Five percent of the revenue raised in our state liquor stores is supposed to go to directly to that fund to help finance treatment and prevention. He believes in expanding supportive housing for recovering addicts, and working with businesses to give people in recovery a second chance, by giving them a job. He’s also a supporter of expanded passenger rail and raising the minimum wage. He, too, has taken The Pledge.

Taking The Pledge is a tacit admission that nothing will change. There will still not be enough money to run the state in more than the most rudimentary fashion. The infrastructure will continue to decay, while the costs of repairs will continue to rise. And the libertea crowd will still bray about cutting business taxes, as if that will entice businesses to ride into NH on their unicorns, despite our failing infrastructure, high energy costs, high housing costs, and various other failings. The Pledge allows Mel Thomson and Bill Loeb to continue to run NH from the grave.

Not a one of the candidates mentioned the serious housing problem we have in our state. All of these candidates face an uphill battle with statewide name recognition.

The state primary election is on September 13. Be sure to research all the candidates, be sure to bring a photo ID (to combat the non-problem of non-existent voter fraud), and be sure to vote!

This was published as an op-ed in the August 19 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper.