Rogue Legislature

        

Last year, NH elected a Republican governor and voted for Republican majorities in all branches of our state government. It’s still something of a puzzle how this came to pass given the rampant voter fraud Donald Trump and his acolytes (including our governor) have brayed about, but the only plausible explanation is that those busloads of people from Massachusetts came to NH to vote for the GOP.

Where a new governor begins sets the tone for his or her administration. Governor Sununu’s first legislative priority was to pass a bill repealing the 100-year-old law requiring a gun owner to have a permit to carry a concealed handgun. NH has the 11^th worst infrastructure in the United States. We ranked 2^nd in the nation for overdose deaths. We have a serious housing problem, and homelessness and poverty are on the rise, yet this gun bill was the most important thing our new governor could think of?

Governor Sununu also took the big raise negotiated for him by the state employee’s union, though he hasn’t yet been willing to sit down and negotiate a contract with them. They’ve been without one for the last 180+ days. One of the sticking points? He doesn’t want to give them a raise, even though he took one, before ever sitting down at his desk in the corner office.

The legislature will be back in session next week. With the likelihood of losing at least some of those majorities (if not all) in the next election, the rabid right majority is going to attempt to pass their entire ideological wish list. There are more voter suppression bills coming up, and more bills to cut business taxes. Bills to maintain fealty to the fossil fuel industries, bills to destroy public education. There are 11 bills dealing with decals on license plates. And because our volunteer legislature full of old people has no interest in a future they won’t be part of, there’s a bill to create a memorial to Meldrim Thomson.

Governor Sununu chose Speaker of the House, Shawn Jasper to be his new Commissioner of Agriculture. One does wonder if that was a deliberate political calculation. The GOP has moved so far to the right that Jasper now appears to be moderate, and removing him from the speakership will very likely allow that rabid agenda to move along more smoothly. When Gene Chandler was elected Speaker last month, there were some sighs of relief. Some real reactionaries ran for Speaker, and Chandler, at least, isn’t one of them. That relief was short-lived.

Chandler has restructured the House leadership. It seems he promised during his campaign for the speakership, to include influential lawmakers in his leadership team. Chandler added six assistant majority leaders, who bring all kinds of “influence” to the table. One of them is State Rep. Al Baldasaro, one of the most nationally famous legislators in the state. Al is famous for a number of reasons (all of them embarrassing) but especially for suggesting that Hillary Clinton should be shot for treason. Another is Victoria Sullivan, who pleased the reactionaries in her party last year, when she launched an attack on the tweets of a female legislator, which appeared to be an attempt to distract attention from former Rep. Robert Fisher, a rape apologist her party was desperate to protect and retain. This is a nice reward for Sullivan, midway through her second term.
 
Speaker Chandler has also appointed a policy advisory committee. This is comprised of “influential” lawmakers who, according to the House website, will review upcoming legislation, hearings, review bills on the calendar, amendments, and give input on various issues. Two of these big thinkers are Frank McCarthy and Lino Avellani. Given that Avellani missed most of the first three months of last year’s session, one wonders how he’ll make it to the weekly meetings, and how, halfway through a second term he became “influential.” Frank McCarthy, after he was ousted in 2012, and before he was reelected, made a career of writing bellicose letters to the editor, where he made frequent bigoted and ugly accusations. In the last year or so, McCarthy has allied himself with the Carroll County contingent of Free Staters and Tea Partiers, groups that promises of inclusion must have been made to by the Speaker candidate, in order to secure their votes.

There are no moderate Republicans any more. The GOP of Trump has no interest in what is right for our state – their interest is in serving party ideology, serving themselves, and their donors/paymasters.

This rogue legislature has the potential to do a great deal of damage. Pay attention – and get involved. State politics may not be sexy, but they affect our lives every day of the week. This is an election year, which gives voters the power to hold their legislators accountable during the session, and again, at the ballot box. 


This was published as an op/ed in the December 29 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper


For those who don't understand the concept of an op-ed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_piece

Losing Strategies

In 2013, a wealthy guy named Shawn O’Connor moved to NH in hopes of purchasing a US Senate seat. He was thinking about running as a Democrat against Kelly Ayotte. He began by not getting involved with local or state politics. The day before the election in 2014, he donated $1000 to the Manchester Democratic Committee, and $1,000 to Executive Councilor Chris Pappas. Those were his only donations of the election cycle.

The 2014 election cycle might have been illustrative for O’Connor. We all watched a former US Senator from Massachusetts move to NH and lose his bid to defeat Senator Jeanne Shaheen. Scott Brown had big name recognition. Shawn O’Connor? None. When Governor Hassan decided to run against Ayotte, O’Connor set his sights on Congress. He decided to run against Carol Shea-Porter in the Democratic primary against Frank Guinta in the first Congressional district.

In early 2015 he hired a bunch of people. There were media consultants, communications strategists, direct mail consultants, fundraisers, digital strategizers, and legal counsel. (To date, he’s spent over a million dollars of his own money.) And still, he couldn’t seem to get any traction. No one knew who the heck he was.

There were some mentions here and there, most not very flattering. NH is suspicious of carpetbaggers with big wads of cash. When O’Connor moved to NH he was a “third way” Democrat. The Third Way think tank is funded by corporations and hedge funds. Third Way Dems are centrist to right leaning types – friends of Wall St. not friends of workers.

Then in the summer of 2015, he made a speech at a political event about being a survivor of domestic violence. Even with all those communications strategists, he wasn’t getting any name recognition. In early January 2016, he endorsed Bernie Sanders. Bernie’s campaign had caught on fire in NH, and it was a way to differentiate himself from all of the other top ticket NH Democrats. They’d all endorsed Hillary Clinton. Suddenly he was a news story. Fighting income inequality, he said, was his number one priority. Those who heard O’Connor speak over the summer don’t remember ever hearing him mention that. He must have been saving the announcement of that priority for a special occasion.

The glow of media attention was what he’d been waiting for. Sadly, it waned. Desperate measures were called for. And early this month, he began to take them. He announced that he was going to sue former Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter for defamation. He claimed that her campaign had engaged in a whisper campaign, accusing him of being a domestic abuser. There was evidence, he said! He said it loudly and often. The Shea-Porter campaign said it was “a sad, desperate, and untruthful attack.” O’Connor called on Shea-Porter to end her campaign. There was evidence, he said! He roped in some state legislators who really should have known better. More huffing and puffing. More legal threats. More claims of evidence.

This week, the NH Democratic Party released a statement saying that O’Connor had threatened to sue the party, and suggested they pay him to drop out of the race. O’Connor responded with a lengthy press release that made some peculiar accusations. In the weirdest game of telephone ever, O’Connor claimed that one state senator told another state senator that O’Connor planned to buy rats and put them in the kitchen of the Puritan Backroom – a restaurant owned by Chris Pappas, the Executive Councilor. O’Connor stated that he does not know where one would purchase rats. He further claimed that the restaurant had a long-standing rodent problem. That, of course, was easily checked with the health department, and quickly proven wrong.

It’s difficult to imagine what O’Connor hopes to gain at this point.  He’s made many accusations. Some of them have changed over time. The one thing he hasn’t done? He hasn’t provided a single bit of proof. Not one item of corroborating evidence to back up his many bizarre claims. It’s too bad that none of those high-priced advisors O’Connor has on the payroll are telling him that this is the worst election strategy ever. He spent over 10 hours tweeting at the media on Tuesday. For Shawn O’Connor, it’s all over but the shouting, and he seems to be determined to shout for as long as his keyboard holds out.

On the local level, the Concord Monitor had a story over the weekend about the number of state representatives that aren’t showing up to do committee work. All legislators are assigned to committees. Some refuse committee assignments – both former Speaker Bill O’Brien and Rep. Max Abramson (R. Free State) have refused assignments. There seems to be an epidemic of “I’m too good for this” going around.

One of the representatives mentioned was Lino Avellani of Wakefield. He’s assigned to the House Labor, Industrial, and Rehabilitative Services Committee, and he hasn’t been to a single committee meeting or hearing this year. He told the Monitor that it’s “hard” to get away from work. Avellani owns a restaurant. He owned the restaurant when he ran for office, yet he ran anyway. Still, as “hard” as it is to get to committee meetings, he does make it to House voting sessions. Luckily, members of the House Liberty Alliance stand in the hallway and hand representatives “The Gold Standard” a sheet telling them how to vote on libertea issues, so no preparation or thought is required.

This committee information should be readily available to us all, on line, but it isn’t.  The 21^st century beckons, but NH is still looking wistfully into the distance. The libertea crowd brays about transparency, but does nothing to actually further it, when it comes to our state government. There are gun bills to write and women’s bodies to control.

Call me old-fashioned, but I have this silly belief that if you make a commitment, you should honor it. If you are elected to a position of public trust, you should be worthy of it. If you can’t do the work of The People, you shouldn’t run for office.

published as an op-ed in the April 29 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper