NH Made History

Last week history was made in New Hampshire. The death penalty was repealed in our state, making NH the twenty-first state to enact a repeal.

To accomplish this, the legislature had to override Governor Sununu’s veto, by a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate. That it happened is a testimony to the kind of bipartisan coalition building that has been going on behind the scenes for years.

In 1998, a bill was introduced to expand the death penalty. Two state representatives, Cliff Below and Renny Cushing, took a different view, and introduced a floor amendment to abolish it altogether. Their amendment failed, but, so did the death penalty expansion bill. That was the beginning of the repeal movement.

The group that formed came to be known as the New Hampshire Coalition to abolish the Death Penalty. It included members from the faith community, police officers, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, and family members of murder victims. They would spend the next twenty years speaking out, filing repeal bills, and building momentum.

As the years went on, the death penalty began to be repealed in other states. Groups like the Innocence Project were using DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions and getting people released from death row. The NH coalition brought some of those death row exonerees to testify before the NH legislature. The testimony over the years of Curtis McCarty, Kirk Bloodsworth, and Sabrina Butler had an impact on how legislators began to think about the death penalty. Granted, the way the NH statute was written made a wrongful conviction unlikely, but even having the death penalty made the state part of something that is increasingly regarded as barbaric. 

Governor Sununu’s reason for vetoing the repeal was that he was standing with law enforcement; that the death penalty offers them some sort of protection, and shows support for them. A more tangible means of support would be to ensure that our police officers have good pay, good benefits, and excellent training. They’d probably appreciate it if the NH GOP stopped trying to turn NH into a right to work state, too. Another show of support would be to tighten up our gun laws, but I’ll save that topic for another day.

There has been a lot of talk about how the death penalty repeal was, “politicized.” A broad, bipartisan coalition was responsible for the repeal. The governor was furious at the thought of his veto being overturned, and so he lobbied House Republicans relentlessly.

In the Trumpian political world every single issue boils down to one thing: winning. The greater good was left in the dust as we hurtled down the road to “owning the libs.” The idea that the veto would be overturned, by people voting with their deeply held beliefs in mind was apparently not worthy of respect – it was LOSING.

In the House, 35 legislators who had voted for repeal in April voted against overriding the veto in May. The governor succeeded in convincing those folks to value party over principle. In Carroll County he turned only one member, State Rep. William Marsh from Wolfeboro. Despite Sununu’s hard work, the House did override the veto, and a week later so did the Senate.

It is unfortunate that the repeal was politicized, and even more unfortunate that those doing the politicizing pointed the finger at those who did no such thing. If Governor Sununu had stood up and said that he was disappointed in the veto override, but he understood that this was a vote by legislators on deeply held principles, he would have looked positively heroic, and I would be writing a different column. 

NH made history. The news of the repeal traveled all over the world. It was refreshing to read international press on the NH legislature that wasn’t generated by a Republican dropping his gun or his pants. We left the company of countries like Afghanistan, China, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Somalia where citizens are executed by the state. New Hampshire walked bravely into the 21^stCentury. We’ve become an example that other states are using in their repeal efforts.

I’m proud of my state. There are far too many people to acknowledge, so I’m going to pick two. State Representative Renny Cushing of Hampton has been a leader in the repeal effort for 20 years, along with Arnie Alpert of AFSC NH. Their work to repeal the death penalty has been tireless and inspiring. I’m fortunate to be able to call them both my friends. 

On dark days when we ask ourselves why good change takes so long, and begin to doubt that it can happen at all, let this vote remind us that the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice. 

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.