Time for the Ideological Year of the Biennium in the NH Legislature

Members of the House have filed their LSRs for 2020. An LSR is the beginning of what will become a bill. LSR stands for Legislative Service Requests.  What we see right now is just a one liner, a fledgling request that will be fleshed out and be assigned a bill number. The title we see right now  may or may not provide insight into the intent of the bill, but when combined with the list of sponsors, the intent isn't difficult to discern. 

The budget is the work of the first year of the biennium. In the second year, some legislators get to work on their ideological projects. There are four bills coming up that are intended to exert control over the bodily autonomy of women and girls. Sponsors may still be added to LSRs, so the sponsors you see in this screenshot may change. It was taken on October 24 at about 10 AM.

2046 is theatrical nonsense from Rep. Prudhomme-O'Brien. Abortion has long been the way the radical right manipulates part of its  voter base. This last year, there's been a lot of phony drama with Trump and the god botherers insisting that doctors are killing babies that are born alive. This is, of course, a lot of bunkum. They've wailed, moaned, and made a big show of filing bills, conveniently forgetting that President George W. Bush signed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002. It's all a lot of sound, fury, and manipulation. That Prudhomme-O'Brien hasn't managed to find anyone to cosponsor the bill is telling. 

2054 is three men desperate to control the lives and bodies of girls. 

2483 is obviously the big ideological centerpiece, given the number of cosponsors. The GOP is skilled at finding women to support the patriarchy. Five of the 6 sponsors are women. I don't know what abortions they want to prohibit "in certain cases," though it's not hard to guess. 

2584 is anti-science nonsense, coming from Dave Testerman. The forced incubation crowd is insisting that something the size of a pea at 6 weeks has a heartbeat, despite the fact that it hasn't developed a heart. This is an attempt to cloud science with emotion - and to use that emotion to force women to serve as involuntary incubators. For more on the fetal heartbeat issue this piece from NY Magazine offers some actual science. 

All of these bill sponsors are people who claim the mantle of being "pro-life." None of them are people who legislate accordingly. Whenever there's a chance to vote on bills that would help children and families, they are almost always on the wrong side. 

A quick example is last year's SB 1, relative to family and medical leave. SB 1 would have created a system for paid leave that would enable parents with new babies to take paid time away from work to be with the new addition to their family. It also would have given people with health problems time off, or time to help a family member with a serious illness. It was a bill to help families. The sponsors of the bills all voted against it - with the exception of Prudhomme-O'Brien and Abigail Rooney, who were both absent on the day of the vote. 

These are folks who are pro-birth. Once that little nipper hits the chute, they expect him to pull him/herself up by the bootie straps and fend for him/herself. 

If Nothing Is True

Webster’s defines truth as: the property (as of a statement) of being in accord with fact or reality.

In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary chose post-truth as the word of the year. Truth’s been taking a beating for the last few years. No longer are facts accepted, just because they exist. Today we are free to dismiss facts if we don’t like them, or if we find them inconvenient.

Science - the systematic building of organized, tested knowledge is dismissed by ideologues who don’t like the conclusions, or who have religious objections to them. Once ours was a country that enthusiastically taught and venerated science, but somewhere along the way, religious fundamentalists started chipping away at it, because of evolution, and then it became a bone of contention when it came to climate change. The fossil fuel companies didn’t care much for the idea that they might be part of the problem, and so they provided a lot of funding to spread the gospel of ain’t no such thing as climate change. The anti-vaxxer crowd tried to tell us that vaccines caused autism – something many still believe. Now all things scientific are in doubt, because we’ve allowed the lunatic fringe to turn education into something questionable and elitist.

History can either be ignored or rewritten. The legendary civil war battle site, “The River of Blood” is memorialized at a Trump golf Course. Who can forget the Bowling Green Massacre? We’ve also seen plenty of rewriting. The deification of Ronald Reagan was years in the making. It wasn’t successful enough to get him on Mt. Rushmore (or Mount Clay) but it was successful in diverting attention from Reagan’s role in the Iran Contra affair. Reagan planted the seeds of government mistrust that have flourished over the decades, and Republicans smile with pride about that. They should be worrying about what happens in a country where the government can no longer govern, the inequality divide is expanding, and there are nuclear weapons lying about.

News stories we don’t agree with are now handily dismissed as Fake News, thanks to our president. He’s desperate for attention, but unless that attention is fawning and slobbering, it is Fake. When I was a schoolgirl, we were encouraged to read differing points of view, and make up our own minds. What a waste of time that was! Easier to pick out what we like, what we’re comfortable with, or what doesn’t threaten us.

Yes, truth has been taking a beating.

We’ve certainly seen that writ large in New Hampshire. The Republican Party had control of the NH House for 150 years. When they lost that control in 2006, the rumors of “busloads of people from Massachusetts” voting in our elections began. It was a steady drumbeat for a decade. In 2016 those drums became Lambegs when gubernatorial candidate Chris Sununu went on a radio show in Boston to bray about voter fraud. Days later he won his election – in fact the GOP seized control of all branches of the state government, despite all that alleged voter fraud.

Shortly after Trump took office, he started whining about voter fraud in NH, thanks to Trump sycophant Sununu, who paved the way. Donald Trump, the sorest winner in US political history was miffed because even though he won the election, he didn’t win NH, and apparently he was entitled to.

Now we’re dealing with the fallout from that bizarre pageant. Last year our legislature passed a ridiculous voter prevention bill. One of the provisions of that bill created a position for someone to play Nancy Drew and dig into the Mystery of the Unreturned Post Cards.

The person chosen for this new position is Orville “Bud” Fitch, who was an assistant AG, then left to work for Kelly Ayotte. A recent story by the excellent Mark Stern in Slate magazine provided some information about this new state employee. Mr. Fitch was resentful at being questioned, and provided little in the way of answers.  He refused to give Mark his job description, or describe how he’s going about doing it. Meanwhile, we’re paying for this – even though there is no proof of voter fraud.

At the same time, we have the audacity to wonder why there is political apathy among the young. They’ve learned that facts don’t matter. That justice is elusive for the non-wealthy. They can see that we have no interest in protecting the planet or their future. They have no hope of achieving the American Dream. And we have the audacity to wonder why there’s an opioid crisis. If nothing is true, nothing matters.

"Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle." Yale Prof. Tim Snyder

Published as an op-ed in the January 25 edition of the Conway Daily Sun