Bob Mead, director of legislative services for the House Majority Office, resigned yesterday after being outed by the Concord Monitor. The Monitor story revealed Mead used his taxpayer-funded position to recruit Republicans to run for office and he had billed the state for travel expenses related to that work.
Questions remain, said House Democratic Leader Terie Norelli:
“By whom was (Mead) directed to do electoral work? I would like to know why the speaker hasn’t taken any action against Greg Moore, the chief of staff, since he was the one who approved the reimbursement.”
We don’t discuss personnel matters, replied House Majority Leader D.J. Bettencourt:
“Unfortunately the professionalism and decorum underlying this policy allows ignorant partisans to jibber jabber without response but the House policy of not commenting on these matters is the proper one.”
An editorial in today’s Concord Monitor surveys the results of state House Speaker Bill O’Brien’s first term as Speaker and evaluates his proposal to cut another $400 million from the state budget in his second term. He’s done enough damage, they conclude.
O’Brien did damage enough in his first term as speaker. He set a tone that has made the State House atmosphere poisonous. He all but banished Republicans who disagreed with any element of his radical agenda to shrink government or opposed his efforts to concentrate power in the body he leads.
If he gets his way, New Hampshire will do less of what it should do and do what it does do less well. It’s an agenda that voters should reject.
Today, the Senate is scheduled to vote on bills that would defund Planned Parenthood, allow employers to exclude birth control from prescription drug coverage and require a 24-hour waiting period for women seeking an abortion. Writing in the Concord Monitor, Marianne M. Jones places the legislation in historical context:
I am reminded of all the women who have stood up over the past 100 years for these rights. It was my grandmother’s fight in the early 1900s that won my right to vote. My mother’s fight in the 1950s and 1960s won the right for me to own property, earn equal wages and have equal access to employment opportunities. In the early 1970s, my sister won my right to higher education, the right to be a scholar-athlete, and the right to legally and safely control my reproductive and sexual health.
I’m sitting at my desk in 2012, thinking of these historic advances with the expectation that no one would think of turning the clock back on my right to vote, my right to own property, get an education and work for equal pay.
But there is an effort to turn the clock back on my reproductive health and my right to privacy with my health care providers. I can vote, I can buy a house, and I can work in an executive position, but my reproductive health is up for debate.
This attack on the rights of women and girls, concludes Jones, is an attack on basic human rights.
An editorial in today’s Concord Monitor calls for state House Speaker Bill O’Brien to be shown the door. “O’Brien’s portrait as speaker,” writes the Monitor, “is a self-drawn caricature of vindictiveness and power run amuck.”
“Nearly all men can stand adversity,” Abraham Lincoln wisely said, “but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” … The current speaker of the House, Bill O’Brien, has failed the test, failed miserably and continuously.
O’Brien has run New Hampshire’s House of Representatives in a notoriously autocratic way and made, to the extent he could, the agenda of a small group that of the state. … A man with a leadership style similar to O’Brien’s, former governor Craig Benson, was ousted after one term. That deserves to be O’Brien’s fate as well.
An editorial in the Concord Monitor details the downshifting of costs to cities and towns and explains how it is resulting in a lower quality of life for all Granite State residents.
The state of New Hampshire has been reneging on promises and shedding responsibilities faster than a deadbeat dad, and that means two things: a lower quality of life for the state’s residents and higher property taxes for the state’s homeowners.
There are limits to how much a household can pay in property taxes and water bills. When they are reached, the composition of the community changes.
When the New Hampshire House returns in January, they’ll take up HB 334, a bill that would prohibit the state’s community colleges and state universities from enacting any regulation restricting gun use and possession. The Concord Monitor states the obvious: “guns on campus is a maniacal idea.”
The year 2011 is shaping up to be the Year of the Gun in New Hampshire, and citizens are none the safer for it.
One’s college years tend to be volatile. Hearts are broken, hopes dashed by bad grades, depression not uncommon. Suicides on campus, we fear, would increase if the bans are lifted, as would homicides and accidental shootings.
The House should see the committee’s proposal for what it is: an extreme measure that would make campuses less safe.
Writing in the Concord Monitor, Bill Duncan details the attempts by the state legislature to dismantle New Hampshire’s public schools.
The scale and scope of the attack is staggering. Bills that have attracted broad Republican support include lowering the high school drop out age, eliminating universal kindergarten, repealing compulsory school attendance, defunding the University of New Hampshire and the community colleges, and eliminating the state Department of Education.
The theme is clear.
America’s system of public education, invented by Jefferson and Adams, is the foundation of our democracy and our market economy. The debates, regardless of politics, have always been about how to improve it to enable our kids to compete in the world.
But when today’s Republicans talk public education reform, they mean to dismantle public education - or “government schools,” as they call them - and replace them with private, religious and home schools.
The Concord Monitor today called on the state’s congressional Republicans to “put partisanship aside” and support President Obama’s jobs bill. Rep. Frank Guinta was singled out for his “scornful” response to the President’s proposal.
We urge Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Reps. Charlie Bass and Frank Guinta to put partisanship aside and vote to pass the jobs bill. … In their brief responses to the president’s speech, all three stuck to Republican Party talking points. They opposed additional government spending to stimulate the economy and called instead for tax cuts for business and the easing of regulations.
Guinta was particularly scornful of the president’s proposals, calling them “failed policy” and his words “empty eloquence.” Yet Guinta went on to call for aid for “job creators” as if there were a Santa’s workshop somewhere where elves hammer business tax cuts and rejected regulations into jobs.
The problem is not tax policy or regulations but a lack of demand for what business sells. What the economy needs in order to create jobs are policies that put money in people’s pockets quickly, and spending that puts people back to work by rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure and educating the nation’s children.
For the past eight months, Gov. John Lynch has been the only thing standing between the citizenry and the hurricane of horrible laws passed by a hyper-conservative Legislature. … The 2011 Legislature has done many things that need to be undone. Given the Republican supermajorities in the House and Senate, the odds that more bad law will be made in the next session are excellent. Undoing them will require the replacement of inflexible ideologues with pragmatists who understand that progress is made through compromise. The best way to ensure that that happens is for Lynch to announce that once again he’ll be at the top of the ticket.
— Concord Monitor, calling for Gov. John Lynch to run for a fifth term.
To the extent that the downgrade serves as a swift kick in the rear to members of Congress who believe that the nation’s budget should be balanced entirely with budget cuts, it will be a good thing. Sen. Kelly Ayotte so believes that’s possible that she was the only member of the state’s congressional delegation to vote for default rather than accept a budget that didn’t accomplish that goal. But that path is folly. It would lead to less, not more, economic growth and an even higher unemployment rate.
— Concord Monitor, on S&P downgrade of U.S. treasury securities
They pay mothers to have children out of wedlock and then wonder why family is breaking down, welfare programs are constantly growing, and children come to school with problems so severe that they can’t be educated. They pay people to stay out of work and then they wonder why our economy is anemic.
— New Hampshire Speaker of the House Bill O’Brien (July 9, 2011)
Considering the draconian state budget drafted by New Hampshire House Republicans this year, we were not surprised to learn that Speaker Bill O’Brien is no advocate of programs designed to help needy families make it through financial crises. But his cavalier ability to demonize the poor — and to blame a program created to alleviate poverty for the very consequences of poverty — is startling nonetheless.
The speaker broadly implies that families in financial crisis use government assistance to avoid work. That without such assistance, they would easily find jobs. That unmarried parents — presumably women — are responsible for severe disabilities among their children. That women have children in order to increase the size of their welfare check. That there is something immoral about the poor. That having kids out of wedlock is a particular quirk of the lower class.
O’Brien’s disheartening comments about welfare recipients follow similarly impolitic insults by House Republican leaders toward college kids, mental health patients and union members in the past several months. New Hampshire voters in the 2012 election will no doubt think twice about the House they created in 2010.
— Concord Monitor editorial staff
