Barker and Bosse Agree on Income Tax Amendment

Dean Barker, founder of the state’s leading progressive blog, and Grant Bosse, lead investigator for a free-market think tank, rarely agree — on anything. So it’s notable that they both made the same point about the proposed constitutional amendment that would prohibit an income tax: it has more to do with influencing the November elections than about how we fund state government.

Barker: So today the Republican supermajority House voted to enshrine the prohibition of raising revenue through income into New Hampshire’s state constitution. I have a bridge I’d like to sell to anyone who doesn’t think this is an obvious, partisan, Get-Out-The-Vote move.

Bosse: Putting CACR 13 on the ballot this fall likely won’t keep New Hampshire from ever adopting an income tax. But it will ensure that every candidate for office will be talking about the income tax. And most voters will have the income tax on their minds when they go to the polls.

Speaker O’Brien’s “Dictatorial and Illegal” Tactics

The New Hampshire House session yesterday was one for the record books — don’t miss Dean Barker’s contemporaneous, tweet-by-tweet account of the chaos.

The House ostensibly met to address several fast-tracked bills that were introduced last month. One of those, SB 198, provides a technical fix to the formula used to calculate assistance payments. It corrects an oversight that has cost the state $2 million since July1.

Speaker Bill O’Brien insisted on appending a non-germane amendment to SB 198, despite the fact that this will delay its adoption for at least three months and cost the state another $2 million. State Senate President Peter Bragdon blasted the House action.

“It is unfortunate the Speaker has chosen such a confrontational position when the governor, the non-partisan Legislative Budget Assistant’s Office, leaders and members of our party as well as other conservative voices agree that SB 198 should have been passed immediately without an amendment.”

But as egregious as the delay is, the manner in which the amendment was adopted is even more deplorable. In fact, Republican state Rep. Steve Vaillancourt claims the amendment “never really passed.” (!)

In the most shameful display of strong-handed tactics I’ve witnessed in this my eighth term in the House, Speaker O’Brien refused to allow a recorded vote on the amendment. … Such a blatant denial of free speech is unheard of and a most vile and dangerous precedent in the New Hampshire House.

After calling for the yeas, O’Brien banged his gavel before even hearing the nays—everyone should really listen to the tape on this one. The vote could have been two to one against the amendment and he would have ruled that it had passed!. If a vote is close, people may request a roll call or division vote. In fact, several people were yelling for a recorded vote before the gavel fell, but the Speaker refused to acknowledge the request, no big deal when the vote is a foregone conclusion, but this voice vote hardly fell into that category.

He may well have hammered in a vote which would in fact have lost. That’s how few yeas he had. I’m sure you’ll all want to review the tape—I certainly will.

I was embarrassed (as were many other Republicans) by this ham-handed anti-small d-democrtic treatment. As a defender of the Speaker throughout the year, even when he cleared the gallery on the day the budget passed, I was disgusted by his actions today. I begin to understand complaints Democrats have been mouthing all year. I had my problems with Democratic Speaker Terri Norelli from time to time in the past four years (as did O’Brien when he was in the minority), but she never did anything even coming close to the dictatorial and illegal tactics we witnessed today.

#JustEndorseAlreadyAndGetItOverWith

More than once, Dean Barker has castigated the New Hampshire Union Leader for building up Rick Perry in preparation for endorsing him in the New Hampshire presidential primary.

The New Hampshire Business Review provides more evidence, pointing out that a Politico column originally titled, “Is Rick Perry dumb?” was retitled when it ran on page A2 of the Union Leader. The Union Leader title? “It’s no accident: Perry ‘not just lucky, he’s good.’”

O’Brien’s Campaign Rhetoric and Legislative Record

Dean Barker compares state House Speaker O’Brien’s first legislative session with his campaign pledge to create jobs, educate our children and look out for our most vulnerable citizens.

“Creating jobs”: In the two months since the budget Speaker O’Brien crafted and championed became law, it has directly caused the loss of 1,376 mostly private sector, jobs.

“Educating our children”: The House of O’Brien has been particularly hostile to the education of children, pursuing a raft of bills that included: pushing a constitutional amendment to eliminate the state’s obligation to pay for schools; lowering the dropout age; abolishing kindergarten; eliminating educational public television, decimating Children In Need of Services; gutting the new bullying law; defining down what is an adequate education; and taking the least funded public college system in the country and cutting that funding in half.

“Looking out for our most vulnerable citizens”: … “The budget would cut $115 million from hospital reimbursements and would reduce funding for dozens of programs including domestic violence prevention, child-care subsidies, ServiceLink resource centers and community health centers. It eliminates mental health services for 7,000 people and eliminates services for children ordered by the court to get counseling.”

Bettencourt’s Hypocritical Plan to “Protect Our Children”

In response to the death of toddler Caylee Anthony and the televised trial of her mother, House Majority Leader D.J. Bettencourt announced he will introduce legislation “to close the hole in any laws that don’t adequately protect our children.”

Dean Barker puts the announcement in context with a state budget, passed by Bettencourt’s House majority, that dramatically reduces the number of at-risk children who will qualify for state social services.

Here’s something the TeeVee never “brought to the national consciousness” — what Bettencourt’s budget did to “protect our children.”

What will happen to the thousands of New Hampshire children that Majority Leader Bettencourt chose to let fall through the cracks?

[S]ome will get the help they need locally instead of through CHINS — to be paid for by your increased property tax bill. Others will fill our jails, expensively. Still others will go missing and unreported.

Rep. Notter: Black Death “Declined Naturally”

Dean tweets:

Becoming clear that Jeanine Notter is to the #nhhouse what Michelle Bachmann is to US Congress.

Case in point, Rep. Notter on HB 416, a bill to allow an exemption from immunizations for “conscientious beliefs”:

“The Black death was a terrible disease, there was never a shot for the black death and yet it declined naturally. Have you heard of that, the Black Death?”

For the record:

The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% – 60% of Europe’s population, reducing the world’s population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million in 1400. … The plague returned at various times, killing more people, until it left Europe in the 19th century.

Quote of the Day: The Struggle to True Equality

Over and over again in the testimony of those against repeal I heard courage. There were many stories shared, about sacrifice, about pain, about discrimination. Told of themselves, of their mothers, their children, their brothers, their friends. Stories about celebration and hope, too. In them you felt the collective struggle of the often difficult movement from second class citizen status to true equality.

While the testimony of those in support of marriage often moved me to tears, Rep. Bates’ opening remarks sent a chill down my spine, especially when he, after questioning from a member of the Judiciary Committee, calmly and confidently declared that the majority rules even in matters of the rights of minorities. I fear any man or woman with the level of supreme surety and apparent absence of self-reflection I witnessed today in him. History is littered with the wreckage of that kind of mindset.

— Dean Barker, on today’s State House marriage equality hearing

Remembering Christa McAuliffe

Dean Barker:

I do not think a Christa McAuliffe, once an inspiration to all of America, is possible today. Not because of who she was. But because of who we have become.