A Senate is typically the single biggest barrier to prosperity in government. State Senators are few in number, lobbied heavily, prone to moderate their positions and easily influenced by donors.
So when I reviewed AFP New Hampshire’s 2018 Legislative Scorecard and found no A+ grades and only two A’s in a Republican majority State Senate, I was not the least bit surprised.
The AFP score card is based on 12 key votes on legislation that impacts,
“free markets, … taxes, spending, healthcare, education choice, worker freedom, regulation, free speech, property rights, and ending cronyism.”
Bread and Butter, platform issues. Things that should be easy for a “Republican” to get right and every modern Democrat to get wrong.
Every NH Democrat in the Senate got an F from AFP-NH but they had a lot of company from the “right.”
Jeb Bradley, Sharon Carson, Bill Gannon, Jim Gray, Dan Innis, John Reagan, And Ruth Ward all Republicans, all received an F.
Kevin Avard, Regina Birdsell, and Harold French scored a D. Chuck Morse got a C, Bob Guida got a B.
Only Gary Daniels and Andy Sanborn received an A.
No one in the New Hampshire Senate got an A+.
Bread and Butter, platform issues. Things that should be easy for a “Republican” to get right and every modern Democrat to get wrong.
No, the State Senate was not a total waste. They did a lot of good things. But they did a lot of bad things that a GOP majority should never have done. And a best-case assessment of the product of their legislative labors is this.
A Democrat majority would have been a lot worse, but Republicans so underperformed in the NH Senate as to make that reality hard to appreciate. The GOP majority in the State Senate appears to have squandered their advantage.
And appearances matter.
The Senate bing-spent the surplus, pushed cronyism with green jobs bailouts, erased women’s privacy rights, kept the Medicare scam afloat, and passed an anti-first amendment gag order on pastors and therapists, for starters.
Things we expect from Democrats who with the support of Republicans advanced a lot of garbage that should have died on the table.
Now, Republican voters need to ask what more they should be doing to influence their State Senators because the Concord Swamp is clearly winning on issues Republicans have no business supporting.
Not one A+ and only two A’s, one B and one C.
If we can’t find better Republicans, we need to do more to make the ones we have better because Democrats will never listen and with them in power, even marginal gains will be erased as the first order of business.
