The New Hampshire Liberty Alliance (the “NHLA”), founded in 2003, is a non-partisan coalition working to increase individual freedom in New Hampshire, by monitoring bills in the legislative sessions and encouraging private charity, a civil society, and citizen involvement.
The NHLA reviews liberty-sensitive bills in each legislative session. Bills are evaluated based on their effects on civil liberties, personal responsibility, property rights, accountability, constitutionality, affordability, regulation, fiscal impact, and taxation. From this evaluation process, it publishes a weekly handout called The Gold Standard, distributed to members of the House of Representatives and Senate prior to their votes, to try to give them an understanding of whether a given bill is pro- or anti-liberty.
The Gold Standard reports then form the foundation for the NHLA’s annual Liberty Rating, a report card by which Representatives and Senators are “scored.” The Liberty Rating is based on pro-liberty and anti-liberty votes (typically via roll call votes) and their impact on the State of New Hampshire. Pro-liberty votes protect individual freedom of choice and personal responsibility, recognize the superiority of freedom over coercion, respect the citizen’s right to self-government, promote good government, and recognize the value of voluntary economic decisions. Anti-liberty votes replace self-governance with interventionist ownership, assume agencies backed by force are superior to voluntary choices backed by personal accountability, and assume a better economy can be designed by a central authority that compels communities to pay for policies people may not willingly support.
The voting scores and grades for the 2023 legislative session were announced at the NHLA annual Liberty Dinner held recently. And the numerical voting scores and grades for every State Representative and State Senator appear on the NHLA website. Grades range from A+ to CT (constitutional threat).
No Senators, but 103 Representatives, were rated CT. A “CT” grade is described as “considered unfaithful to their oath to uphold the New Hampshire Constitution and the principles of liberty.”
The following are the numerical voting scores and grades for the State. First are the NH State Representatives from Belknap County, the notional home of the ‘Grok:
[An “Incomplete” grade overrides a letter grade if 50% or more of scored votes were missed due to absenteeism, incomplete term or otherwise missing roll call votes.]
And the following is the listing of scores of the State Senators covering Belknap County:
Note that the highest-rated State Senator in the entire state was Keith Murphy, with a score of 69.0 and a grade of B-.
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