We have two bits of excellent news for Granite Staters fighting the good fight – two bills you’ve all been battling have either died in committee or crawled out on their last legs, most certainly to die unless someone screws something up – always an option this session.
HB1002, an effort to attach a tax to requests for public documents (91a to us, RTKs, or FOIAs) to others, was resuscitated only to end its days this session in interim study. The committee equivalent of “we don’t have the votes; it’ll never pass, but we still want it,” so let’s set it over here and see about taking a deeper dive until the next session when numbers might be more favorable.
Overall, this is good news, but keep your eyes open. The advocates for making government transparency unaffordable really want this. They tried very hard to find a trigger that would squeak it through. We made more than a few very good cases on these pages about why it is a bad idea (if you need some for the eventual resurrection).
The other good news is HB1610, which (requires all students to participate in standardized statewide assessments) would hijack homeschooled and religious school kids and their curriculums. If you’d like a detailed look at why that’s a bad idea, Ann Marie Banfield has had a few things to say about it here. The short of it is, if you have to pass the assessment, you need to teach to that, and if it’s crap (it is), then crap is what gets taught. It also opens the door to more of the same until there are not many points in trying to save your kid’s ability to learn from the Education Industrial Complex and its freaky gender cult.
That’s the point. Find a backdoor to ruin school choice. And it’s not dead-dead. While HB1610 came out of committee Inexpedient to Legislate and landed on the consent calendar, it could be pulled off. Some debate and a floor vote later, and it’s still alive unless a motion to reconsider follows and that fails.
Democrats might try to save it, so Republicans need to stop that and then kill it for the rest of the session.
You can’t trust the Senate to do the hard work, and Governor Sununu is probably busy planning his 2028 run for President. Haley may have dropped out, but His Excellency kissed that campaign’s ass so hard that all of her RINO donors are sure to have taken notice (which I’m certain was what he was after all along).
And he might sign any number of bad bills to piss off Republicans, who’ve given him a hard time.
Kill it in the House.
As you were.
