If you’ve missed it or are a glutton for punishment (as opposed to a gluten for punishment, which is what my spellchecker just tried to do to my pre-editing fat-fingered spelling of the former), HB1002 has gone around and come around after a valiant but failed effort to kill it on the floor of the NH House.
Those seeking to pass the bill would love to wrangle some number of reps to support a Rube Goldbergina Final Solution whose goal remains the same. Punish everyone for the misdeeds of an alleged few to benefit “The State” while embedding a deliberate decline of government transparency and accountability into the law.
This is a bad bill. How bad is it? In a casual pre-zoom meeting conversation late last week, I framed the problem again in what I hoped was a new way (to review my past efforts to undermine the passage of this crap wagon of a bill, look here). If there are a handful of near-do-wells making right-to-know requests with legitimate Cloward-Piven-esqe malice, what sane Republican would take the same approach to access to public documents as Democrats do to the right to self-defense?
To Democrats, every shooting, even the ones that the FBI does not set up, is not just an excuse to punish law-abiding people but a call to action. Gun owners, in total, must pay a price for the actions of the disorderly few. By making it difficult or impossible to exercise the right, you give the government a power that puts law-abiding citizens at risk – not just from those disorderly few but the very tyranny of government 2A exists to dissuade.
That’s HB1002.
Any added cost, fee, fine, or tax to access public records makes the mere idea of holding your local or state government accountable less likely. It limits the pool of those able to afford it. It encourages the government to make accountability less likely by ensuring it is unaffordable.
HB1002′ disarms’ citizens who might otherwise request public documents, discouraging civic involvement or engagement.
HB1002 is the information elitism bill, and making carve-outs for the media (including GraniteGrok) does not make it better, and if you don’t think it will be abused, you are lying to yourself and everyone else.
Would it not be a better use of our time to address the disorderly few towns that leverage government power and the taxpayer purse to hide the people’s business from the people than to find ways to encourage more towns to follow their bad example?
