On Friday, Rep. Michael Moffett (R-Loudon) defended himself against a “Hit Piece” from Julie Smith regarding HB-1002 (now law), the “Right-to-know tax.”
Numerous Groksters submit Right-to-know requests and copy the text of them here, either to show how to talk tough to office-holders, to show how to burden office-holders to distract them from eating out the substance of their constituents, or simply to establish activist street-cred. If the agency produces the data, what will the requestor do with it? Probably just write another article with more specifics.
One contributor has fashioned a petition to the state Supreme Court, patching together phrases from laws and our founding documents to claim the court is required to ban the use of mechanical ballot readers. Given that the labor-saving practice has gone on for decades with the full understanding and awareness of our elected legislators, and that there is no one being denied constitutional rights except those who believe that the only way we could have lost the election in the year of the Covid misery is through foreign hacking of computers, the suit is absurd.
Right-to-know requests designed to require reams or megabytes of response, like assembling a hundred activists in the lobby of Town Hall so that no one can pass, are citizen sabotage, even if you have the right to perform those specific acts in isolation. (Contrast specific requests that lay out the motivation, such as the recent one by Ann Marie Banfield. That was not a fishing expedition.)
Sabotage has a warm place in my heart, as forcing clerks to spend days on a nuisance Right-to-know request is better than most of the things they would otherwise be doing. But it is neither the way government should work nor the way to convince the average citizen that your faction is sensible enough to influence the next generation of office-holders. Organizing a Queers for Palestine demonstration in Chicago to impede Democrats from entering their convention site seems disorderly and senseless, no matter how many like-minded activists are cheering their approval. It is a fringe tactic. Define yourself with it, and you will be seen as a fringe movement.
Surely, Right-to-know requests needed limits. Groksters, ironically, have taken the lead in proving that. Surely, the answer is not to let the municipality set its own price. But HB-1002 has limits on that as well.
Julie’s article follows a pattern of Groksters asserting: You are dead to me because you voted the wrong way on House Bill Whatever. Ed Mosca wrote a series in 2022, and Spec Bowers has a series this year, though he uses the seemingly scientific approach of limiting the study to Reps who voted differently when 80% of Republicans voted the same. But it’s still cherry-picking. No Rep gets a 100% rating from every group, and you can always get a list of bad votes and extrapolate that the Rep is a bad person. No sale; I’m going to go by the batting average, not the called strike three he took the day I was in the stands. Of course, I may withhold my vote if the Rep went the wrong way on the bill I care the most about, but I’d hardly suggest that everyone else do too because my values are not exactly your values.
Julie mentions Scott Wallace (R-Danville-Fremont-Brentwood) as another vote for HB-1002 who’s being primaried. I am in his district. We discussed HB-1002 briefly, and I’m voting for him anyway. Despite that vote, he is 98% at NH Liberty; his opponent was 88%-92% when she was in the House, and Scott has seniority and committee titles we ought not to discard.
On a tangent, Emily Phillips had a masterful mailing recently contrasting her and her opponent, Senator Bill Gannon, by vote rating. Emily rates about 95% with five conservative/libertarian groups (99.7% at NH Liberty); her opponent is consistently in the large Republican herd that, while better than any Senate Democrat, is worth 62%. Emily took heat last Tuesday in Brentwood for a vote on a specific bill: the one to require ICE to give a day’s notice before setting up a border checkpoint. And she gave the heat right back; federal rules say that the “border” is 100 miles wide (stretching down to Laconia and Lebanon) and the driver’s duty could extend to producing identity documents you don’t keep in the car. “I will always put the liberty interest first.”
The point is that, when a good Rep. casts a seemingly bad vote, there may be another side to the story. Talk to the Rep. and find out what it is, and you can inform us and not merely chest-thump.
Moffett correctly notes that Julie asks the reader to perform the research that, if Julie had done it, would have made her post coherent. It is not coherent. It goes scorched-earth on the ratings groups themselves. And the thesis, that based on one vote, we should turn out Rep. Moffett for a first-termer who “has no record”, is outrageous.
