The Fortnightly Rant for July 1, 2011, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 255, No. 20, posted on Tuesday, August 8, 2011.
New Hampshire’s Republican Party, given an indisputable mandate last November by the voters, is returning that favor by doing its best to wreck the state completely. If they haven’t quite succeeded yet, it’s not for lack of trying. They are making great strides.
Rather than run the risk of solving some real problems — inadequate school funding and ruinous property taxes immediately spring to mind — the state’s Republican leaders are focusing on non-problems, giving themselves the opportunity to proffer solutions which make matters worse.
Finding ourselves in a bewilderingly target-rich environment, we have simply clutched at a few examples almost at random. We urge the reader not to assume that these are the worst — only that they were closest to hand.
You Want to What?
Perhaps the clearest example is SB 129, requiring would-be voters to display a government-issued photo ID every time they go to the polls. SB 129 would purportedly solve the problem of voter fraud, which the GOP claims is a grave threat to the Republic. Voter fraud is to Republicans as Bigfoot is to cryptozoologists — they know it’s out there, they just can’t prove it.
New Hampshire Secretary of State for Life™ William Gardner scrutinized the 2008 election for possible registration fraud among new voters who proved their qualifications without using photo ID. Out of 76,755 new registrations he found just 201 — one-quarter of one percent — who used alternative IDs. Verification letters were sent to all 201 of those voters. Ten letters came back marked “undeliverable,” indicating possible fraud. The Attorney General then investigated those ten cases and reported that in all of them, the subjects had “registered and voted … in conformance with New Hampshire law” and that “no fraudulent registration or voting occurred regarding the subject-registered voters.”
So, after some unknown expenditure by both the Secretary of State’s office and the Attorney General’s office, we discovered yet again that the problem was nonexistent. That, in the minds of Republicans, called for a solution. And sure enough they found one that would discourage marginal voters (read “Democrats”) from registering — also at some additional but unknown expense to the taxpayer.
Non-problem un-solved!
Dumbing (Further) Down
People who were so careless as to have had children in the mid-1990s now face an ominous prospect: putting those former rug rats through college.
With the cost of a college education inflating like Newt Gingrich’s ego, Republicans in Concord took bold and decisive action — to make things worse. Rather than invest in the state’s future by increasing aid to the University of New Hampshire, they slashed it in half.
It was a heroic gesture, but if the GOP was trying to lower New Hampshire’s ranking for support of higher education, they failed — we were already at the bottom.
We’re Not Doctors, But …
In their fervor to get the government off the backs of their consituents — specifically, in this case, teenage girls — House Republicans overturned Governor John Lynch’s veto of a bill requiring parental notification at least 48 hours before a minor receives an abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, or abuse.
Rep. Warren Groen, R-Rochester, justified his vote to intercede between unfortunate teenage girls and their doctors on the grounds that rape was “no excuse.”
Speaking of women’s health issues, that quaint vestige of Puritan days that we call the Executive Council voted recently against a contract that would have provided funding for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. Sixteen thousand women will now find it harder, if not impossible, to get screened for breast and cervical cancer, among other things.
Executive Councilor Dan St. Hilaire, a Republican, explained to New Hampshire Public Radio that he voted against the contract because he objected to “[a]ctually funding an agency that performs the actual event.”
NHPR explained that by “actual event,” St. Hilaire meant “abortion,” which, last time we checked, was a legal procedure. Apparently his objection is so pure and complete it extends to uttering the word abortion.
St. Hilaire’s fastidiousness notwithstanding, none of the money in the contract would have paid for abortions.
We have not independently confirmed it, but the evidence suggests that neither Groen or St. Hilaire is a woman.
Liberty and a .38 for All
It cannot be said that the Republicans are bent on disenfranchising women altogether.
Robert Kingsbury, an eighty-five year old former Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Reserves, Chapter Leader of the John Birch Society, and State Representative for Belknap County District Four, is sponsoring a bill that would “require the courts to give every woman who gets a restraining order a gun and box of ammunition and provide her with instruction in shooting.”
Kingsbury also wants to help improve the lot of local fishermen — by encouraging offshore drilling. Oil wells in ocean waters, he says, “mean ten times more fish for the commercial fisherman.”
Right to Work for Less
On May 25th, with General Court attendance at its peak, House Speaker William O’Brien tried to override Governor Lynch’s veto of HB 474, aka the Right to Work for Less. Finding that he didn’t have the required two-thirds majority, O’Brien asked Republican members unwilling to vote with him to get lost temporarily, thereby improving his odds.
The Speaker could not convince enough members of his own party to stoop that low. The veto stands — so far.
O’Brien said on June 22nd that he would wait until summer was over before making another attempt at an override. So, between now and Labor Day, Democrats can presumably trust that he will not pull an override bill out of his sleeve, even if some day he finds that his cronies are present in force, and the opposition’s numbers are few. If Democrats do trust him, they’re bigger fools than we think.
The Origins of Super-Bully
Since we seem to be living in a comic book world, with Republican leader Billy O’Brien playing the role of Super-Bully, we thought we should look for an origin story. O’Brien’s life fits the pattern eerily well.
Comic book villains often emerge from some sort of metamorphosis. An ex-Democrat, O’Brien made political contributions to John Kerry, Al Gore, Mary Landrieu, and the New Hampshire Democratic Party totaling $2,300 between 1996 and 2002. Then, he changed. Between 2006 and 2010, he gave $2,650 to Republicans and Republican causes.
Villains often come from weird, exotic locales. O’Brien came [Insert dramatic pause….] from Massachusetts.
Do we have any evidence of a nefarious criminal mentor? No doubt about it. During the early 1990s, O’Brien was partner in the law firm of former Massachusetts House Speaker and convicted felon Tom Finneran.
Which is not to say that O’Brien has broken any laws. The way he operates, he does wrong legally.