House Republican leaders are proposing a rule change giving committees the power to table legislation using a supermajority vote. Tabling bills in committee is standard operating procedure the vast majority of legislatures, but the proposal has sparked an outpouring of opposition in Granite State politics.
New Hampshire has the largest all-volunteer legislature in the Western world. Some of them complain that the legislative sessions are getting ever longer, making it harder for civic-minded Granite Staters to participate. One problem is the State House mandate that every bill must receive a public hearing, even fringe legislation with little support.
House Majority Leader Jason Osborne (R-Auburn) has proposed a rule change that would help speed the legislative process. It has the support of Speaker of the House Sherm Packard (R-Londonderry) and Deputy Majority Leader Joe Sweeney (R-Salem).
Sweeney told NHJournal the debate is “overblown.”
“This rule change – once a bipartisan solution of both caucuses until the Democrats failed to take control of the chamber – would allow 75 percent of an entire committee’s membership to move on from bills that are not ready for primetime and don’t deserve a public hearing. This rule would rarely get used, and even if it is, no bill will become law in New Hampshire without multiple public hearings – the highlight of our volunteer legislature.”
But the idea of allowing a bill to die without a hearing is anathema to some in New Hampshire politics, including activists on the political right.
On Monday, Cornerstone Action released a statement condemning the proposed rule change, labeling it as “an attack on bills heard in committees that often lack fair representation on certain issues.”
“This rule change is an attempt to undermine the longstanding tradition in our legislature that ensures that every bill receives a public hearing and that Granite State citizens are heard,” the group added.
And in an op-ed for NHJournal, former state Rep. Melissa Blasek writes, “The New Hampshire House of Representatives has long prided itself on being the most accessible and responsive legislative body in the country. This proposed rule change betrays that legacy.”
Blasek is now executive director of RebuildNH.
Data from the National Conference of State Legislatures show New Hampshire’s current rules make it an outlier. Only two other states, Colorado and North Dakota, mandate public hearings on every piece of legislation.
And even with the new rule, a single New Hampshire representative can move to bring a bill tabled by a committee onto the House floor with a simple majority vote.
Critics of the current rules point to the time it takes to hold hearings on bills that have no chance of passage.
“We are going to have trouble getting members to sit on a committee, and it’s going to get more and more difficult if we don’t find some way to reduce the number of bills,” Packard told the Rules Committee at a meeting last month.
Left unsaid during the committee’s Dec. 17 meeting — but frequently referenced in off-the-record discussions with NHJournal — is the trend of using bills from the political fringes with little support to embarrass an entire party. Usually the GOP, though Democrats have been caught by it, too.
For example, a 2023 bill introduced by former state Rep. David Testerman (R-Franklin) calling for a statewide 15-day abortion ban, was rejected by the Judiciary Committee, but brought to the House floor.
The bill was so extreme even Cornerstone Action opposed it. Republican Gov. Chris Sununu said the bill belonged “in the crazy pile.” The GOP-controlled House defeated it in a crushing 363-11 vote, but the bill still caused headaches for Granite State Republicans as it generated national headlines.
”New Hampshire Republicans propose ’15-day’ abortion ban,” NBC News claimed in its Dec. 8, 2023, headline. Granite State Democrats claimed the bill reflected the views of the New Hampshire GOP.
“Extreme Republicans want to strip Granite Staters of their right to an abortion,” Democratic candidate for governor Joyce Craig wrote in a social media post at the time. “Their new 15-day abortion ban is dangerous, cruel and one of the most extreme in the entire country.”
And during an appearance on MSNBC, Rep. Alexis Simpson (D-Exeter) echoed that view. “Here in New Hampshire in the legislature, we really are a microcosm of the extremism that we’ve seen nationwide from Republicans,” she said.
Simpson is now the leader of the House Democratic Caucus.
Simpson, who serves on the House Rules Committee, did not respond to a request from NHJournal for comment. When the rule change came up for a vote at last month’s meeting, Simpson sided with her fellow Democrats in a party-line vote against it.
During the House Judiciary Committee’s Jan. 10, 2024, public hearing on the 15-day abortion ban legislation, state Rep. Mary Hakken-Phillips (D-Hanover) appeared to give up the political game.
“Let’s be clear — passage of HB 1248 will accelerate the quickening pace of the voting age electorate in New Hampshire that runs, not walks, away from the Republican party for either more independent or more Democratic candidates who will protect independent medical decision-making and the right to reproductive healthcare choice,” she said.
The Judiciary Committee then voted 19-1 to slap the bill with an “inexpedient to legislate” label. The lone holdout was Testerman. Yet even if Testerman had switched his vote, the current rules mean the bill would have advanced to the House floor regardless.
That’s what happened in 2022, when a constitutional amendment backed by a handful of fringe libertarians was rejected unanimously in committee but still made it to the House floor with a nearly unanimous vote of House Democrats — who then denounced Republicans for supporting the legislation.
“The fact that this bill was even debated on the floor is a disturbing window into the current state of the Republican Party,” said then-House Minority Leader David Cote (D-Nashua), who had voted to bring the bill to the floor just minutes earlier.
(All but 17 Republicans voted to table the bill rather than allow it to reach the floor. Only one Democrat joined them.)
With 221 Republicans in the 400-member House, several political insiders told NHJournal on background that lawmakers can expect to see more bills hit the public hearing “crazy pile” if the Packard-backed rule change fails to advance. And Packard has said if the rule change doesn’t work, “we can get rid of it.”
But there may be enough Republican opposition from the Freedom Caucus wing of the party to block it, particularly if Democrats remain united against the change.
Carla Gericke, former president of the libertarian Free State Project, posted on Twitter X that “having a hearing on every bill is an NH tradition.”
Gericke tagged several Republicans in her comment, including House Majority Leader Jason Osborne (R-Auburn), who serves on the House Rules Committee.
“Y’all aren’t planning to go full evil, I hope?” Gericke wrote.
