Thursday 21 March.
Regular Senate session. Not as
bad as last week, we only had 40 bills to deal with. We managed to get done by 3 PM. Which was
good, I was able to get up to Lancaster
in time for the Coos County Republican committee meeting. That ran until 9:30
PM and I didn’t get home until 10:30PM. Long day.
Senate session got
off to a good start by passing the Fast Track (consent) calendar of 13 bills in
one quick voice vote, no debate. One surprising
exception. A fairly harmless bill SB 42
to declare applejack as the official New Hampshire
state spirit was pulled of the Fast Track calendar and thrown onto the regular
calendar. Usually this kind of bill
declaring state flowers, state birds, state just about anything are quickly
passed because it makes their sponsors happy and nobody else cares. Applejack was not so lucky. The Democrats debated this bill for a half an
hour at the end of the day, speaking about the hazards of alcohol, the case for
New England rum, and a bunch of other trivia. Total waste of time.
Now for the main
event, the regular calendar. We opened
with SB10, the minimum wage bill.
Introduced by Senate President Donna Soucy. Jeb Bradley spoke eloquently against it. This
is a job killer. Up here in Littleton,
far up in the North Woods, the retailers are already automating in anticipation
of a $15 minimum wage. McDonalds, Applebee’s;
Wal-Mart, and Lowes are pushing us customers to learn how to run the bar codes
thru the scanner. Kiss that entry level
jobs goodbye. SB 10 backs the minimum
wage down to $12 an hour, but it is still a job killer. Democrats rammed it thru on a roll call
14-10. That’s all the Democrats voting
yes and all the Republicans voting no. We spent a half an hour on this
turkey. Maybe we can get the Governor to
veto it.
Then my bill SB
150 to allow all out of state health insurance companies to sell in New
Hampshire was voted Inexpedient To Legislate on another roll call vote
14-10. Democrats claimed that the
insurance department would not be able to control them, that the out of staters
could offer lower cost policies that lacked some of the mandatory coverages of
Obamacare and some other stuff. The way
to lower the costs of healthcare is competition. Right now we have only TWO insurance
companies licensed to sell in New Hampshire. Not much competition there.
And we revived
casino gambling SB310. Three fellow
senators urged me to vote to revive it and so I did, reluctantly. It got
Ought to Pass 13-11. Probably the house
will vote it down. This bill has been
kicking around for 10 years that I know of.
It always promises fantastic tax revenues. And it gets voted down every time (so
far).
We have been
kicking a lot of cans down the road. We
have tabled 16 bills before this session started. We tabled 10 more on Thursday. Let’s hope that table is strong enough to
hold up under load. It is not clear to
me what will happen to these tabled bills.
They might be allowed to die quietly and out of sight. They might be waiting for the finance
committee to decide if we can afford them. Stay tuned.
And we voted SB 309
which restores the stabilization grants to state schools Ought To Pass
24-0. Stabilization grants are an
obscure school funding deal, going far back in history. However, the schools in district 1 (my
district) need the money badly. So do
plenty of other districts. I said
exactly that during the floor debate. Unfortunately,
after voting OTP, the democrats moved to table the bill. If it ever gets off the table it will do
good.
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