Budget Day in Concord.

Senate Session, 6 June.  Budget day.  Plus 200 year anniversary of the Concord state house.  We had a small army of former Senators in the visitor’s gallery and the senate president introduced each one by name.  And a short joint session where nice things were said about New Hampshire history and the progress women have made in politics over the years.  No Fast Track calendar this week.  We ran thru the 8 bills on the regular calendar, mostly on roll calls, 14-10, all the Democrats voting for and all the Republicans voting against.  That got us up to lunch, sandwiches and cookies on the lawn outside.  After lunch we started on the budget and didn’t finish it until midnight.  The budget comes in two parts, part 1 (200 pages) and part 2 (180 pages).  Over than style changes it was/is not clear to me what the difference between them is.  Transparent they are not. Would you believe opaque?   No index or table of contents.  I never found any totals of spending or tax revenues for the whole state, or even of the various departments of state government.  I have been told that restoration of 100% stabilization grants is in there, somewhere, but I never found it.  The budget is started by the governor, who asks all his department heads how much money they need.  This list of goodies then goes to the house, which modifies it to suit them selves.  Then it comes to the senate and we make a lot of changes, or we try to. 

    We submitted 20 amendments.  The Democrats voted each one down, 14-10.  My amendments, one to fund renovation of the Hitchner building in Littleton to support White Mountain community college expansion there, and the other for expansion of the Coos County Family Health Services clinic in Berlin, both perished on party line roll call votes 14-10.  Anyhow, that makes this budget a Democrat budget.  Lots of new taxes.  Lots of expensive goodies like a 1.5% COLA for state retirees.   

   It was after 10 PM by the time our last amendment was voted down.  Then we got into a complex, and amazing bit of parliamentary quibbling than ran on till midnight.  We had originally voted to “divide” the budget into stuff we liked and stuff we didn’t like.  Senate president Donna Soucy had ruled the budget part 2 “divisible”.   In a voice vote the Democrats overruled the senate president (one of their own party!) and declared part 2 indivisible.  Very unusual to slap down your own senate president like that.   Which meant we could only vote the whole thing up or down, whereas we wanted to vote for the stuff we liked and against the stuff we didn’t like.  So we called a recess and waited for the Democrats desire to go home to override their desire to score an obscure political point.  It didn’t work, and at midnight we finally held a roll call vote to approve budget part 2.  All the Democrats voted for and all the Republicans voted against.  So the Democrat budget is off to the governor’s desk.