Never A Dull Moment In Concord

   Governor John Lynch was a very busy man last week with his veto pen, negating nearly a dozen mostly-contentious House-pushed bills at least temporarily. As Republican Bill O’Brien and his cohorts continue their attempt to change New Hampshire into one of those far away states that we’d read about in the past and thank God that we don’t live in, it’s now even more incumbent on Granite State voters to keep an eye on what the conservative House and Senate in Concord have been doing to our citizens for the past 1 1/2 years. An eviction notice for most of these regressives couldn’t come any sooner.

   Tea Party-sponsored bills that Lynch vetoed that have nothing whatsoever to do with either cutting our taxes or advancing New Hampshire’s quality of life include some of the usual suspects from the right-wing: tightening the Voter Registration law re: student IDs, as the Republican Party continues to push the canard that voter fraud is rampant; another assault on New Hampshire’s already financially-ravaged public schools by allowing millions of dollars of tax credits to go to businesses that contribute to organizations that give scholarships to both private (read religious) and home-schooled students; designating the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee to oversee all state employee union bargaining (wonder whose side they’ll take?); a new anti-abortion law that would require two doctors instead of one to certify that a woman’s life was endangered before performing the already federally-banned partial-birth abortion, along with other initiatives. Concord lawmakers will be meeting this week in an attempt to override as many of these vetoes as they can, and they undoubtedly will be successful with at least some of them.   

   With the November elections looming the likely Republican nominee Ovide Lamontagne’s ideology and views should be closely examined by every voter who wants to keep New Hampshire the state we’ve lived in and loved for years. An unchecked Lamontagne/O’Brien team in power would bring enormous social changes here that would adversely affect entire blocks of people including the elderly, students, women, and union workers. Lamontagne is already on record as advocating a Concord takeover of Medicare which would disastrously reduce benefits, as well as the defunding of Planned Parenthood and ending as many Roe vs. Wade statutes as possible to cheer the anti-choice crowd. He also aims to cut the state minimum wage (current federal level for young workers being the paltry sum of $4.25 per hour) and, of course, outlaw gay marriage. This puts him right in line with the new breed of radical Republicans that have roiled so many of our states on mostly social change levels since their power ascension in 2011.

   We have been the "Live Free Or Die" state for decades, successfully espousing a philosophy that enables its citizens to maintain their own individualism regarding the management of their lives, as long as laws aren’t broken. We are now being led back to the 1800s by many of these new Tea Party legislators, most of whom don’t compromise and work with their fellow Republicans any better than they do with congressional Democrats. The two guilty parties for this travesty include many of the Republican/Independent voters of Nov. 2, 2010 who simply voted for the (R) on the ballot without first checking out what type of (R) they were voting for, as well as all the Democrats who stayed home, allowing our state government to be kidnaped by a well-organized, intractable Tea Party faction that many members of their own party can’t stand. Granite State voters repeat that process this November at our peril.