Op-Ed: What I've learned in my first term at the NH State House

It’s been an interesting first term in the house to put it mildly. I’ve gotten to see how things get done, or more often than not don’t get done, in one of the largest legislative bodies in the world. I thought it would be worth taking a bit of time to collect my thoughts on what I’ve learned so far.

The first thing is, no one really grows out of high school level grudges. Not that it’s terribly unexpected in politics, but navigating personal issues can often take precedence over the actual policy being debated. The same exact bill can float or sink depending on whether the committee chair dislikes the sponsor or the party they’re affiliated with.

The second thing is, when you go far enough left or right, you sometimes end up forming a circle. Things like mandatory minimums, marijuana legalization, data privacy, and individual liberty. A majority of members on both sides vote with their party over 90% of the time, but bipartisan alliances might not look like what you might expect. 

You make strange bedfellows as they say, even with people who vote against you on every other bill. I believe policies should be considered by their merits, independently of who is proposing them, even if that isn’t what happens most of the time. One time I was told that even if my floor amendment cured cancer that it wouldn’t pass. That amendment did end up passing anyway, but the point remains.

Plenty of bills are actually pet peeves of state reps, not that it’s always a bad thing in the case of something like ambulance overcharging, but it can end up creating hundreds of bills that may not have needed legislation in the first place. The problem is that many bills are shaped by legislators' personal experiences, which often aren't particularly representative of the issues most Granite Staters are facing.

At one point some representatives thought we should create a Renter’s Caucus since renting costs are rising and there are many laws that apply differently to renters compared to homeowners. That was until we realized there weren’t enough renters in the entire house to form a caucus. I would hazard a guess that there are actually far more landlords than there are tenants in the legislature.

When you think about who you’d expect to have the time, connections, and financial capacity to take a good chunk of the year off of work to campaign and serve in the house for $200 a term, it makes sense that many legislators are wealthy or retired. Most of them aren’t facing the cost of childcare or college loans, and so the laws being proposed and passed end up not addressing the true issues facing working class people.

It’s an issue without an easy solution, but one proposal that I believe would be a decent start is treating serving at the statehouse similar to jury duty in terms of civil service. Basically, if you are a working person and get elected to the statehouse, your employer couldn’t retaliate against you for taking unpaid time off to attend voting days. 

Plenty of well-qualified and passionate people aren’t able to serve because of this very real risk. I believe it’s a disservice to our constituents if we were prevented from voting on important legislation due to a work obligation, and this reform would allow more young and working people to serve in the statehouse without fear of losing their jobs. HB1663 was proposed this year to make that very change and was voted down in the House.

There are many things I thought I might do when I first got elected. I had ideas for lead poisoning prevention bills that ended up getting scrapped despite lead poisoning being on the rise in New Hampshire. Even the smallest reforms had been voted down in the first year, so there was no hope of passing anything comprehensive this year. Idealism met reality, so I had to learn to adapt in order to make real change.

I never thought I would get into politics to begin with, and it’s not something I want to do for the rest of my life. It’s messy, it’s interesting, it’s frustrating, and yet hopeful all the same. I don’t want to give into the notion that this is how it will always be, because democracies exist to change and reform themselves. It’s not often a smooth path, and there may be times of steep backsliding on many fronts, but as long as we have the choice to elect our representatives, there will be opportunities to improve.

As for money in politics, that’s a bigger can of worms than I have time to get into today.