The New Hampshire House is Back In Session
With Credit to House Speaker Steve Shurleff and Representative David Muse
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought change to everyone across the Granite State. Our lives are different than they were last February. Your state representatives have been busy making sure you all were connected to the agencies you needed and were receiving the information and benefits you needed but we always knew we would want to get back to the legislative work you elected us to do. This proved to be no easy task. In the 200-plus years of the New Hampshire House we had never held a remote meeting.
The truth is by not meeting--or by refusing to take up the legislation that’s on our plates we’d be losing far more than just a year’s worth of busy work. We would also be losing the confidence of the people who sent us to Concord to do inessential job.
Between January and March, many citizens braved bad weather and sacrificed personal time to travel up to Concord to tell those of us in both the House and the Senate why specific changes in our law were important to Them. Some told us about losing children to cancer caused by chemical contamination. Others tried to help us understand what it’s like having to choose between a paycheck and the needs of a family member who is ill or dying because our state has no paid family and medical leave program. A few even tried to educate us on complex problems that often fly under most people’s radar, like what to do with the mountains of trash we create as landfills near capacity and many items become more difficult to recycle.
To most of the legislators I know, our bills represent much more than pieces of paper or ways for political parties to keep score. They represent real opportunities to solve real problems for real people. They also represent ways to chip away at long-simmering issues, to build consensus during a divisive period in our history, and to inch us forward towards real—if sometimes frustratingly slow—change
We have been sure to take things step by step so we can be confident the process is still fair and the public can still participate. To date, the meetings have been successful with House committees taking up bills and voting on them in much the same way as if we were still in the State House together. Our next step is for the House to get together a full session.
This is no small task.
The Constitution mandates that we meet in person and with 400 members, the New Hampshire House is the third-largest legislative body in the world. With the ongoing risk of COVID-19, that means we cannot meet in Representatives Hall. This will be the first time since the Civil War that the House has met outside of Representatives Hall but we know it is what we must do to get our work done.
We plan to meet to finish much of the work we started this session and pass important bills that will help Granite Staters during this crisis and better prepare for a potential second surge of the virus.
New Hampshire should be proud of its representatives from both parties for stepping up during this crisis and should be proud of the House for adapting to a new challenge in its long-vaunted history. I am hoping for many, the House returning to session will help make life feel more normal again – if only for a few moments.