Is there something in the water in Concord? Even by the 21st-century standards of weird, offensive state legislative wackiness, New Hampshire’s Republican delegation stands out.
First you had Republican state Rep. Harry Accornero and Republican state Rep. Susan DeLemus going full-birther, demanding that President Barack Obama be removed from the state ballot because they have secret knowledge that his birth certificate is fake — throwing a crazy tantrum when the state’s election commission rejected their proposal.
Then you had Republicans in the state introducing a bill to require all legislation to cite the Magna Carta:
All members of the general court proposing bills and resolutions addressing individual rights or liberties shall include a direct quote from the Magna Carta which sets forth the article from which the individual right or liberty is derived.
New Hampshire Republicans followed that with a proposal to prevent police from protecting domestic abuse victims. As Marie Diamond reported for Think Progress:
Since the 1970s, New Hampshire police have operated under a progressive policy for handling domestic violence cases that has saved countless lives. Under current law the presumption is that an arrest will be made when police observe evidence of abuse. They have a large degree of discretion and don’t need to witness the assault firsthand or obtain a legal warrant before they can separate the alleged attacker from his victim.
… House Bill 1581 would turn the clock back 40 years to an age when a police officer could not make an arrest in a domestic violence case without first getting a warrant unless he or she actually witnessed the crime. That’s an exceedingly dangerous change. Consider the following scenario, one outlined for lawmakers by retired Henniker police chief Tim Russell:
An officer is called to a home where she sees clear evidence that an assault has occurred. The furniture is overturned, the children are sobbing, and the face of the woman of the house is bruised and bleeding. It’s obvious who the assailant was, but the officer arrived after the assault occurred. It’s a small department, and no one else on the force is available to keep the peace until the officer finds a judge or justice of the peace to issue a warrant. The officer leaves, and the abuser renews his attack with even more ferocity, punishing his victim for having called for help. […]
The quote-within-the-quote there is from this excellent editorial from the Concord Monitor.
And now there’s this:
Carolyn Dube of the Merrimack Patch reports on what that video shows:
State Rep. Jeanine Notter, R-Merrimack, told a House committee earlier today that health insurance companies should not be required to cover birth control because the pill has recently been linked to prostate cancer.
Notter sits on the State-Federal Relations and Veterans Affairs Committee, which held a public hearing today on House Resolution 29, “urging the United States Department of Health and Human Services to rescind its rule requiring health plans to cover preventative services for women such as contraceptives.”
…
“As a man, would it interest you to know that Dr. [Bernstein] just published an article that links the pill to prostate cancer?” Notter asked Rep. Andrew Manuse, R-Derry, who was testifying at the hearing.
“In the children that are born from these women?” Manuse asked.
Notter then offered to lend Manuse a copy of the study before telling him that she is against putting chemicals in her body and trying to explain her claim. The end of her explanation was that women take the pill and the chemical is in their body, but the end of her sentence about how it affects men is mostly unintelligible from the video.
Notter was likely referring to a Newsmax post by David Brownstein, a columnist for the conservative website, publisher of the “Dr. David Brownstein’s Natural Way to Health” newsletter, and director of a Center for Holistic Medicine.
Part of the problem seems to be the sheer size of New Hampshire’s House of Representatives. It has 400 members — combined with the 24-member state Senate, the General Court “is the largest state legislature in the United States and the fourth-largest English-speaking legislative body in the world, behind the Parliament of the United Kingdom, the Parliament of India, and the United States Congress” (Wikipedia). This is in a state with only 1.3 million residents.
It seems clear that 400 seats is way too many for the people of New Hampshire to fill with sane, smart, capable or reasonable people. Instead they’ve got a bunch of crazy racists who think black people all have forged birth certificates, a bunch of people who don’t seem to understand that New Hampshire isn’t part of England, a bunch of people who want to make it harder to arrest men for beating their wives, and at least one person who thinks that taking oral contraceptives is bad for one’s prostate.
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