My votes in the NH House session
of May 23, 2024

We continued voting on Senate bills. Overall, we had a pretty good day.

SB 418-FN

I note this bill because I voted against the party’s recommendation of ITL. (My seatmate, Paige Beauchemin, agreed with and voted the same way.) The bill would have doubled the length of license suspension for a first-offense refusal to take a chemical test for impaired driving, from six months to a full year. The Department of Safety supported this bill because our current refusal rate of 70% is nearly double the national average; people consider refusing the test the “smart way to go.” The argument against increasing the suspension length is the hardship that ensues when someone loses their driving privileges. Paige and I agreed that the hardship should not be an excuse for driving while impaired. We lost the vote, and I was a bit surprised to see more Republicans vote against the bill than for it.

CACR 22

This proposed constitutional amendment would enshrine our “first in the nation” status in the state constitution. I’m fine with it being a law, but a constitution is about the organization of the government and the rights of the people. It’s not about how political parties conduct their business. The amendment garnered a majority vote, but not the 60% necessary.

SB 440

This bill would have allowed optometrists to perform certain surgical procedures that currently only opthamologists may perform. The motivation is that access to opthamologists in rural areas, especially Coos County, is a problem. As you can imagine, we received a ton of email on this bill, from optometrists who supported it, and from opthamologists who opposed it. I voted for the motion to Table because the training that optometrists would get for these procedures is insufficent.

This bill would come back the next week as an amendment that the Senate attached to HB 1410.