It's 84 days until baseball's Opening Day, so we have to settle for Convening Day of the New Hampshire State Legislature. This is their second meeting as a group, after Organization Day last month when they were all sworn in.
That's a picture of Cheshire-15's own Rep. Renée Monteil, taken by Cheshire-4's Rep. Jodi Newell. Also, it was 62 degrees out, which seems a little warm for Concord, New Hampshire the 4th of friggin' January.
I always find the best way to find out what happened in the session is by checking Rep. Eric Gallager's live tweet-stream over at Elon Musk's Nefarious Website of Purgatory.
According to that, here are some dumb and terrible things the Republicans did today:
- Voted to allow guns on the House floor, because that's really mature
- Voted against proxy voting because covid safety doesn't matter anymore
- Voted against remote/hybrid hearings, which were really one of the greatest, most democracy-enriching and participatory practices to come out of the pandemic. It's a real loss.
- Made a power grab that involved giving committee chairs the ability to break ties on recommendations. This one didn't quite fly.
Some of this looks to be part of a broader Republican strategy to maintain their narrow balance of power in the ledge. They all know that many Republicans would be likely to come into session if they were contagious with covid in cases where Democrats would do the responsible thing and stay home. It's an alliance with a biological pathogen, and its dirty pool.