AFP-NH legislative agenda includes right-to-work, college campus free speech, business tax cuts
Other priorities are education ‘freedom accounts,’ direct payments to health care facilities, withdrawal from TCI
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Updated: 11:24 PM EST Jan 21, 2021
Other priorities are education ‘freedom accounts,’ direct payments to health care facilities, withdrawal from TCI
Share
Updated: 11:24 PM EST Jan 21, 2021
(New Hampshire Primary Source is a regular feature of WMUR’s political coverage.)CONSERVATIVE GROUP’S TOP 10 BILLS. Americans for Prosperity-New Hampshire, an influential advocacy group promoting conservative initiatives such as low taxes and limited government, detailed its 2021-2022 legislative agenda Thursday, joined by key Republican lawmakers.The agenda includes expanding right-to-work to the private sector, cutting business taxes, making freedom of speech a requirement on college campuses and allowing patients to make direct payments to health care facilities.“2021 has the chance to be a transformative year for New Hampshire,” AFP-NH executive director Greg Moore said during the remote presentation. “We have a chance to get our economy thriving again, to expand educational opportunity for students and to strengthen our rights to free speech, privacy and worker freedom.”Moore, state Sen. John Reagan, House Speaker Sherman Packard and other Republican lawmakers described AFP-NH’s top 10 priority bills.Packard said his bill for “employer tax relief,” House Bill 10, is his number one priority, as it was for the late Speaker Dick Hinch, who died Dec. 9. The bill would lower the business profits and business enterprise taxes to 7.5 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively, by Dec. 31, 2022.House Bill 20 would establish the “Richard ‘Dick’ Hinch education freedom account program” to provide state adequate education funds to qualified students for private schools. Packard said Republicans believe children should be offered “the best education they can get.”“It will come out of committee and it will pass,” said Packard, who leads the GOP House majority. “It’s just another step in helping the children in this state and giving them some options.”Senate Bill 61 would extend right-to-work to the state’s private sector workers. It would expand on public sector right-to-work, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2018 ruling in “Janus v. AFSCME.” The court ruled 5-4 that forcing public union fees to be paid by non-members violated the First Amendment.If the bill passes, after many years of falling short, New Hampshire would become the first right-to-work state in the Northeast, which, Moore said, “would give us a huge advantage in attracting good, new jobs, particularly in the manufacturing sector.”Sen. John Reagan, the prime sponsor, said right-to-work would promote competition among employers to provide attractive working conditions and would benefit workers and those in the job market.House Bill 568 would phase out the state’s 5 percent interest and dividends tax by increasing exemptions in each year until it is repealed in 2025. Moore and the prime sponsor, Rep. Norm Silber, said the interest and dividends tax is a tax income that hits the elderly particularly hard.Other key bills on the AFP-NH agenda are:-- House Bill 405, which AFP-NH says would streamline a licensing process to allow licensed workers in other states to relocate to, and work in, New Hampshire. Ross Connolly of AFP-NH said the bill responds to regulatory hurdles faced by medical professionals who came to the state after the COVID-19 outbreak. Gov. Chris Sununu suspended many of the requirements through executive action.The bill would make the streamlined process permanent and would apply to all licensed professionals.-- House Bill 597, a cyber privacy bill, would require law enforcement and other agencies to obtain a warrant to access data stored in a cloud. Moore said the bill follows up on a privacy amendment to the New Hampshire Constitution passed by the voters in 2018.-- House Bill 331 would restrict the use of a civil asset forfeiture process by state agencies currently carried out under a federal law. Rep. Mike Sylvia said loophole victimizes low-income people and is “highly offensive” because “95 percent of this is taking money from people who cannot afford to fight their own battles.”-- House Bill 290 would allow patients to provide direct payments to health care facilities, without requiring reimbursements by third parties. It would expand an existing law that allows direct payments for primary care.The bill “recognizes there is an enormous amount of diversity in the state in the way that people pursue how they are going to get their health care,” said the sponsor, Rep. Mark McLean. “It moves the health care market just incrementally in the direction of more openness and more options for the people of New Hampshire.”-- House Bill 234, which proponents say would protect free speech rights on public college campuses in the state by requiring those colleges to include free speech in their handbooks and codes of conduct. “Free speech is under attack in this country,” said Rep. Joe Alexander, the bill’s prime sponsor. “Private companies like Twitter have set a dangerous example by banning the former president from Twitter.”Alexander said that opinions of people on college campuses naturally conflict, “but it is not the proper role of post-secondary educational institutions to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions that they find unwelcome, disagreeable and deeply offensive.”-- House Bill 373 would remove the state from the Transportation and Climate Initiative, a 12-state collaboration that its advocates say is an effort to develop a clean energy economy and its critics say is a cap-and-trade program that would raise the cost of gasoline by at least 30 cents a gallon.“The express goal of TCI is to raise gas taxes to the point where they are unaffordable,” Moore said. Rep. Jeanine Notter, the prime sponsor, noted that gas taxes are regressive, hurting those on fixed incomes, the working poor and those who commute to work. (Follow John DiStaso on Twitter: @jdistaso)>> Download the FREE WMUR app