Flexing influence, Ayotte helps defeat two Republican bills

Gov. Kelly Ayotte strolled into the Secretary of State’s Office Thursday morning flanked by dozens of supporters and officially filed her bid for reelection, kicking off five months of official campaigning.  

But the governor’s more immediate political battles Thursday were against her own party, just down the hall. 

As they met for the last standard voting day of the year, House and Senate lawmakers took up two conservative priorities — on guns and education — that Ayotte appeared likely to oppose. 

In the end, Ayotte won those battles. In both cases, House and Senate Republicans joined with Democrats to vote down the measures with little explanation. And in neither case will the governor need to deploy a veto. 

But the close results illustrated the divergent political environments between the Republican-held Legislature, which has favored ambitious conservative proposals, and the Republican governor’s office, where Ayotte has sometimes rejected those proposals in favor of priorities central to her campaign.

One proposal Ayotte helped vanquish Thursday would have expanded public school open enrollment. The other would have overruled state and local firearms regulations and put the Legislature in control.

After both defeats, some Republicans lawmakers fumed, issuing public statements of disappointment.

But Ayotte has argued some of her party’s proposals are too hasty and sprawling to pass so suddenly, and that they need further study. 

And she says as governor, she can’t solely focus on conservative priorities. 

“I believe very firmly that New Hampshire isn’t about a party,” Ayotte told reporters Thursday when asked about the intra-party conflicts. 

“New Hampshire is about this being the absolute best place to live in the entire country. And so my view on all of this is I wake up and say, ‘What’s best for New Hampshire?’”

Open enrollment

One of Republicans’ biggest defeats centered on open enrollment. 

For months, school choice advocates in House and Senate education committees have urged the expansion of the state’s existing open enrollment program. That program currently allows school districts to opt into making their schools open enrollment schools, allowing them to accept students from other districts and receive tuition payments. 

Republican lawmakers have pressed for legislation to make the program universal and require all schools to both receive and send students, with some exceptions.  

From the beginning of the year, Ayotte has been skeptical of a universal plan, worrying about disruptions to school district budgeting and local control. And a small faction of House Republicans also voted against a statewide program. 

But open enrollment advocates had hoped that a pared back version of the bill, House Bill 751, that emerged from last week’s committee of conference — in which all public schools would be required to allow at least 10% of students to leave but no school would be required to receive students — might win Ayotte over. 

They were wrong: In a statement last week, Ayotte said even that version of the bill was “not ready for prime time.”

At a press conference Wednesday, Ayotte elaborated on her opposition, saying she had received feedback from public school superintendents and school board members about “how it could impact not only their funding but disrupt the flow of students and their systems.” She said she was concerned that Republican lawmakers had not sought out such school-level feedback before advancing their proposals.

Above all, Ayotte urged more study of the idea before lawmakers move ahead.

“I sat down with school board members, for example, from Londonderry, other areas of the state, and I want to make sure if we make a change like this, we do it correctly, and we get this right,” she said.

After the governor’s comments, the Senate unanimously voted to table HB 751 Thursday, depriving it of a vote in the House. They did so without any debate or comment — and months after they had voted to pass a broader, universal open enrollment bill to the House. 

That response did not placate Rep. Kristin Noble Thursday, the Bedford Republican and chairwoman of the Education Policy and Administration Committee, who said she was “immeasurably disappointed.”

In a statement, Noble noted that the latest version of the bill — requiring districts to allow at least 10% of students to leave — was meant in part to allow a group of students who live in the Pittsfield School District to continue attending Prospect Mountain High School, the state’s only functioning open enrollment school. This spring, Pittsfield residents voted to effectively block their students from attending Prospect Mountain, potentially forcing those students to return to Pittsfield.

 “Unfortunately, our colleagues in the Senate did not have the courage to defend the more than 60 students who will now be forcibly kicked out of their chosen schools because of their inaction,” Noble said in a statement. “The House had to battle a waffling Senate and sadly, when the chips were down, they chose to walk away rather than stand up for the futures of New Hampshire students.”

Noble’s frustration was not limited to the Senate. In remarks to the Concord Monitor this week, she criticized Ayotte for not meeting with her. 

Approached for comment outside the State House Thursday, after the Senate tabled HB 751, Noble declined to comment further.

Firearms regulation

Ayotte did not directly kill the Republican bill on firearms. But her attorney general dealt it an unusually sharp blow. 

House Bill 609 would have established the Legislature as the sole authority for firearms regulations, a move that might have invalidated policies in local police departments, municipal governments, state agencies, state-run universities, and other public entities. To firearms rights advocates, the bill represented a transformative change that would prevent potentially overly restrictive weapons policies in government-run spaces and give lawmakers the final say over any rules. 

But a day before its vote, Attorney General John Formella, a Republican, wrote a letter urging lawmakers to vote the bill down. He argued the bill could override prudent law enforcement firearms policies, hinder the executive branch, weaken policies that protect gun owners, and lead to an ongoing legislative tug-of-war over new regulations. 

For a moment Thursday, it appeared that Formella’s warning might not work. Senate Republicans passed HB 609 on party lines and over Formella’s objections, 15-8. No Republicans spoke in favor of the bill; speaking against it, Sen. Tara Reardon, a Concord Democrat, said: “Not only does this bill present a local control issue, but this bill also cuts at the authority of our agencies, our judicial branch, who are very concerned and have cited case law that conflicts with this policy.”

But when the bill reached the House, 28 Republicans broke ranks, joined Democrats, and moved to table the bill, ending its path forward. As with open enrollment, none of those House Republicans explained their decision.

Once again, stalwart conservatives vented frustration.

“Our rights come from the Constitution and our Creator, not a group of unelected officials,” said Rep. Terry Roy, a Deerfield Republican and the chairman of the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee. “… Just because today was a setback in our mission, we will not stop until Granite Staters can practice their full constitutional rights without fear.”

Action on other bills

The twin defeats came during a turbulent day in which a few long-fought-for Republican bills died, and others moved ahead to Ayotte’s desk.

The two chambers passed the “Right to Try” bill, adding it to House Bill 1735, which would allow people with a qualifying severe illness to try experimental treatments, while providing health providers with legal immunity for that care.

They passed House Bill 1376, which would allow a parent to raise a child “in a manner consistent with the child’s biological sex” and exempt such a decision from state child abuse laws.

They sent to Ayotte House Bill 155, which would exempt some small businesses from paying state business enterprise taxes by raising the minimum threshold of who must pay, and allow for a future reduction in the overall tax rate if revenues perform well.

And they passed House Bill 1300, which would pose a question of whether to adopt an annual tax cap on voters’ local school district budgets on all ballots in the 2024 and 2026 general elections — and require a three-fifths majority vote to do so. 

One defeated bill was House Bill 1709. That legislation would have barred from occupying or renting housing undocumented people who had been convicted of felonies and had left the United States and returned, and would require county sheriffs carrying out writs of possession to arrest people that met those criteria. The Senate laid the bill on the table. 

William Skipworth contributed to this report.