Restoring the Right to Work in New Hampshire

After several years of complacency and conceit among New Hampshire Republicans, the combination of which saw the Democrats take a U.S. Senate seat, both House seats, the governor's office, and both branches of the NH legislature, the Republicans had a resurgence in 2010.  In the midterm elections, Republicans, invigorated by the Taxed Enough Already (TEA) party, swept both houses of the legislature and both U.S. House seats.  Incidentally, all this wasn't enough to defeat the extremely popular Democratic Governor John Lynch.

The Republicans, with a whopping 297-103 advantage in the NH House and a 19-5 advantage in the NH Senate, set about a return to small government.  In a July 2011 speech to a Republican gathering, Speaker of the House Bill O'Brien said that the Republican-dominated legislature cut the budget 11%, from $11.5B to $10.4B while significantly reducing business taxes.  State unemployment fell from 5.7% to 4.8%.  The unemployment rate is not all good news, though; Speaker O'Brien tells us that "[i]n part it's because our young people are leaving New Hampshire."  New Hampshire needs new business and new jobs.

The Republicans passed a Right to Work (RTW) Act, HB 474, by margins of 221-131 in the House and 16-8 in the Senate.  Governor Lynch vetoed the bill.  Sixteen to eight is sufficient to override in the Senate, but the House seems to be a few votes short.  According to Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard, there are some 35 Republican union supporters who will vote to sustain the veto.  (Trade unionism is a legacy in some families, surviving from the days when a union job could be passed from generation to generation.)

Support the Ayotte-Brown Fisheries Legislation

Senators Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Scott Brown (R-MA) have introduced S.1678, the “Saving Fishing Jobs Act of 2011.”  The Ayotte-Brown bill is similar to, but stronger than the House bill, HB.2772, also called the “Saving Fishing Jobs Act of 2011.”  Both bills are aimed at limiting the fisheries management technique known as catch shares.  The House version addresses future implementations of catch shares while the Ayotte-Brown version extends the legislation to existing catch shares programs.  Ayotte-Brown requires that an existing catch shares program be terminated if it can be shown that the program has reduced fishing jobs by more than 15%.

Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)

Senator Scott Brown (R-MA)

Catch shares, a fisheries management technique developed by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), is documented in a 184-page playbook titled "Catch Shares Design Manual."

President Obama’s handpicked ecozealot, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, administrator of NOAA and former bigwig at the EDF, is implementing catch shares nation-wide.  In New England, she has personally driven fisherman allocations drastically below those levels that even her own scientists say are sufficient to sustain and allow growth of the stocks.  Dr. Lubchenco wants the industry to shrink.  She envisions a fixed number of catch share permits allocated within a small community of fishing boats.  Let the fittest fishermen survive.  Her implementation of catch shares has some curveballs.