Friday, February 11, 2011

Front Door Politics: constitutional health care debate, sex offender registry, renewable energy

Front Door Politics: constitutional health care debate, sex offender registry, renewable energy

Thursday, 10 February 2011 21:58 | Written by Front Door Politics
What are state lawmakers doing that actually affects your daily life? Lots! Find out with Front Door Politics: jargon-free, non-advocacy state house news at www.frontdoorpolitics.com.

constitutional debate over federal health care action:  A constitutional showdown could be on the docket if New Hampshire lawmakers pass a bill set for a full House vote. The Feb. 2 session was cancelled due to snow, so the House will likely take up the bill on Wednesday, Feb. 9.
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epublican-sponsored House Bill 89, which passed out of committee on a party line vote, would require the attorney general to join some 26 other states in a lawsuit challenging the federal health care reform act passed last year. Attorney General Michael Delaney testified last month that the proposal itself was unconstitutional because the legislative branch can make laws but not tell the executive branch how to enforce them. He promised to challenge the law in court if it passes.

“We called upon our attorney general to join with other states in filing a lawsuit challenging ‘Obamacare,’ but Governor Lynch and the Democratic leadership at the time refused to join with us in standing up for the citizens of our state,” said House Majority Leader D. J. Bettencourt (R-Salem), a co-sponsor of HB 89, in a statement. “I call upon my colleagues in the Legislature to support HB 89 when it comes to the floor of the House on Wednesday so that we may join the fight against expensive mandates.”

Supporters of HB 89 applauded Monday’s ruling by a Federal District Court judge in Florida that struck down the federal health reform law as unconstitutional. In four federal court decisions, two have found that the law is constitutional and two others have struck down either part or all the law’s provisions on constitutional grounds.

While the majority report from the House State-Federal Relations and Veterans Affairs Committee urged passage of HB 89, saying it was “a concern worthy of action by the attorney general,” the dissenting minority report said the “symbolic” measure was legally irrelevant, a waste of taxpayer money and unconstitutional.
“Just as the attorney general has no constitutional authority to require the legislature to pass or defeat particular bills, the legislature has no constitutional authority to require the attorney general to mount legal challenges against particular laws,” said Rep. Theodoros Rokas (D-Manchester) “If the legislature can compel the attorney general to challenge particular laws, the traditional independence of the attorney general is compromised.”

If the law passes the House, it would then go to the Senate. If it is approved by the Senate later this session, it faces an almost certain veto by Gov. Lynch, who in turn faces veto-proof majorities in both legislative chambers. —Michael McCord

rechecking the sex offender registry: Is the sex offender public registry list working in New Hampshire? A bipartisan proposal to answer that question faced a second test when the Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee met in executive session on Feb. 3.

Sponsored by Rep. James MacKay (D-Concord) and co-sponsored by Sen. Sharon Carson (R-Londonderry), House Bill 122 would set up a four-member committee to study the effectiveness of the current system requiring registration after serving prison time for a wide range of sexual offenses against adults and children. The committee would be charged with producing a final report by Nov. 1, 2012, and recommending “whether the sexual offender registry serves a legitimate public purpose relative to prevention, control, punishment, and rehabilitation of sexual offenders.”
After a public hearing on Jan. 18, a subcommittee recommended to the full committee that HB 122 was “inexpedient to legislate.”

According to KlaasKids Foundation, as of March 2010 there were 4,484 registered sex offenders in the state, and there has been a 90 percent compliance rate for the many reporting requirements for sex offenders.
Amanda Grandy, policy director with the N.H. Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence, believes another sexual registry study committee “would be premature.” Such a committee would come too soon, she says, after two major overhaul laws that took effect in 2009, House Bill 1640 and House Bill 1613. Those came about after study committees modified a wide range of registry issues.
Closer examinations of the effectiveness of sex offender registries have taken place in various states across the country. A federally funded study in South Carolina released last year recommended “the current state and federal laws for registering sex offenders and notifying communities about their locations need to be revamped.”

Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina said the registry policies were well intended and supported by the public, but “the current state policy of registration and notification is failing because the unintended effects it has had on prosecution of sex crime cases could actually reduce community safety.” In particular, suspects charged with sex-related crimes often plea bargain to non-sex-related charges. This allows offenders to stay off the registry and away from rehabilitation programs.
Grandy tells Front Door Politics that while the laws that went into effect in 2009 have done a good job of providing a better registry that the public wants and giving law enforcement a tool to use, the Coalition would still like to see a shift. She prefers moving away from a classification system based primarily on the crime committed, toward a rigorous process of diagnosing potential recidivism. A system along those lines is used in states like Massachusetts.
“That is what we’d like to see. But we know in the current budget climate, it’s cost prohibitive,” she says. —Michael McCord

renewable energy could get a whole lot bigger: Rep. Richard Barry (R-Merrimack) didn’t plan to stir up any controversy, or a “big to-do,” as he said, with his bill to alter the renewable energy portfolios law that passed with strong bipartisan support in 2007.
“I think this will level the playing field and simplify a complicated law,” Barry said of House Bill 302.
But the House Science, Energy and Technology Committee gave the proposal an “inexpedient to legislate” recommendation even before it went to a public hearing on Feb. 8, Barry said.
HB 302 would deemphasize solar power, add larger hydropower dams to the renewable energy mix for utilities, and increase legislators’ authority over the Renewable Energy Fund. Financed by utilities that don’t meet annual standards for using renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and hydropower, the Renewable Energy Fund goes toward grants for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. Under HB 302, the Science, Energy and Technology Committee would have to approve REF grants issued by the Public Utilities Commission. Authority to audit all projects funded by the REF would also transfer from the commission to the committee.

Renewable Energy Fund: Gov. John Lynch hailed the 2007 Renewable Energy Act as a major step toward meeting the state’s goal of 25 percent renewable energy use by 2025 and stirring economic development. The law, which was co-sponsored by current Senate President Peter Bragdon (R-Milford), passed by a vote of 253-37 in the House and unanimously in the Senate.
According to financial analysis provided by the Public Utilities Commission, Barry’s proposal would lead to an almost $750,000 reduction of utility payments into the Renewable Energy Fund. This is due to a change in renewable energy classifications that will allow electric companies to pay less than market price for the different classes of renewable energy certificates they must meet.

Impact on Small-Scale Renewables: Barry says “leveling the field,” such as not giving a greater percentage of renewable energy classification to solar power, and taking grant approval from “the bureaucracy” will end up promoting more economic development. But Jim Rubens, a New Hampshire environmentalist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, says Barry’s proposal would do just the opposite.
Rubens says the bill would “kill” the growing solar energy market in the state, send more money outside New Hampshire and lead to a greater politicization of the renewable energy grant process by taking it away from an appointed board connected to the PUC.

“It will take adjudicating projects and put them into a fairly charged political environment,” Rubens says.
Large hydroelectric power plants like Hydro-Quebec are currently not considered a renewable energy source, but they would be under HB 302. Rubens says that re-classification would come at the expense of scores of small-scale but growing renewable energy sources in the state.

Barry denies that he had any intention of helping any sector in particular, but Rubens says a close look at HB 302 shows real winners and losers.

“What it does by the virtue of its design is create a very strong policy towards Canadian hydropower,” Rubens says. “As proposed, it takes away the economic benefits from New Hampshire.” Those benefits, he says, are what originally made the law popular to a broad bipartisan coalition.

Some wording regarding the economic and environmental benefits of renewable energy technologies would also be struck from the law under HB 302.

Barry is also sponsoring a bill to repeal the state’s involvement in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. That bill will receive an all-day public hearing on Thursday, Feb. 10.—Michael McCord
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"When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect."
~Adlia Stevenson U.S. Vice President (1893–1897) and Congressman (1879–1881)

On a Personal Note

Thanks for the opportunity to express my thoughts regarding the issue of citizens’ rights, particularly addressing certain sex offenders’ crimes that do not fit the devastating, inequitable and endless punishment given.


As you know, many young men and women lives across the nation are being destroyed by incarceration, life-time registry and restrictive laws that do more harm than good. For those individuals, there is no second chance.

Below is a personal letter to President Obama:
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“Dear President Obama,

I truly agree with your sentiments that individuals, such as ex-felons, should be able to receive a second chance at life. Since we all know that one can veer off that path of life and travel along rough, rocky terrain, sometimes running off and ending up in some ditch. We all have made our fill of mistakes and sometimes those held a costly consequence that changed life forever. So we lived through it, trying harder to make things right with family, friends and those around us, but what about those who aren’t able to make things right even if they tried…because they’re labeled as too dirty, a leper, a person who is rejected from society and home.

But what if they’re a seventeen year old and had sex with a fifteen year old, consensual at that? Or they’re a teen that had gotten so enraged after a breakup that he sent out naked pictures of his girlfriend on his cell phone or email? Or an individual urinates where someone just happens to see them?

All are wrong and a travesty but do they deserve the life of no second chance with a registry that ends all. They are labeled, no jobs, no where to live…they have been deemed a menace to society, a plague. These certain circumstances, and many other situations similar to these, I believe still deserve a second change.

Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

After my son’s early release and two years of prison, I thought I had handled that fact graciously knowing after serving his time he would be able to get that fresh start, that second chance. He was an exemplary inmate, GED, college courses and vocational classes. Little did I know that a second chance on the outside was the farthest from the truth? He now struggles and lives in a trailer park sharing a trailer with another and surrounded by others in the same rocking boat, one to float endlessly in shark infested waters. I see him little because of probation requirements (he couldn’t live with us because we were 800 feet near a school). My family is afraid of what would happen to them if he lived with them…vigilantism. My son has no other place to stay since others condemn him of his crime that is screamed from the highest rooftop. Sex offender, sex offender!

Not all sex offenders are pedophiles or predators but some are simply young kids that make one stupid and rash decision that eventually changes everything, and they have no idea what they’ve done until their life is never their own. Exactly, where is that second chance for those sex-offenders who are lumped together with pedophiles and predators? Now, it makes me sick to think of my son’s future and many like him that are on the registry and many with no second chance…ever. I am asking you as a mother and as another concerned citizen of the United States that these laws are looked at again and taken into serious consideration in what they are doing to the Constitution of the United States, not for sex offenders in general but the future rights of every citizen, before anymore are put into effect. They unjustly strip an offender of their rights and place them in a guillotine that can be easily set off by anyone and at anytime. Where is the second chance for ex-sex offenders in the present, pending and future laws?”
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What truly saddens me is the weakness and deterioration of what the sex offense issue is doing to our once, great nation. Across Europe, others are seeing the injustice and disregard of rights, but we ignore this problem and it makes me wonder where humanity is heading….

We have become a hysterical society in which our latest witch-hunt is a sex offender--no matter his/her crime.

Below is a email sent from a foreign advocate to a father of a sex offender:
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“The tragic story of your son's death is just so sad that it's difficult to explain how. It was very hard to read your letters. It seems almost unbelievable that this can take place in a democracy! From our point of view, there is no justice in this. Not in any way: not for you, your son, the former girl friend – or even the state.

It is an abusive legal system. It seems barbaric. And we are so very sorry that this takes place. That's why it's so important for us to try to neutralize the debate with this…, hopefully making some changes. ….. to show the every day life of the sex offenders, trying to show how they keep on being punished, even after served prison time…..But we will for sure tell the story of the injustice that your son has been exposed to.”
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I appreciate everyone's commitment and backing to protect everyone's civil rights, plainly as noted in the Constitution of the United States and is presupposed, giving ALL men are “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.”