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Personal freedoms! That should mean staying out of other people's bedrooms and bodies, right? Well, no. Representative Mead doesn't think you have the right to marry if you're gay. He doesn't believe women have the right to bodily autonomy and privacy. He doesn't believe in protecting transgendered people, and he's opposed to assisted suicide. Rep. Mead wants to be in your bedroom, your doctor's office, your bathroom, and your deathbed.
Those much vaunted personal freedoms that Rep. Mead is concerned with seem to be confined to seatbelts, helmets, carrying guns to the State House, and not paying taxes.
The NH GOP has been mouthing the same slogans about taxes and spending for over a century now. Those slogans have left us with bridges and dams in utter disrepair. Those slogans have left us ranking in 50th place in the nation on spending for secondary education. Those slogans have ensured some of the highest property taxes in the nation.
Representative Mead sponsored 8 bills in the last legislative session. Six of them were ITL'd. One bill that he co-sponsored, SB-472 would make the commission of certain murders eligible for the death penalty. In other words - expanding the definition of the death penalty, so that more murders would apply, and we'd be executing more people.
The state's judicial branch, Dept. of Justice, and Dept. of Corrections state that this bill may increase state expenditures by an indeterminate amount each year. The Judicial Council finds that it would create costs in excess of $5 million each year. The DOJ found that this bill would create 2-3 capital cases each year.
This bill was cosponsored by 11 Republicans - who all moan and wail about money, yet here they are, supporting a bill that would add in excess of $5 million a year in new expenses. How can this be defined as "fiscal responsibility?" The bill doesn't even tackle the issue of how this will be paid for.
To summarize: Rep. Mead wants to protect your freedoms, as long as you're a heterosexual, gun totin', motorcycle riding guy. He wants to make sure you don't pay more taxes - except when HE wants to increase them. In excess of $5 million a year is going to have to come from somewhere.
The antidote to this kind of crazy is to vote for Jennifer Daler, Andrew French, and Theodore Groh - the sane folks running for the NH House in Hillsborough 4.
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