In New Hampshire lawmaking there is something called an LSR, for Legislative Service Request, which is basically a very first draft at a bill that lawmakers want to get passed. Hundreds of them land at this time of year, jostling to get into line for hearings and all the other legislative hoo-hah needed to create a law.
At this point, all you know about an LSR is its title. Finding out more requires hunting down the legislator(s) who sponsored it, which is non-trivial. I haven’t done any of that yet, but to whet your appetite for the coming legislative season, I skipped through the list (you can scroll through it here if you want) to find some titles that might make the geeks among us say “Hmmmm – that sounds intriguing”:
- relative to ranked-choice voting (this is a perennial topic favored by the libertarian types, who no doubt got a boost when it passed in Maine last year, although that state has since put it on hold for legal reasons)
- relative to the cybersecurity software used by the state of New Hampshire
- establishing a committee to study redesigning the state flag. (geeks are really into vexillology)
- establishing a committee to study the changes in law necessary to allow for microgrids in electricity supply.
- prohibiting the use of the far left lane on the interstate for anything other than passing (geeks are really into “logical driving”)
- relative to digital electronic product repair (I assume this is a freedom-to-repair bill, which would be very cool)
- relative to telemedicine (this is probably regulatory rather than technical).
- removing tetanus from the law requiring certain immunizations (part of continuing push by anti-vax folks to weaken state vaccination laws)
Return to the Concord Monitor
I naturally don’t support halting vaccinations for tetanus. What would happen is that some kid would be infected, he’d be dumped into hospital, and the huge expense of saving his life would be dumped on the taxpayers. The very people who shriek about compulsory vaccination would be the first to howl when they were given the finger and told to let their brat die. Since we are stuck with the costs of medical treatments, we can justifiably demand that the recipients of our bounty act in such a way as to minimise our expenditures. This is of course the logic behind laws requiring the compulsory use of seat belts, for example.
The poster child for ranked-choice voting is Paul LePage, who would have been defeated in 2014 had Michaud and Cutler not split the opposition vote.