Bills, Bills, Nothing but Bills. Here’s What’s Happened to Mine so Far…

In addition to showing up to vote on bills and doing committee work, legislators like me have the option of prime-sponsoring or cosponsoring bills dealing with issues of particular interest to themselves, their constituents, and/or their community leaders.

How It Works

As a cosponsor, your name appears on the bill and serves as an endorsement of the policy the bill proposes. Cosponsoring a bill also means taking on a commitment to follow the bill through the process and, when scheduling conflicts allow, supporting the bill with testimony or online sign-ins when it comes up for public hearings in the House and/or Senate.

As a prime-sponsor, your commitment is significantly larger. Filing and championing a bill takes a combination of listening, research, writing, collaboration, recruiting skills, and diligent follow-through to shepherd it from the idea stage to the point where the governor (may) sign it into law.

There are multiple ways bills can come to life.

• As a response to a request. In some cases, legislators may be given both the idea for a bill and the actual language for it by a state agency, advocacy group, or local elected officials in their community; and asked to file and advocate for it.

• As a way to revive a past legislative effort that was unsuccessful. A bill that didn’t have the votes to win in one session, may have the votes to win after a new election. It’s fairly common for legislators to pick up, improve/modify, and resubmit a failed bill from a prior session that would solve a problem that continues to be an issue. In some cases, such as the repeal of the death penalty in 2019, these efforts can go on for decades before they are ultimately successful.

• As a new initiative on your part or as part of a group of legislators and/or advocates. The majority of new bills are either written by legislators themselves or by drafting attorneys in the House Office of Legislative Services who draft the bill to the prime sponsor’s specifications.

The bills I prime-sponsored in the 2023 and 2024 sessions were a mix of all three. But one thing they all have in common is the work it takes to shepherd them through what can be a long, exhausting, and frequently maddening process. From the time committee work starts in January, a public hearing or work session requiring your attendance can pop up at any time, usually with only a few days notice—and seemingly always when you’re also juggling a full committee workload.

In 2024, I prime-sponsored or cosponsored 25 separate bills. In 2023, I sponsored a total of 17. They reflect issues and concerns ranging from gun safety, to the fentanyl epidemic, to racial justice, child safety, the environment, and more. Worth noting is that several of my bills that are finally being acted on in 2024 were filed during the 2023 session. These bills were retained for additional work by the committee that considered them. Here’s where they now stand.

Prime-Sponsored Bills That Have Become Law

• HB 491, relative to prohibiting the use of the prone restraint for minors.

  • Where It Stands: Signed into Law

  • What It Does. This bill makes it clear that RSA 126-U’s ban on the use of dangerous restraint techniques on New Hampshire children under state care specifically prohibits the use of prone restraint. Prone restraint is generally considered the most dangerous method of physical restraint, placing children at risk of restricted breathing and suffocation. Prone restraint is the same restraint technique that killed George Floyd. Its use on children has resulted in close to 100 deaths since the 1990’s. More.

Prime-Sponsored Bills That Are Still Alive

• HB 596, prohibiting the use of racial profiling in law enforcement activities and in sentencing.

  • Where It Stands: Passed in House and Amended in Senate; the House will have the option of concurring with the Senate’s changes, non-concurring (which would kill the bill), or requesting a committee of conference to work out the differences.

  • What It Does: This bill explicitly prohibits New Hampshire law enforcement personnel from targeting individuals for suspicion of a crime based on the individual's race, ethnicity, color, national origin, nationality, language, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, political affiliation, religion, socioeconomic status, or disability. It further clarifies that these characteristics shall not be a factor in determining the existence of probable cause to arrest or to place an individual into custody. The bill provides clear guardrails to prevent demographic characteristics that have nothing to do with criminal activity from being used as a factor to constitute reasonable suspicion that an offense has been committed in order to detain an individual or to stop a motor vehicle. But there is nothing in the bill prevents a law enforcement officer from using a physical description to apprehend a specific suspect linked to an identified criminal incident or scheme.

• HB 491, relative to fentanyl test strips and other drug checking equipment.

  • Where It Stands: Amended and Passed in House; Awaiting recommendation from Senate Judiciary.

  • What it Does: With overdose deaths continuing to plague our state, this bill would go beyond legalizing fentanyl test strips to exclude all drug checking equipment from New Hampshire’s drug paraphernalia law. With powerful new drugs and deadly combinations hitting the streets, this approach would simply make new kinds of test strips and other tools enabling user self-testing of drugs available sooner than having to amend our laws every time a new type of test becomes available. More.

• HB 1047, relative to the effectiveness of state outreach to residents without computer, tablet, smartphone, or other electronic device access.

  • Where It Stands: Amended and Passed in House; awaiting recommendation from Senate Ways and Means committee

  • What It Does: Spurred by a series of failures of state agencies to maximize participation of lower-income residents in heating assistance and health care programs, the bill would task the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Business and Economic Affairs with investigating the barriers lower income residents face when it comes to receiving and accessing critical state outreach information. In particular, it would examine how widespread the use of electronic devices such as computers and smartphones are in this population along with best practices used by other states to reach people who may lack them.

• HB 1319, relative to prohibiting the nonconsensual dissemination of synthetic sexual images.

  • Where It Stands: Passed in House; awaiting recommendation from Senate Judiciary committee

  • What It Does: This bill, authored with the input of the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence and supported by the NH State Police, amends New Hampshire’s revenge porn statute to criminalize the act of making and sharing non-consensual deepfake porn videos. In recent years, advances in artificial intelligence technology have made it possible for a person using computer program or an app on a smartphone to realistically swap the face of a victim with that of an actor or actress in a porn video. The results are extremely realistic and are increasingly indistinguishable from the real thing. This abhorrent behavior overwhelmingly harms women and children and is booming online at an unprecedented rate.

• HB 1613, establishing a trust fund for money from soil and water environmental contamination court settlements.

  • Where It Stands: Amended and Passed in the House; awaiting recommendation from Senate ways and Means committee

  • What It Does: This bill seeks to remedy a situation that allows settlement funds received by the state from environmental lawsuits that weren’t previously assigned to a specific use by the legislature to be placed in the General Fund where they can be spent on any state expense. This happened in 2023 when $20 million from a Monsanto PCB settlement was directed to the General Fund instead of being spent to address the environmental damage caused by PCBs. The bill would create a Soil and Water Contamination Trust Fund under the management of the Department of Environmental Services to temporarily hold undirected settlement funds until the legislature directs how they should be applied. It ensures that money received for environmental damages will be used to remediate and mitigate the harm that has been done to our state and its people.

• HB 1195, relative to allowing school districts to approve different apportionment methods for school administrative unit costs.

  • Where It Stands: Amended and Passed in the house; awaiting a recommendation from the Senate Education Committee

  • What It Does: This bill was a request from town officials in Newington, which comprises part of my district along with New Castle and Wards 1 and 5 in Portsmouth. Current law restricts apportionment to only one-half enrollment and one-half equalized property valuation. The amended bill would allow for different methods of apportionment if approved by all the school districts in the School Administrative Unit (SAU)

Prime-Sponsored Bills That Have Been Killed

Unfortunately (or fortunately in some cases),there are multiple ways a bill can die.

• Inexpedient to Legislate. When the full House or Senate wishes to kill a bill, an ITL vote will usually do the trick.

• Indefinite Postponement. If a majority of legislators intensely dislikes a bill and never wants to see it or anything similar, this alternative to ITL ensures it can’t be brought up again for any reason for the remainder of the legislative session. This essentially does to your bill what Van Helsing does with a wooden stake to a vampire.

• Interim Study. This action sends a bill back to the originating committee for more work over the summer which may or may not actually happen. But since the last legislative session day is typically in June, the bill is effectively dead for the year.

• Tabling. This action holds a bill in limbo for future consideration. But after a certain point, a 2/3 vote is needed to take the bill off the table to debate it. This is usually enough to kill it.

• Non-Concur. This one is the toughest. It happens when both bodies pass different versions of the same bill and members of the originating body won’t agree with either to other body’s changes or agree to form a conference committee to work out differences.

Bottom line: with every bill comes the potential for failure. But for every bill listed below that didn’t make it, the only “failure” would have been never to try.

• HB 1050, relative to establishing a voluntary waiver of the right to purchase a firearm. This bill would have established the right of a person who believes they are at-risk for suicide to be listed in the federal firearms background check database as ineligible to purchase a firearm. (INDEFINITELY POSTPONED)

• HB 351, relative to the negligent storage of firearms and relative to firearm safety devices. This bill would have required a locking safety device accompany all commercial firearm sales. It also would have strengthened our state’s firearms negligence laws involving children. (INDEFINITELY POSTPONED)

• HB 1037, relative to repealing limited liability for manufacturers, distributors, dealers, or importers of firearms or ammunition. This bill would have removed a blanket exemption for firearms and ammunition manufacturers from liability laws which no other industry in our state receives. (INDEFINITELY POSTPONED)

• HB 156, relative to misconduct by a law enforcement officer. This bill, which I submitted in conjunction with ACLU-NH, sought to expand the definition of police misconduct to include “intentional misrepresentation of a material fact in a police report.” (PASSED IN HOUSE; ITL IN SENATE)

• HB 597, relative to race and ethnicity data on driver's licenses, and race and ethnicity data collection. Also submitted in collaboration with ACLU-NH, this bill would have added race and ethnicity as optional information that could be included on a driver's license. It also would have required law enforcement agencies to collect and report such data. (ITL)

• HB 89, relative to posthumous exonerations. This bill passed in the House but died in the Senate. It would have authorized the posthumous exonerations of the only person ever jailed in New Hampshire for witchcraft as well as a man who was unfairly prosecuted and jailed during the 1950s Red Scare. (PASSED IN HOUSE; ITL IN SENATE)

• HB 205, relative to testing private wells. This bill would have required companies drilling new wells to test them for PFAS and issue a report to the owner. It also would have required the owner to disclose this information when selling the property. (DIED ON THE TABLE)

Cosponsored Bills That Have Been Signed into Law

• SB 103, including the raid on Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth in the planning of the American revolution sestercentennial commission. Yay!

Cosponsored Bills That Are Still Alive

• HB 1711, authorizing the state to report mental health data for firearms background check purposes and providing for processes for confiscation of firearms following certain mental health-related court proceedings and for relief from mental health-related firearms disabilities. This bill. also known as “Bradley’s Law” after the New Hampshire Hospital security guard who was shot to death at his post by a man who was likely severely mentally ill, passed in the House and is now in the hands of the Senate. More.

• HB 1020, establishing a committee to study restoration of competency.

• HB 1114, extending the commission to investigate and analyze the environmental and public health impacts relating to releases of perfluorinated chemicals in the air, soil, and groundwater in Merrimack, Bedford, Londonderry, Hudson and Litchfield.

• HB 1169, creating a private cause of action for discrimination based on hairstyles relative to a person's ethnicity.

• HB 1171, extending the commission to study environmentally-triggered chronic illness.

• HB 1415, relative to PFAS facility liability.

• SB 239, relative to the use of harm reduction services to treat alcohol and other substance misuse.

• SB 420, relative to requiring an additional report from the legislative study committee concerning the long-term impact of the New Hampshire adult parole system.

• SB 507, extending the time to petition for a new trial in certain cases.

• SB 593, relative to possession of firearms in safe school zones. More.

Cosponsored Bills That Have Been Killed

• HB 34, relative to raising the age of marriage to eighteen. (ITL)

• HB 46, establishing a committee to study replacement of bail commissioners with court magistrates and relative to delinquent payment of accounts by on premises and off premises licensees and relative to electronic payments to employee debit cards. (NONCONCUR)

• HB 78, repealing an act prohibiting the state from enforcing any federal statute, regulation, or Presidential Executive Order that restricts or regulates the right of the people to keep or bear arms. (ITL)

• SB 360, relative to extreme risk protection orders. (ITL)

• HB 226, enabling municipalities to regulate the distribution and disposal of certain solid waste within landfills. (ITL)

• HB 342, relative to lead testing in children (VETOED BY GOVERNOR)

• HB 1068, relative to establishing a blood lead level testing requirement for children entering day care and public schools. (ITL)

• HB 1707, relative to liability for the cost of PFAS blood testing. (ITL)

• HB 614, making an appropriation to the department of health and human services to fund the Merrimack, New Hampshire Kidney Cancer Incidence Phase 3 Feasibility study. (ITL)

• HB 345, enabling ranked-choice voting for state party primary elections and municipal elections. (ITL)

• HB 350, relative to ranked-choice voting. (ITL)

• HR 8, urging Congress to enact legislation regulating and banning certain semi-automatic assault weapons and large capacity ammunition feeding devices. (ITL)

• HR 10, supporting statehood for the District of Columbia. (ITL)

• SB 254, relative to community-based sentencing alternatives for primary caregivers. (ITL)

• HB 1170, requiring public benefit and community impact assessments from the department of environmental services. (INTERIM STUDY)

How Can You Tell Which Sponsor is the Prime Sponsor of a bill?

The prime sponsor is always the first sponsor listed on the bill.

How Can You See which Bills Your Rep or Senator Are Sponsoring?

There are several ways to do this using the General Court Website.

The easiest way is to go to the Advanced Bill Search Page , enter the year you wish to narrow your search to, and then select your rep or senator from the Sponsor menu. All of the bills that person has prime-sponsored or cosponsored will be listed.