By Rep. Dan McGuire, R-Epsom. Editor’s note: He was an early member of the Free State Project, moving to New Hampshire with his wife Rep. Carol McGuire from Washington state in 2005.

In a recent op-ed, former Rep. Marjorie Porter opposed a proposed NH House rules change that will be debated on Wednesday.  Unfortunately she failed to describe the proposal, opposing it on the basis that other states have bad practices (they do) which are like this (they aren’t).

Let’s start with current practice and what is being proposed. Legislators have a short annual window in which to propose legislation.  Those ideas are drafted by attorneys who work for the legislature and become bills that are taken up at the start of the year. Each bill is assigned to a committee, which holds a public hearing, decides on a recommendation (pass, fail or pass with changes), and then the full body (the House in this case) decides what to do with the bill.  If passed, possibly with changes, it may then repeat the process in another committee or go on to the other body.  This year over 800 bills have been submitted in the House and over 300 in the Senate.

The proposal is to add another way of dealing with a bill.  If a committee chooses, with a 75% or better vote (i.e. bipartisan), it can short circuit the process, avoid the public hearing, and lay the bill on the table.  This puts the bill in limbo.  However, any single legislator, including the bill’s sponsor, can ask the House to take it off the table by a simple majority vote, and restart the normal process.

The reasons for this proposal are obvious.  With 800+ bills and only about 20 committees the average committee has to have 40 or more public hearings, work sessions and votes in a little more than two months.  As you can imagine, some of those bills are obvious stinkers that have been thoroughly rejected in previous years.  Some may be duplicates or near-duplicates of other bills on the same subject.  This rules change could give committees more time to consider worthwhile legislation, resulting in a better work product.

The legislative process is deliberately long and tedious because it is so important to avoid mistakes and get things right.  Wasting time on bills that have no hope makes it that much harder to do a good job on the others.