By ANDRU VOLINSKY
Tomorrow is important for at least three reasons.
CACR 12 Vote
First, the NH House votes on CACR 12, a constitutional amendment designed to prevent all future governors and legislatures from adopting a “broad-based” tax, which could be an income, sales or property tax. Stated another way, CACR 12 commits (or condemns) NH to its extreme reliance on the local property tax with its crushingly high rates in some communities and pennies-on-the-dollar rates in the most privileged communities.
The goal of CACR 12 is two-fold. First, it creates an issue for Republican Free Staters to run on in November to distract from an economy that is crashing due to President Trump and his MAGA leadership. Second, it kills efforts at tax reform designed to create a system in which all taxpayers pay their fair share.
Remember, it’s not how much we pay in taxes as a state, it’s a matter of who pays how much. If you earn more than $329,300 a year, 4.2 percent of your income or less is devoted to property taxes. The top 1 percent (income over $720,000/year) pay only 2.8 percent. If you earn less than $35,000 a year, 20 percent goes to pay your property taxes. CACR 12 makes this gross imbalance much harder to fix.
For more on CACR 12 and its link to William Loeb of the Manchester Union Leader, read my prior piece, “That SOB William Loeb is Back.”
Tax Reform and Book Talk
Second, tomorrow night (May 14) at 7 p.m., the Historic Deerfield, NH, Inc. will host my first public book talk and discussion of the 3-3 Tax Savings Plan since the Libertarian Party issued their death threat against me. There will be security present. The public discussion will take place at the Deerfield Town Hall located at 10 Church Street.
Israel and Palestine
Third, May 14, 1948 is celebrated by some as Israeli Independence Day when David Ben Gurion, then the head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared the creation of Israel.
In other quarters, May 14th is the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic. The Nakba refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified in the 1930s with the increase of Jewish immigration, driven by persecution in Europe, and with the Zionist movement aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Ironically, now we argue about creating/maintaining a Palestinian state in Palestine with settler terrorism in the West Bank and genocidal war crimes in Gaza.
Remembering both the Nakba and Israeli Independence Day is particularly important in NH as we have Republicans House Rep Travis Corcoron (R-Weare), who used the term “final solution” in reference to a Jewish colleague and Rep Mathew Sabourin dit Choinere (R-Seabrook), who invited a convicted Holocaust denier from Germany to help develop NH public school curriculum. Not to be out done, candidate for NH’s first Congressional District (and Democratic NH House Rep) Heath Howard (D-Barrington) challenged Israel’s right to exist, not apparently understanding his comment is a half step removed from Germany’s approach to the Jewish problem. The Israeli consul general for New England rightly condemned Howard’s remark on X.
Update on Recusals in the Rand School Funding Suit
Readers will recall that the State has appealed its latest school funding loss to the NH Supreme Court. Superior Court Judge David Ruoff ruled in late 2025 that taxpayers are harmed by NH’s gross under-funding of public education that shifts the funding burden unfairly to local property taxes. The State appealed the ruling and, for the first time in years of litigation in the Rand case and in the ConVal case, asked the NH Supreme Court to reverse “Claremont and its progeny.”
In response, we asked the members of the Court who previously were lawyers for the State in the “Claremont and its progeny” cases to disqualify themselves from hearing the case. We also sought to disqualify a fourth justice for other reasons related to his appointment being apparently to “torpedo” the Claremont line of cases. As we asked four of the five justices to disqualify or “recuse” themselves, we also petitioned the Court to send the legal question of whether disqualification was required to an independent group of judges who were uninvolved in the Claremont line of cases.
We are starting to get rulings back.
First, the Court’s five members ruled there was no reason to convene an independent panel to decide the recusal motions. Social science research that shows one cannot determine one’s own bias was rejected in favor of the standard way we’ve always done things.
Second, Justice Patrick Donovan denied the request to recuse him in a two-paragraph order that he signed which adopted and repeated a prior ruling in the statewide education property tax (SWEPT) part of the case. The problem with Justice Donovan’s reasoning is that the State did not seek to reverse Claremont during the SWEPT appeal. Justice Donovan was my opposing counsel in the 1996 Claremont trial and in the Claremont II appeal. When I finished questioning a witness during the Claremont trial, Patrick Donovan was one of the State’s lawyers who then stood up and tried to refute what I had proven.
Here’s the thing about recusals, they really encompass two separate considerations. I think, the members of the NH Supreme Court tend to focus on one and exclude the other. A judge should recuse if she or he can’t be fair to the litigants. A judge should also recuse if the public reasonably believes the judge can’t be fair, even if he secretly can.
Unfortunately, we are taught in law school that lawyers are superhuman. It’s why so many people think lawyers are all jerks. (We’re not, at least not all of us.) It’s as if we’re taught that our brains enlarge during law school and we acquire both out-sized analytical abilities and the ability to completely compartmentalize our feelings from our thoughts. If we scrunch up our faces and grit our teeth, we lawyers can banish all intruding emotions and make decisions clinically based only upon the evidence before us. The social science that the Court chose to ignore, by the way, shows we can’t actually do this, but I digress.
Justice Donovan has committed to the “face scrunch.” I believe that he’ll try. He’s promised in his short order to rule only based on the facts of the case and the relevant precedents. He hasn’t however really addressed the public’s perception of the Court or of him.
I remember the years of work that led up to the trial. I remember what it felt like to have the entire state’s attention focused on us during the six week trial that occurred in the Spring of 1996. The commitment of my team—and its attendant sacrifices—were surely matched by Donovan and Leslie Ludtke in their representation of the State. I couldn’t imagine standing up in front of the Supreme Court and arguing the other side of the Claremont case and the public would never trust me to divorce all of my feelings and concerns about how our schools are funded in order to decide the outcome of a school funding cased based on the facts presented exclusively during a two-week trial that occurred twenty-nine years after the initial trial.
Ultimately, the public will decide if it trusts the NH Supreme Court. If the US Supreme Court’s failed recusal practices are any guide, trust in the NH Supreme Court will become a scarce commodity.
You can read Andru Volinsky’s substack here.