By GARRY RAYNO, InDepthNH.org

The New Hampshire Legislature is the third largest governing body in the world.

Many use that to say it is also one of the most representative bodies in the world, but is that true?

If elections in New Hampshire operated on a level playing field, you could make that case, but they do not.

The districts are gerrymandered to give Republicans all the advantages in elections, which is why you have an Executive Council with a four-to-one majority and a Senate with a 16 to 8 majority, although the state is almost equally split between Republicans and Democrats, while independents outnumber both parties, and there is the all Democratic Congressional Delegation.

The House is a little harder to gerrymander if lawmakers follow one of the newest constitutional amendments that every community with enough voters should have its own representative, but that provision was often ignored when the House map was drawn in 2012 in the name of proportional representation or the one man, one vote concept.

The representation factor is also influenced by what the House and Senate members are paid, which is $100 a year with the exception of the Senate President and the House Speaker, who earn a whopping additional $25 a year.

Unlike in most other states where house and senate members are paid a living wage, the pay in New Hampshire severely limits who can run for elected offices in the legislature.

If you have a family and hold a job to support your family, you are not likely to be in the legislature.

That means a vast majority of the people in the state really do not have someone that works for a living representing them.

Instead, you have a lot of retirees, people with wealth and those who are really representing some industry or organization but won’t tell you that when they run for office, much like the Free Staters and Libertarians.

Running for state Senate has gotten to be very expensive over the last decade, which prohibits most people from ever serving unless you are wealthy, a businessman or woman, who can adjust your time away from your work, or the spouse of a wealthy person.

And because the pay is horrible, legislators are susceptible to freebies such as trips to conventions or seminars in faraway places like California or Japan paid for by someone else.

It is much like the Clarence Thomas problem the US Supreme Court has.

And the other problem with money, is after the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, the monetary flood gates opened wide and now millions of dollars have flowed into House and Senate races from outside sources for both parties, but here the significant advantage is for Republicans who have reaped the dark money by the truckloads through organizations like Americans for Prosperity and Young Americans For Liberty to name a few where the dark money is actually fossil fuel money.

All of this skews real representation in the General Court or how else do you explain how about 70 or 80 Free Staters/Libertarians setting the agenda for the 424-member New Hampshire Legislature.

Let’s take education for example.

Over the past decade, the legislature passed bill after bill aimed at dismantling public education by requiring more and more paperwork and time-consuming activities not related to learning and then complaining about the explosion in the costs of administration.

At the same time, lawmakers have approved a state voucher system called Education Freedom Accounts that has siphoned more and more out of the state’s Education Trust Fund which is what pays for adequacy aid to school districts and charter schools to the point where what was once a $240 million surplus is now down to about $100 million also due to lower business tax revenues that go into the fund.

EFA supporters like to say the award-winning program is wildly successful, without acknowledging the awards come from a national school choice organization.

And they don’t use the word “popular” because the last survey done on the program by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center found that 45 percent of state residents disapprove of the program where much of state tax dollars pay religious school tuitions and fees and 35 percent approve of it.

One of the bills recently passed by the legislature allows a small number of school district petitioners to place spending caps on school budgets through warrant articles.

To date, all but one or two of those budget caps on school district spending have been defeated by resounding numbers, with people instead expressing their support for public education.

But you would not know of that support if all you listened to were public hearings in the Legislature.

One bill introduced this year would have gutted the content areas of what constitutes an adequate education, that the state Supreme Court ruled the state has to provide every public school student and pay for it.

Another example of the disconnect between the public and lawmakers is legalizing the recreational use of marijuana, which about three-fourths of the state’s residents support.

The legislature however, has failed to deliver although it has been trying for more than a decade.

Last year for the first time, the Senate, which has always been the solid brick wall against legalization, passed a legalization bill.

But the method for sales and distribution differed significantly from the House’s version and after a compromise was worked out that favored the Senate’s structure, the House killed the bill even though Gov. Chris Sununu, who long threatened a veto had changed his tune and agreed to accept a system that looks a lot like the state’s liquor monopoly.

And then there is climate change.

In the midst of one of the coldest and snowiest winters the state has seen in years, after record heat for the past three years, once in a century or even 500-year floods, and California, the West Coast and Canada burning, the legislature this year has voted down every bill that even hints at climate change.

This week, the House voted to do away with the Division of Wind Energy from the Department of Energy and several other agency changes to kiss the ring of President Trump and his dislike of offshore wind turbines.

The House also approved changes to the state’s energy policy that favors the continued burning of fossil fuels over renewable sources due to reliability and affordability principles.

A number of members of the House Science, Technology and Energy Committee have been the recipients of free trips to Koch Foundation seminars preaching the wisdom of continued fossil fuel consumption, which is the bedrock of the Koch empire.

How many of the state’s residents who have seen their homes flooded along the seacoast or rivers, and roads and bridges destroyed believe the state should shut the door to offshore wind?

The same money through Americans for Prosperity has fueled the anti-commuter rail linking the Granite State and Boston in the legislature which last year passed a bill forbidding the use of state money for the project despite support in Nashua and Manchester, the state’s two biggest cities.

Unfortunately, you get what you pay for but so do outside oligarchs who put considerably more money into the political process than the average citizen.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.