Mike Sylvia: Democrats planning charade of a year-ending legislative session

To The Daily Sun,

Friday March 13 started very early for the House of Representatives in Concord, as we where still working the session that had begun 14 hours prior to midnight. We were up late working because of the failure of the Democrat majority to properly handle the scheduling of House business. Perhaps they should have skipped the day wasted reprimanding legislators for NOT violating the House rules. We finished our session around 4 a.m. By 5:15 p.m. the governor would declare a state of emergency to deal with the coming pandemic of COVID-19.

In mid-March of 2020 no one would question the proper coarse of action taken by the governor. The models touted by experts warned of hospitals being overrun with seriously ill patients, many of whom would be in ICU units and require ventilators to be kept alive.

By middle May it was becoming clear that our hospitals would not be overrun with COVID-19 patients. Hospitals operated with over 90 percent of their beds available through the surge.

With many executive orders in place limiting social behavior the governor was in a difficult position. If he did not continue the state of emergency all of the executive orders would be removed and business would be restored to its regular statutory controls. He viewed the option to end the state of emergency as too risky, in part because he might be targeted with responsibility for those who would die from the disease.

While the governor wrestled with running the state from the corner office, the Democrat majority Legislature sat back and only spoke up to fruitlessly sue for control of federal funds. The only thing stopping the Legislature from meeting was the Democrat leadership. They have been happy to leave all the work of managing a fading crisis in the hands of the governor. There is little doubt they look forward to using such powers with the flimsiest excuse in the future.

Now it is very clear that this disease is almost entirely a problem affecting people in long-term-care facilities. Attention must be focused on the vulnerable and the rest of us need to be aware of contacts that may be connected to those facilities.

House Speaker Shurtleff and Senate President Soucy have cooked up a pageant to give the appearance of "doing the people's work" by scheduling an abbreviated calendar of events to close out the session. The outcome they desire is to stuff the Democrats' wish list into a few bills and send them off to the governor for vetoes — campaign theatrics, pure and simple.

Republicans, being in the minority, have one tool: stopping a rule change (which requires 2/3 of those voting). It is a tool that must be used to stop the sham of appearing to do the people's work. Pretending to be productive is simply lying and wasting tax money putting on a show. Democrats will cry “obstruction;” that’s fine, stopping sewage from flowing into the lake is obstruction of which to be proud.

Rep. Mike Sylvia

Belmont