Where’s the roll call on SB 66? (Update: Found!)

Update: a few hours after this post went up, so did the Senate roll calls for SB 66. View them at this link. The first roll call listed is the 8-week amendment that failed on a 12-12 vote. Sens. Jeb Bradley (R-Wolfeboro) and Dan Innis (R-New Castle) joined the Senate’s ten Democrats in rejecting that language. They did support the 20-week amendment, which passed 14-10. 

The thing about legislative roll calls is that they’re public. They tie elected officials to particular votes. They’re an accountability measure.

During the debate on Senate Bill 66, the fetal homicide measure passed yesterday by the New Hampshire Senate, three roll call votes were taken, according to the official docket for the bill, accessed via the General Court’s web site.

Docket of SB 66 as posted 11:30 a.m., 2/17/2017.

The first roll call (“RC”) was on an amendment; the vote was 12-12; the amendment failed (“AF”). This was the attempt to change the bill’s language to 8 weeks, instead of keeping the original “viability.”

The second roll call was on the amendment to replace “viability” with 20 weeks. This one passed (“AA” or “amendment adopted”) 14-10. The third roll call was to accept the bill as amended, and on another 14-10 vote, the bill passed.

Those RC notations are all hyperlinked to the page that ought to give us the roll calls: each Senator’s name, each Senator’s vote. Instead, we have this.

Record indicating no roll calls on SB 66, as viewed 11:30 a.m. 2/17/2017.

Each day’s roll calls are usually posted online by the end of the day. The recent House right-to-work roll call was online within ten minutes of when the vote occurred.

Personally, I’d like to know the breakdown on that 12-12 vote. I feel safe in saying all ten Democratic senators opposed the bill in all its proposed versions. So who are the two Republicans who couldn’t support the 8-week amendment?

I could just call the Senate clerk or call a Senator. But there’s that thing about roll calls being public. There’s that roll call page on the web site.

I’ll update this when and if the roll calls are posted.

 

So I noticed the national election…

This’ll be brief, so if you’re sick of election postmortems, bear with me.

I publicly declared last June my refusal to support either of the major presidential candidates. I saw (and see) no reason to recant. But here we are. Donald Trump is president-elect, and he is my president, whether I like it or not.

So was Barack Obama. You know what happens when I say he’s not my president? I reject my own right as an American citizen to call out him and his Administration for actions and policies. The president, any president, owes me accountability. I will not reject that.

The president-elect has said at least one encouraging thing. From his President-Elect web page (greatagain.gov; never let it be said the man forgets brand identity) on healthcare: “Protect individual conscience in healthcare; Protect innocent human life from conception to natural death, including the most defenseless and those Americans with disabilities.”

His opponent wouldn’t be saying any such thing.

Now we have a benchmark, one that the president-elect has set up himself, against which we may measure his actions.

The March for Life on January 27 is now of heightened importance. It will be the first major public gathering letting then-President Trump know that we’re watching. Copy that message to our upcoming pro-abortion congressional delegation.