New Hampshire Executive Councilor Karen Liot Hill, D-Lebanon, describes current efforts to impeach her or force her to resign as a partisan attack by state Republicans.
Impeachment, of course, is inherently a political, not a judicial, process. The decisions are made by a legislative body, which is by definition political. The real question in any particular impeachment is whether it is a nakedly political exercise or has a substantive basis in fact.
As our colleague Clare Shanahan has reported, the New Hampshire Constitution provides that an executive councilor may be impeached by the House of Representatives and tried by the Senate for “bribery, corruption, malpractice or maladministration.” Based on what is known so far, applying that standard to the conduct at issue here is not merely a stretch but an intellectual contortion.
The background is as follows. The Legislature this year enacted and Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed into law a requirement that when seeking an absentee ballot, voters must submit a copy of their photo ID or a notarized application. In other words, yet another Republican attempt to suppress voting by groups thought to lean Democratic.
On Aug. 5, Liot Hill met with an attorney for Elias Law Group, a Washington, D.C.-based law firm that specializes in voting rights cases. Subsequently, she used her official government email to contact five leaders who work with New Hampshire seniors and disabled residents inviting them to contact that attorney.
The basis for the Republican complaint against Liot Hill is that her actions constituted unlawful political activity by inviting a lawsuit against the state, which the taxpayers would ultimately have to pay to defend.
There’s nothing illegal that we know of in a public official inviting a lawsuit against the state. In fact, the Republican majority in the Legislature has passed several acts in recent years that they knew or should have known were of dubious legality and thereby invited well-grounded lawsuits against the state, some of them successful. Think of the “divisive concepts” education law, for instance.
This past session they passed legislation altering the terms of the Youth Development Center Settlement Fund, which lawyers for those who were abused as children while in state custody are now challenging in court and which the state is defending.
And, of course, the Legislature’s 30-year refusal to obey the state Supreme Court’s mandate to fund an adequate education for all New Hampshire children has drawn multiple lawsuits that the taxpayers are obliged to pay to defend.
So, we guess the question here is which party gets to issue an invitation to sue the state.
The email issue raises the question of what other executive councilors, executive branch employees or legislators, if any, have used their official email to communicate with law firms or advocacy groups with an eye to influencing the political process for partisan purposes. The Republicans agitating for Liot Hill’s removal need to make full disclosure of any such communications under the standard they have articulated.
Finally, Liot Hill notes that she made contact with Elias Law Group at the behest of a Hanover constituent with an interest in voting rights. Executive councilors are elected by district, not statewide, and thus are duty bound to conscientiously represent their constituents to the best of their ability. If that means taking issue with an act of the Legislature that negatively impacts the people she represents and trying to overturn it, that would seem to be well within the scope of her responsibilities.
Perhaps more information will be disclosed that will bolster the Republicans’ case, but so far it displays all the characteristics of a partisan hit job, as Liot Hill has suggested. That impression is further bolstered by the Republican State Committee’s rehashing of Liot Hill’s two driving under the influence offenses in 2010 and 2018. Given that those were public knowledge when she was elected to the Executive Council, one assumes that the voters did not find this old news disqualifying.
There is a warning embedded in all this for the state’s Republicans, who hold legislative and Executive Council majorities, as well as the governor’s and attorney general’s offices. They are defining on the fly what constitutes acceptable political activity. The level of scrutiny they apply to Liot Hill’s actions will be the standard that they will be held to when Democrats next take control of the state’s levers of power. What goes around comes around.