Shortly after the New Hampshire Senate moved to water down the House’s “campus carry” bill that would allow college students to carry firearms, Rep. Sam Farrington, the bill’s sponsor, declared the fight wasn’t over. “We still have some time to work this out,” Farrington, a Rochester Republican, wrote on social media earlier this month, vowing to press his case in negotiations with the Senate. “It ain’t over till it’s over.”
Those negotiations never happened. Last week, the Senate refused to entertain the House’s request, dashing any final hopes of cooperation.
It was not the only example. New Hampshire’s Republican-controlled House and Senate have mostly agreed on legislation this year. But on some of the most contentious issues, the single-party control of the Legislature and the governor’s office has not translated to automatic alignment. On Thursday, one of the final voting days of the year, the two chambers clashed over some major policies, sending many of them to further negotiations in a committee of conference.
And in a handful of cases, the chambers ditched negotiations entirely.
Here is the graveyard of bills that died after the House and Senate abandoned even the idea of negotiating common ground.
Campus carry
The fate of House Bill 1793, the campus carry bill, was driven by a disagreement over half measures.
As passed by the House, the bill would have allowed students at state-funded colleges and universities to carry firearms and would have prohibited any rules against those firearms or other non-lethal weapons, such as pepper spray and TASERs. But a backlash to the idea, led by police chiefs and university officials over safety concerns, dampened support in the Senate, and several Senate Republicans raised concerns.
The Senate’s compromise proposal: changing the bill to allow faculty members to be armed and create a commission to study whether to eventually allow the same for students.
For the bill’s House Republican supporters, the Senate proposal could have been a bird in the hand — something rather than nothing. But to Farrington and others, the compromise missed the point of the bill, which was rooted in the inalienable right of students to bear arms. Those disagreements sealed the bill’s fate; after the House requested a committee of conference, the Senate rejected the request, dooming the bill.
The CHARLIE Act
Deep disagreements between the two chambers ended another hot-button bill: House Bill 1792. That bill, originally dubbed the Countering Hate and Revolutionary Leftist Indoctrination in Education Act, or CHARLIE Act, aimed at curbing certain teaching methods that endorsed Marxism, “LGBTQ+ ideology,” and other topics. It was named after Charlie Kirk, the right-wing influencer who was assassinated in September.
The Senate passed a dramatic overhaul of the bill, stripping out most of its provisions and replacing them with a new version of the 2021 law known as “divisive concepts,” which the U.S. District Court of New Hampshire struck down as unconstitutional in 2024. The state has appealed that decision to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, which has yet to issue its ruling.
Though the 2021 law passed both chambers via that year’s budget bill, the House on Thursday rejected the Senate’s attempts to bring it back.
Vaccine clinics at schools
House Bill 1449 sought to prohibit public and charter schools from holding vaccine clinics on their campuses during school hours. Both chambers approved the bill, but senators added exceptions for flu vaccine clinics and for clinics held during a public health emergency. When HB 1449 returned to the House, representatives rejected the watered-down version. They didn’t request a committee of conference to negotiate a compromise, which killed the bill.
Artificial intelligence oversight
As passed by the Senate in March, Senate Bill 657 would have created a study commission to track the effects of artificial intelligence on commerce and politics in New Hampshire, including by monitoring its impacts on education, health care, wages and the job market, consumer protection, the spread of misinformation, and campaigning.
A replace-all House amendment did not create a new commission but rather added artificial intelligence deployment and oversight to the purview of the New Hampshire Information Technology Council. It also sought to add terms to an existing requirement that the Department of Information Technology submit an annual report on state agencies’ use of artificial intelligence. The Senate refused to concur with these changes.
Two kratom bans
House Bill 1423 originally sought to make it a class B felony to threaten violence or harm against family members of public officials with the goal of coercing or influencing their official decisions. The law previously punished people only for threatening public officials themselves. However, after the House approved it, senators tacked on an unrelated amendment that would outlaw the manufacture, distribution, sale, or possession of kratom. Kratom is a drug available at convenience stores and smoke shops that doctors say can be dangerous and addictive, and regulation has yet to catch up with the speed at which it was brought into the market. After the Senate approved its version of the bill, the House rejected the amendment.
A separate bill, Senate Bill 557, also sought to ban kratom. However, the bill failed in a similar fashion. After the Senate approved it as a kratom ban (though earlier versions banned it only for people under 21), the House added a provision reshaping the way towns change their form of governance. The Senate rejected the bill with the House’s amendment.
Neither chamber requested a committee of conference on HB 1423 or SB 557.
Becoming a ‘technology-first’ state
House Bill 1685 attempted to create a committee to study whether and how New Hampshire could become a “technology-first” state for disability services. Technology-first is a framework developed by disability rights advocates designed to address a common issue within state services for people with disabilities: the perennial shortage of professional disability caregivers. Becoming a technology-first state would mean prioritizing new technologies (such as automatic medication dispensers) that could reduce the need for hard-to-find caregivers. The Senate softened the bill language, removing the term “technology first” in favor of “assistive technology.” Some advocates worried this change would result in a less comprehensive system-wide approach. When the bill returned to the House, it rejected the new language and asked the Senate for a committee of conference to attempt a compromise. The Senate declined.
Competing visions for Renewable Energy Fund dollars
As introduced, House Bill 1542 sought to eliminate the requirement that electricity providers pay penalties if they do not meet New Hampshire’s renewable energy goals in their power mix. The bill was amended before passing the House, becoming a proposal to use the state’s Renewable Energy Fund — funded by those payments — for ratepayer rebates rather than for investments in renewable energy projects.
In the Senate, the bill was referred to a study committee to evaluate the performance of the New Hampshire Renewable Portfolio Standard and the Renewable Energy Fund. That would have included an assessment of whether it would be more beneficial to ratepayers to disburse the fund as rebates or as continued investment in energy projects. (Other bills have taken aim at the Renewable Energy Fund in this and prior sessions.)
The House refused to concur with the Senate’s amended version of HB 1542.
Creating a Granite State ‘court of chancery’
One bill that did not survive the end-of-session reconciliation would have studied how to make New Hampshire look a lot more like Delaware.
House Bill 1419 would have created a study commission to explore whether to create a specialized business court modeled after the Delaware Court of Chancery, which adjudicates corporate disputes. That court has recently overseen legal challenges to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $56 billion compensation package, as well as to investor challenges to Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter.
The New Hampshire commission would be tasked with examining how to amend the state’s corporate statutes to position the state as an alternative to Delaware for resolving business disputes. It would have brought together representatives of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law, the Department of Business and Economic Affairs, and others.
But the Senate proposed shrinking the commission’s size and ambitions and converting it into a committee consisting of just three House representatives, with no senators or other members. The Senate’s version would also have shortened the study from two years to one. The House rejected that suggestion.
Free parking for veterans
As passed by the House, House Bill 1768 would have allowed state-resident veterans to park for free at state parks, provided they have a veteran license plate on their vehicle. The bill would have also raised the threshold for gifts and donations that the New Hampshire Department of Natural and Cultural Resources could accept without Governor and Executive Council approval from $2,500 to $50,000 — according to the bill, in order to offset revenue losses from the free parking program — and allowed the department to solicit donations.
A Senate amendment removed the free veteran parking program. The House refused to concur with that change.