Ethan DeWitt - New Hampshire Bulletin

Voting laws, school budgets, and nuclear power will all be on the agenda Thursday when the House and Senate meet to take a final vote on bills this year.

New Hampshire has traditionally held its state primary election on the second Tuesday in September, which gives the primary election nominees a short stretch until the general election in November. Starting in 2028, New Hampshire will be moved up and held in June, giving the nominees of the political parties extra time to campaign.

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 governor’s office has not translated to automatic alignment.

Following years of court battles over “divisive concepts,” House Republicans have rallied around new legislation this year to bar public K-12 teachers from the “indoctrination” of Marxism and critical race theory. But the bill has an unlikely opponent in the New Hampshire Department of Justice.

A series of scheduling woes, time constraints, and partisan machinations last week upended the tradition of every bill getting a floor vote before the New Hampshire House or Senate.

A year after a Berlin man shot and killed his estranged wife, New Hampshire Republicans at the State House criticized two bills intended to penalize people who fail to turn over firearms when ordered to do so by a court.

Under the proposal, the Department of Employment Security would share the state’s W2 wage data with the courts to allow judges to determine the income of a person requesting a free attorney.

The idea, titled the “3-3 Tax Savings Plan,” would institute a 3% income tax for all residents and a $3 tax per $1,000 of equalized property value for all homeowners.

The Attorney General’s Office plans to ask the state Supreme Court to overturn its two landmark Claremont school funding rulings from the 1990s, arguing they are an improper reading of New Hampshire's constitution.

A statutory change being pushed by State House Republicans, if upheld by state courts, would introduce a new interpretation of the state’s school funding obligations laid out in the Claremont Supreme Court decisions of the 1990s.