The Sharia Caucus of Seabrook

While New Hampshire families watched gas hit $4 and home prices cross $530,000, ten Republican state reps spent their 2026 session on an anti-Sharia resolution, a ban on Chinese homebuyers, and an amendment to seat a Holocaust-denial group on the state’s Holocaust Commission. All three efforts failed. One of the sponsors posted about it on Facebook as if he were the one who got cheated.

On March 16, state Rep. Matt Sabourin dit Choinière of Seabrook posted a message to his Facebook page titled “Matt4NH.” The post was short, the grievance was direct, and the intended audience was clear.

“Some of the bills I (co)sponsored this year didn’t go as far as I had hoped,” he wrote, “(anti-Sharia resolution, prohibiting real-property ownership and university attendance of Chinese Nationals). My amendment proposal relating to historical revisionism went as far as expected, however.”

Read that one more time. A sitting New Hampshire state representative is publicly disappointed that the legislature didn’t do more to ban Sharia law, kick Chinese students out of UNH, and confiscate property from Chinese nationals. Then he notes — on a public Facebook page with his name on it — that his “historical revisionism” amendment went as far as he expected it to.

What the post doesn’t say, but what the record does, is that the “historical revisionism” amendment was Sabourin dit Choinière’s attempt to add a seat on the New Hampshire Commission on Holocaust and Genocide Studies for a group that disputes the death tolls and denies the existence of Nazi extermination programs. Three witnesses were flown in from Michigan to testify for the amendment, apparently at his invitation. They are, by any honest account, Holocaust deniers.

This is not a gaffe. It is not a taken-out-of-context quote. It is a Facebook post written by the man himself, listing his legislative achievements and setbacks, in his own words, on his own page, and the tally is: sad the Muslim and Chinese bills died, satisfied with how far the Holocaust Commission amendment got.

This is what a portion of the House Republican caucus chose to spend the 2026 session on.

What HR 34 Said

House Resolution 34, introduced December 1, 2025, is a non-binding resolution “declaring that Sharia law and political Islam represent an existential threat to the state and country and that any deference to Sharia law by a government institution is prohibited.” It has no force of law. It creates no statute. It changes no RSA. It is a paper statement that the body of New Hampshire lawmakers, as a symbolic act, wishes to go on record as opposed to a system of religious law that exactly zero New Hampshire government institutions have ever shown any interest in adopting.

Ten Republican House members put their names on it. The LegiScan record confirms ten Republican sponsors — a partisan bill with zero Democratic support.

The resolution was referred to the House Committee on State-Federal Relations and Veterans Affairs. On February 20, 2026, that committee voted 13 to 3 to refer HR 34 for interim study — the parliamentary equivalent of putting a bill in a drawer — and reported it out on the regular calendar. A minority filed an “Ought to Pass” report. Rep. Michael Moffett (R-Loudon/Canterbury), one of the resolution’s ten co-sponsors, chairs no committee that heard it.

On the House floor, HR 34 never received a recorded vote. Along with 74 bills, it died without debate when the March 12 calendar deadline expired and House Republican leadership, facing 344 bills in two days, adjourned with those bills still waiting. HR 34 was dispatched by arithmetic, not conscience.

That is the best-case reading. A less generous reading is that House Republican leadership knew the resolution was an embarrassment, would not survive a floor vote, and was content to let the calendar do what the gavel would not. Either way, the result is the same: the NH House, on the record, went to the edge of passing a symbolic anti-Muslim declaration and pulled back.

The Roster

The sponsors of HR 34 are public information. The resolution’s prime sponsor is Rep. Matt Sabourin dit Choinière of Seabrook, and the co-sponsors are Reps. Mike Belcher, JD Bernardy, Travis Corcoran, Aboul Khan, Linda McGrath, Michael Moffett, Joe Sweeney, Joe Alexander and Peter Mehegan. The pattern across the group is worth studying not because the ten men are especially powerful — they are not — but because the same small bench of names keeps showing up on the session’s most embarrassing legislation.

Sabourin dit Choinière, the Seabrook freshman who posted the Facebook lament, is the fullest expression of the pattern. He is the prime sponsor of HR 34 (anti-Sharia). He is a sponsor of HB 1792, the “CHARLIE Act,” which would ban critical race theory and LGBTQ+ topics in public schools and let parents sue school districts for up to $10,000 per violation. He is a sponsor of CACR 28, a constitutional amendment to grant “every denomination of Christian” special protections in the state constitution and authorize the public funding of “Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality.” He proposed the amendment to seat a Holocaust-denial organization on the state Holocaust Commission. And he is one of five co-sponsors of HCR 15, a resolution to commemorate the slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, whose prime sponsor is Rep. Bryan Morse.

He is one man. He represents one district. Rockingham District 30 covers a slice of Seabrook. The district elects two representatives to the 400-seat NH House. Sabourin dit Choinière is a propertarian Christian activist with an outsized footprint on the session’s most indefensible bills, and the reason his footprint is outsized is that the House Republican leadership lets him have it.

Rep. Kristin Noble (R-Bedford) chairs the House Education Policy Committee. She is a co-sponsor of the CHARLIE Act. Granite Post News reported in January that leaked Signal chats show her advocating for a return to segregated schools. She is the chair of the committee that writes New Hampshire education policy.

Rep. Moffett is also, in a separate matter, a sponsor of a bipartisan psilocybin medical-use bill, which is one of the two or three useful things the legislature did in the 2026 session. A man can be both a reasonable voice on one issue and a co-sponsor of a legislative embarrassment on another. Both things are true.

Rep. Julius Soti is the prime sponsor of CACR 28, the Protestant-theocracy amendment. Rep. Kelley Potenza is a co-sponsor. Rep. John Sellers is a co-sponsor. Several of these names overlap with HR 34’s sponsor list. The same caucus sponsors most of this.

HB 1606 — Killed 16–0

The Chinese-nationals bill Sabourin dit Choinière references is HB 1606, which would have regulated real-property ownership by Chinese nationals and imposed civil, criminal, and administrative penalties. Sponsorship was again partisan: six Republicans, zero Democrats. The House Commerce and Consumer Affairs Committee recommended Inexpedient to Legislate on February 4, 2026 by a vote of 16 to 0. A unanimous committee vote — every Republican on the committee, every Democrat on the committee — to kill the bill. It was placed on the consent calendar, and the House adopted the ITL motion on a voice vote February 19, 2026.

There is a common defense of bills like this, which is that New Hampshire already restricts foreign-adversary land purchases near military installations. It does not. SB 162, filed in 2025, would have prohibited foreign principals from countries including China, Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea from acquiring property within ten miles of six identified protected facilities, including Pease, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and the New Boston Space Force Station. That bill was a national-security measure with a defined footprint, and it is the shape the argument would have to take to be serious. It never became law. Its eight sponsors were all Republicans, it was reported Inexpedient to Legislate on a 17-0 committee vote, and the House killed it on a voice vote on January 7, 2026.

HB 1606 was not that bill. HB 1606 targeted all Chinese nationals, statewide, with criminal penalties for owning property. That is not national security. That is ethnic legislation. The 16–0 committee vote confirmed what the sponsors apparently needed to be told.

The “university attendance” portion of the Facebook post — the claim that Chinese students should also be barred from NH colleges — does not appear to correspond to a separately filed bill. Either Sabourin dit Choinière conflated a failed floor amendment with a bill, or he is referencing the federal Stop CCP VISAs Act, a U.S. House bill that has nothing to do with the New Hampshire General Court.

What the Legislature Was Not Working On

The most important fact about HR 34 and HB 1606 is not the text of either one. It is the opportunity cost.

The 2026 NH legislative session convened against a backdrop of real crises. Median home prices crossed $530,000 in March, up 78 percent since 2019 while wages rose only 28 percent. The 2026–2027 state budget did not renew $35 million in one-time housing appropriations — $10 million for Invest NH and $25 million for the Affordable Housing Fund — at the moment of maximum need. Gas prices jumped from $3 to over $4 a gallon between February 28 and April 7 as the Strait of Hormuz remained closed following the Iran war. Child care costs an average $15,000 a year for an infant in this state. The Concord Board of Education approved a 12.2 percent property tax hike and cut close to 40 staff positions because the state’s funding formula punishes cities for rising home values. The Laconia Village redevelopment, which could add 2,000 units to the Lakes Region, has no state gap financing because the state let those programs lapse.

Those are the problems a legislature exists to address. Those are the problems a Seabrook state rep’s constituents are living with. A family in Seabrook pays the same gas prices, the same median home price, the same child care bill, as a family in Laconia or Keene.

Rep. Sabourin dit Choinière’s Facebook page does not mention any of that. What it mentions is an anti-Sharia resolution he wishes had gone farther.

The National Weather

HR 34 did not emerge from a vacuum. It emerged from a national Republican movement that has made anti-Muslim rhetoric a 2026 campaign theme. The U.S. House now hosts a “Sharia-Free America” Caucus with more than 50 members, co-chaired by Texas Reps. Chip Roy and Keith Self. The caucus has introduced two federal bills targeting Sharia, held a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on February 10 that featured Robert Spencer — a commentator the Southern Poverty Law Center says was referenced dozens of times in the manifesto of the 2011 Norway mass shooter who killed 77 people — and provided a steady stream of incendiary quotes. Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles said on X that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” House Speaker Mike Johnson defended the rhetoric, saying: “The demand to impose Shariah law in America is a serious problem.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has designated the caucus an anti-Muslim hate group. There is no documented, successful effort anywhere in the United States to impose Sharia as a competing public legal system. It is a talking point.

HR 34 is the New Hampshire branch office of that talking point. The text of the resolution cites purported “informal Sharia tribunals” in Minnesota, New York, and California — states that are not New Hampshire. It cites concerns about divorce and family disputes in Muslim communities — communities whose voluntary religious mediation is no different in structure from the Jewish Beth Din, the Catholic declaration of nullity, or the Mennonite conflict-resolution process, none of which the sponsors have proposed to ban. The resolution does not name a single New Hampshire incident, a single New Hampshire court case, or a single New Hampshire government institution that has deferred to Sharia law.

It does not name one because there isn’t one.

The Protestant-Theocracy Tell

The tell, and the reason the whole project is a joke before it’s an offense, is CACR 28. The same legislators who sponsored the anti-Sharia resolution on the grounds that religious law must never influence American legal institutions also sponsored a constitutional amendment to enshrine Protestant Christianity as a privileged religion in the New Hampshire constitution and authorize the public funding of Protestant religious instruction.

Rep. Sabourin dit Choinière’s name is on both.

Rep. Potenza’s name is on both. Rep. Sellers’s name is on both. Rep. Soti is the prime sponsor of CACR 28. The sponsors of the anti-Sharia resolution and the sponsors of the Christian-theocracy amendment overlap so substantially that it cannot be explained as coincidence. The position is not that religion should stay out of American government. The position is that the wrong religion should stay out of American government. Their religion is fine.

A lawmaker who files one of these bills might be a principled secularist with a narrow focus. A lawmaker who files both is not a secularist. He is a sectarian, and the sect has a preferred legal status he’d like codified.

CACR 28, for the record, was also killed — ITL adopted on voice vote March 5. The Protestant-theocracy amendment and the anti-Sharia resolution and the Chinese-homebuyer ban all failed, all in the same session, and none got the recorded roll call their sponsors were hoping to use in primaries. This is a mercy for everyone except the sponsors.

The Holocaust Commission

The amendment Sabourin dit Choinière says “went as far as expected” deserves a paragraph of its own, because it is the part of his Facebook post that moves from bad legislation into something worse.

HB 1162 is a routine extension of the New Hampshire Commission on Holocaust and Genocide Studies, pushing its reporting and repeal date to November 1, 2029. It is uncontroversial. It passed and was enacted as Chapter 13, 2026. In the hearing, Sabourin dit Choinière proposed adding a 13th seat on the Commission for a representative from the “Committee for the Open Debate on the Holocaust and Genocide Studies.” That group’s core activity is to dispute whether Nazi extermination programs existed, whether gas chambers functioned as alleged, and whether the death tolls are accurate. It is a Holocaust-denial organization wearing the costume of academic inquiry.

Three witnesses were flown in from Michigan, apparently at Sabourin dit Choinière’s invitation, to testify in support of the amendment. All three are associated with antisemitic rhetoric. Rep. Anita Burroughs, granddaughter of a man whose entire family was murdered by Nazi precursors, wrote in her newsletter that Sabourin dit Choinière’s conduct “reflects a willingness — by an elected official — to legitimize antisemitic ideology under the guise of ‘open debate.’”

The amendment was not adopted. It was withdrawn after public backlash, and it does not appear in the enacted law. What did happen is that Holocaust deniers were invited to testify in the New Hampshire State House, and the testimony happened. That is the part that cannot be withdrawn.

The Seabrook Problem

Seabrook, the town Sabourin dit Choinière represents, is not a wealthy suburb with the luxury of performance politics. Its median household income is below the state average. Its housing stock is older and more modest. Seabrook Station, the nuclear plant on the coast, dominates the town’s tax base and is also, as Granite State Report has covered, at the center of Governor Ayotte’s proposed nuclear-campus expansion — a policy with enormous local stakes for exactly the kind of district Sabourin dit Choinière was elected to represent.

None of that is on his Facebook page. What is on his Facebook page is the anti-Sharia resolution.

A Seabrook voter reading Matt4NH the afternoon of March 16 would learn nothing about the property taxes rising at Seabrook Station, nothing about the state’s share of local education aid, nothing about the workforce-housing dynamics that determine whether their kids can afford to stay in town. They would learn, instead, that their state representative wishes he could have done more to legislate against Muslims and Chinese people, and is satisfied with how far he got toward legitimizing Holocaust denial.

This is, to use his own word, a kind of legislative revisionism. It revises the job description of a state representative from “advocate for my constituents’ material interests” to “national cultural warrior posting on Facebook from Concord.” It is generational malpractice dressed up as patriotism.

The House, to Its Credit

It is worth saying plainly what the New Hampshire House did right this session, because it matters to any honest accounting.

HR 34 died. HB 1606 died 16–0 in committee, with every Republican on the committee voting to kill it. CACR 28 died. The CHARLIE Act drew public opposition from the NH Attorney General’s office itself, on constitutional grounds — an extraordinary break for a Republican-led DOJ — and died in May. The Holocaust Commission amendment was not adopted. Multiple death penalty reinstatement bills were unanimously recommended dead by the Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, chaired by Rep. Terry Roy (R-Deerfield).

That is the House working the way the House is supposed to work. The committee system strangled most of this in the crib. Some of that strangling was done by Republicans voting against their own side. The process, imperfectly, did its job.

But the process shouldn’t have had to. These bills shouldn’t have been filed. The committee hours they consumed, the legislative counsel time spent drafting them, the public hearings held, the witnesses flown in from Michigan — every minute of that was minutes not spent on SWEPT reform, not spent on Invest NH, not spent on the Claremont case, not spent on the housing crisis, not spent on the energy shock, not spent on the problems a New Hampshire family sat down at a kitchen table and asked their representative to go fix.

Every representative on this roster who seeks re-election will be asking voters for another two years in November 2026. The question those voters should carry into the booth is not whether they fear Sharia law or Chinese graduate students or whatever next threat the caucus has manufactured. The question is whether the people who spent the session legislating against those imaginary threats are capable of legislating against the real ones.

On the evidence of Matt4NH, the answer is on the record.

Dexter Dow is the editor of Granite State Report and the author of Generational Malpractice. Contact: granitestatereport@gmail.com.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.