Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Get Others to Do the Work

424 legislators paid $100 a year, no personal staff, and 1,155 bills in a session. An office of about seven drafters writes them, working through the holidays. The bills go out under someone else’s name, and nobody in New Hampshire finds this strange.

For the 2025 session, New Hampshire lawmakers filed 1,155 bills: 830 in the House, 325 in the Senate. The office that turns those requests into legal language has about two dozen people, roughly seven of them drafters. They worked every holiday from Thanksgiving to Christmas to get it done.

None of their names appear on the bills.

Robert Greene’s seventh law of power says to get others to do the work for you and always take the credit. He presents it as a maneuver against an unwitting subordinate. New Hampshire built it into the constitution instead, and the result is the most complete demonstration of the seventh law in American government.

The finding is not that anyone is cheating. It is that this state has followed Greene’s advice so universally that the advice stopped working. When every player runs the same play, the play stops being an advantage and becomes the floor.

The architecture that makes it inevitable

Start with the pay, because everything follows from it.

Two things follow from a $100 salary. Legislators need other jobs or retirement income, and no member gets personal research staff. A representative serves roughly 3,300 constituents, the smallest ratio in the country, and has no one to answer the mail.

Now add the volume: over a thousand bills a year, filed by people doing this in evenings and on weekends, on utility regulation, Medicaid financing, criminal procedure and school funding.

The gap between what the job requires and what the job pays for has to be filled by somebody. New Hampshire fills it in two places, and only one of them is on the record.

The half that works, and works honorably

The first filler is the Office of Legislative Services, and this piece is not a complaint about them.

The process starts with a Legislative Service Request. A member files an LSR that may be little more than a title and a description of the goal, sometimes in broad terms. OLS researchers and drafters then do the actual work: locating the relevant statutes, researching how other states handled it, and writing the language. The member reviews the draft and either signs off, asks for a redraft, or withdraws it. Only then does it become a numbered bill.

The office is nonpartisan and, by every account, careful. One drafter described the standard as requiring “at least four sets of eyes on it” before a request becomes a bill. Lawmakers frequently arrive with a problem rather than a solution, having heard something from a constituent without knowing what to change or how, and the research team works out what the fix would have to be.

That is skilled legal work by public employees for a fraction of private-sector rates, on a deadline that ate their holidays. The bill goes out under the sponsor’s name, and nobody finds this strange, because it is how the system was designed to run.

The half with no required record

Here is the part that matters if you want to know why a bill exists.

A bill idea can come from a legislator. It can also come from a private citizen, an interest group, a trade association, or a state agency. The only formal requirement is that a member of the House or Senate agrees to sponsor it. What gets recorded is the sponsor, the LSR title, the drafted text and the vote. What does not get recorded, anywhere, in any required form, is who walked into the member’s district and asked.

The organizations that work this system are candid about it, and their candor is the best evidence available. One statewide advocacy group tells supporters that because legislators have no research staff, they rely on constituents and advocacy organizations, and that this “provides an opportunity for individuals and groups to influence policy.” A taxpayer group’s how-to guide for getting a bill filed advises readers to prepare talking points their legislator can use with colleagues, noting plainly that “your legislator is a part-time official and may not be an expert” on the issue.

Neither is a scandal. Both accurately describe how an unpaid legislature has to function, published openly by groups telling their members how to participate.

The problem is narrower and it is real. Sponsorship is documented and origin is not, so the public record systematically captures the person taking the credit and systematically omits the person who did the work of deciding what the law should say. That is Greene’s seventh law rendered as a filing system.

The case for building it this way

The strongest argument for the design deserves a full hearing, because it is not weak.

An unpaid, unstaffed, 424-member legislature is the most accessible in the country. A resident of Northfield with a good idea and no money can get a bill filed, because her representative is a neighbor with 3,300 constituents rather than a professional politician with a gatekeeping staff. The same absence of staff that lets a trade association write a bill also lets a retiree who noticed a problem at her town hall get one written. Both walk through the same open door, and a professionalized legislature would close it to the second person long before it closed to the first.

There is also a real argument that OLS drafting improves the product. Bills written by advocates tend to be written for advocates. Routing every request through nonpartisan drafters who must reconcile new language against existing statute is a quality filter self-drafted bills would lack.

And the $100 salary buys something. It keeps the body large, keeps districts small, and keeps turnover high enough that entrenchment is harder than it is in states where a legislative seat is a career.

All of that can hold at once. The design is defensible. What is not defensible is that a system built on outside input keeps no systematic record of where the input came from.

What the arrangement is worth in dollars

There is a way to price this.

A trade association that wants a statute changed in a professional legislature has to pay for the capacity to get it changed: lobbyists, yes, but also outside counsel to draft language that survives contact with existing law. In New Hampshire, the drafting is free. It is performed by nonpartisan public employees, paid by the state, at a standard most private clients would be pleased with.

An organization arriving with a clear idea and a willing sponsor gets professional drafting at public expense, plus a sitting legislator’s name on the result. Greene describes offloading work onto a subordinate. This is better. The work goes to an institution that is good at it, cannot refuse, and takes no credit by design.

The same door is open to a resident of Tilton with no organization behind her at all, which is the honest defense of the arrangement and the reason it should not simply be closed. But the door is used far more efficiently by people who do this professionally, and the record does not distinguish between the two.

Why the seventh law is worth less than Greene thinks

Set the pieces together and something odd emerges.

He writes Law 7 as an edge: while others exhaust themselves, you harvest their effort and wear the laurels. That framing assumes the practice is uncommon. Its value comes entirely from the contrast between you and the people still doing their own work.

In the New Hampshire General Court, the practice is universal. Every member files LSRs that someone else drafts. Every member puts a name on legislation written by a professional staffer. A legislator who insisted on writing her own bill language would gain no status for it, and might well produce a worse bill.

A law that everyone follows confers no advantage on anyone. It becomes a description of the environment rather than a strategy for navigating it. That is why this scores a perfect ten on frequency and still lands at 6.0.

Compare Part Six of this series. Courting attention had a real floor and a false ceiling, but at least it distinguished between candidates. Law 7 in New Hampshire distinguishes between nobody. Its only remaining power is over the reader, who sees a name on a bill and assumes the name means authorship.

That is the through-line running back to Part Three. Every law in this series so far has turned on what the public can check. Nonpublic sessions failed for lack of a referee. Refusal phrases worked because listeners could not tell law from preference. The Laurie List changed only when outside parties forced the ledger open. Here the gap is quieter than all of them, because nothing is being hidden. The origin of a bill is simply not a field anyone is required to fill in, and a record that was never created cannot be requested.

How to find out who wanted the bill

The trail is thin, but it exists, and none of it needs a lawyer.

Read the LSR before the bill. The public LSR listing goes up before the drafted text and carries the title and the sponsor list. A title that arrives with six co-sponsors from four counties on a technical subject did not come from one member’s constituent mail. The next round, for the 2027 session, gets filed this fall, and in an election year most of it lands after November, once the new members are seated. That listing is the earliest public trace of what the next Legislature will be asked to do.

Compare the language across states. If bill text tracks language moving through other legislatures in the same season, the origin is a national organization rather than a Granite Stater. OLS researchers routinely look at how other states handled a question, so similarity alone proves nothing. Near-identical phrasing is a different matter.

Go to the hearing and watch who testifies first. Committee hearings are public. The organization that supplied a bill is usually the organization that shows up with prepared testimony, a fact sheet and a witness who has clearly read the draft more closely than most of the committee.

Ask the sponsor directly, in writing. Who brought you this idea, and did anyone outside the Office of Legislative Services help write it? There is no obligation to answer. The answer, or the refusal, tells you something either way, and it costs one email to find out which.

Next: Law 8, on making other people come to you, tested against the state’s most reliable trap: the public hearing nobody has to attend.

Fact check

Editor’s note: Commentary and analysis, not legal advice. This piece makes no allegation of wrongdoing against the Office of Legislative Services, any legislator, or any organization named or described. The practices described are lawful and, in the main, openly published by the organizations that use them. Where sources conflict on staffing figures and on New Hampshire’s world ranking by chamber size, both accounts are given in the fact-check table. The GSR Power Index is an editorial rating, not data.