Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Make Other People Come to You

Every bill in New Hampshire gets a public hearing. In Concord, on a weekday, during working hours, in person, in whichever building the Legislature chooses. The most open rule in the country turns out to be a filter, and the people who pass through it are the ones paid to.

New Hampshire promises something almost no other legislature in the country promises. Every bill filed gets a public hearing. Not the leadership’s bills, not the ones a committee chair likes. All of them, more than a thousand a session, each with a room, a date, a sign-in sheet and a microphone.

Here is what the promise does not say. The room is in Concord. The date is a weekday. The time is during working hours. You have to be there in person to speak, because neither chamber takes testimony by video. And for the entire 2026 session the room was not even in the building most people would look for it in, because the Legislative Office Building was closed for maintenance and every House hearing moved to 1 Granite Place.

Robert Greene’s eighth law of power says to make other people come to you, and to use bait if necessary. Force the other side onto your ground and they arrive already at a disadvantage. New Hampshire’s hearing guarantee is the most generous version of that law in American government, and the bait is the guarantee itself.

The finding is that Law 8 works exactly as Greene says it does, and the winner is not the Legislature. When the ground is a weekday morning in a Concord committee room, the people who reliably arrive are the people paid to arrive. The most open rule in the country is also one of its most effective filters.

The promise, and how close it came to ending

The hearing guarantee is not a courtesy. It sits alongside two other near-unique New Hampshire rules: any of the 424 members may file as many bills as they like, and every bill gets a vote on the House floor. Committees here cannot kill a bill; their recommendations of ought to pass or inexpedient to legislate are advice to the full chamber, nothing more.

In January 2025 House Republican leaders tried to change that. Majority Leader Jason Osborne proposed a rule letting a committee table a bill without a hearing on a three-quarters vote, sending it to a tabling calendar where it would die unless the full House pulled it back. Anna Brown of Citizens Count called it “a major departure from tradition in New Hampshire.” The House voted the proposal down on Convening Day.

Two things passed the same day that got less attention. The threshold to special-order a bill, rescheduling its floor vote, dropped from a three-fifths supermajority to a simple majority, 211 to 170. And committees no longer have to give public notice before voting on bills in executive session. A chair can now schedule the vote and hold it without telling anyone in advance.

Read those together. The public kept its guaranteed hearing. It lost its guaranteed notice of the vote that follows.

The ground

Greene’s insight is that whoever sets the location holds the advantage before anyone speaks. Apply it to a New Hampshire hearing and the terms stack up quickly.

Testimony is in person. Citizens Count, which publishes the plainest guide to the process, states it flatly: the House and Senate “do not allow people to give testimony by Zoom.” You can register support or opposition online, and in the House you can upload a written statement, but if you want to be heard by the committee you drive to Concord.

The hours are working hours. Committees sit on weekdays, in the morning and early afternoon, in the months between January and May, which is when the state’s roughly 1,100 bills get their hearings. A Senate hearing calendar entry reads like a workday appointment: Room 100, State House, 1:15 p.m., Tuesday.

The building is whichever building the Legislature chooses. From September 2025 through October 2026 the Legislative Office Building was closed, and House hearings ran at 1 Granite Place, in the South Building. Anyone who learned where hearings happen from a civics class or a previous visit went to the wrong address.

None of this is malicious. Buildings need maintenance and committees need daylight. But the sum is a venue that a working adult from Colebrook or Hinsdale cannot attend without taking a day off, driving two hours each way and hoping the bill comes up before the room empties for lunch.

Who comes

The best evidence for who reliably shows up is who writes the instruction manuals.

The guides to testifying in Concord are published by New Futures, Disability Rights Center New Hampshire, the New Hampshire Network, Citizens Count and Granite State Taxpayers. Those are advocacy and civic organizations. They publish the guides because their staff and members are the regular users, and because the system needs explaining to everyone else. One of them tells readers to arrive early, bring a copy of their remarks for every committee member, and prepare a two-minute statement. That is professional advice for a professional venue.

A lobbyist’s job is to be in that room. An agency’s legislative liaison is paid to be in that room. A trade association budgets for the person who sits in that room from January to May. A resident the bill lands on has a job, a commute and no reason to know the hearing exists until it has happened.

That is the filter. It was not designed as one. Greene would say the design does not matter; the ground does the work either way.

What the state built to lower the cost

Fairness requires noting what New Hampshire has done about this, because it has done more than most.

The online sign-in lets anyone register a position on a bill by 11:59 p.m. on the day of the hearing, and those tallies are read into the record. The House accepts written testimony through the same form. Hearings are streamed live on YouTube, so the room can be watched from anywhere. And the sign-in form itself carries a notice worth reading twice: the information submitted will be “considered public records subject to disclosure under the Right To Know Law.” Who signed in for and against every bill, and from which town, is public.

Those are real openings. They also share a limit. Every one of them lowers the cost of watching or registering. None lowers the cost of speaking. The committee still hears voices only from the people in the room, and the room is still in Concord on a Tuesday.

Then the guarantee cracked

On March 12, 2026, the House faced 344 bills over two days and a midnight deadline to act on them. Leadership arranged the calendar so bills recommended ought to pass came first and bills recommended to be killed or shelved came after. When the gavel fell Thursday afternoon, 74 bills had not been voted on. They died.

Every bill gets a hearing and every bill gets a vote is, as the New Hampshire Bulletin put it that week, “a cherished State House maxim.” In March it stopped being true for 74 of them. The public had come to Concord for those hearings. The Legislature did not finish coming to the floor.

That is the reverse of Law 8, and it deserves a name. The state made people come to it and then did not show up for the half of the transaction that was its own.

Where the eighth law stands

The scoring on this one splits between what the rule promises and what the venue delivers.

Greene is right that the ground decides. New Hampshire proves it by accident: the most participatory rule in American legislatures produces a room full of professionals, not because anyone excluded the public but because the venue selected against them. Weekday, daytime, in person, Concord. Four conditions, and the population that can meet all four is the population paid to.

Where the law fails is in who benefits. Greene writes it for the party that sets the ground. In Concord the Legislature sets the ground and gains almost nothing from it. The advantage flows to whoever can afford to stand on that ground every day, which is a different group entirely.

That connects to Part Seven. The bill’s origin goes unrecorded, and its hearing is attended by people whose organizations may have supplied it. A resident who wants to know who wanted a bill and who showed up to defend it is looking, in most cases, at the same names.

How to use the ground anyway

Sign in online, every time, even if you cannot attend. The tally is read into the record, and the form is open until 11:59 p.m. on hearing day. A bill with 400 opposed on the sign-in and three in the room is a bill the committee has to explain.

Read the sign-in list for a bill you care about. It is a public record. Note the organizations next to the names. Cross it against the lobbyist registry at the Secretary of State’s office and you can measure, for that bill, what share of the room was paid to be there.

Watch the livestream, then write to the committee. You cannot testify remotely, but you can hear exactly what was said and respond to it in writing before the executive session. That vote can now be scheduled without notice, so write the day of the hearing, not the week after.

If you do go, go with the four conditions in mind. Weekday, daytime, in person, Concord. Know the building. In 2027 the House hearings return to the Legislative Office Building. Check before you drive.

Next: Law 9, on winning through action rather than argument, tested against a chamber that debates a thousand bills a year and decides most of them on a consent calendar.

Fact check

Editor’s note: Commentary and analysis, not legal advice. No individual is accused of anything. The organizations named publish their testimony guides openly and are cited as evidence of who uses the process, not as targets. The claim that hearing rooms are populated mainly by compensated participants is an inference stated as such in the fact-check table; the sign-in records that would test it are public, and the method is described above. The GSR Power Index is an editorial rating, not data.