By Jason Osborne
Six years ago, the people of New Hampshire handed Republicans the majority of both legislative chambers and asked us to do something simple: protect what makes our state special.
Let families keep more of what they earn. Let them have more say in how they live. And most of all, keep New Hampshire a place where people matter more than politics.
Today I am announcing that I am running to be the next Speaker of the New Hampshire House, because that work is not finished and I intend to see it through.
Like most other Granite State families, mine didn't come here by accident. We chose New Hampshire over every other state in the country because of what this place still believes about freedom and self-government, and because we wanted to raise our children somewhere that trusts people to run their own lives. I have never taken that for granted, and I have spent the last eight years in Republican leadership working to make sure no one in Concord takes it for granted either.
The principles behind everything we have done are simple. They're familiar. And yet they're still very powerful:
When government takes less, families do better. When parents are trusted, children do better. When the state gets out of the way, the economy does better.
These are not just platitudes to me. They are the reason my family chose to make New Hampshire our home, and they are the reason I have fought to keep this the freest state in the country.
Look at what our majority has delivered.
We cut taxes, and then we cut them again. We eliminated the last personal income tax — the tax on interest and dividends — entirely, so that retirees and savers are no longer punished for doing the responsible thing.
We made the largest investment in education in the history of the state while at the same time expanding Education Freedom Accounts so that a child's future is decided by their parents and not by their ZIP code.
We reformed health care in a way that opens the market and expands real choices for patients, rather than papering over a broken system with another round of subsidies.
We took on the energy policies that drive up the cost of heating a home and running a business, and we have begun the hard work of bringing those prices back down. We strengthened the right to keep and bear arms until New Hampshire's Second Amendment protections became the strongest in the nation. That is a record any Granite Stater can be proud of, and it happened because we had the majority to make it real.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that none of this is permanent. We have to keep fighting for it every single day, because all that we've accomplished can be undone in a single session if the other side wins the gavel.
We should be honest about what they would do with it. The Democratic Party in this state has told us exactly who they are. They proposed a billion-dollar income tax on the steps of the State House, and when we gave them the chance to vote for a constitutional ban on an income tax, they refused. They would tax your wages, raise your property taxes anyway, pull children back into a one-size-fits-none school system, and trade the New Hampshire Advantage for the failed policies found back in the states people are fleeing to come here.
Give Democrats the chance, and they would turn New Hampshire into Massachusetts almost overnight. I am not willing to let that happen, and I do not believe the voters are either.
So here is my commitment: I am not waiting for November to make the case.
I am going to spend this entire summer on the road with our candidates, in every corner of the state, in the districts that will decide the majority. I will help them sharpen their message, knock on doors, raise the money, and win the arguments on the ground where elections are actually decided. We are not playing defense, and we are not running merely to maintain the status quo. We are running to grow our ranks, because a larger majority means a stronger New Hampshire, and it means the gains we have made can be locked in and expanded for the next generation rather than relitigated every two years.
The pathway to the speaker's chair runs directly through that effort. I am asking my colleagues to support me not because of a title, but because of a plan that starts with winning at the ballot box and ends with a House that delivers. We earn the gavel by earning the majority, and we earn the majority by showing up everywhere and giving the people of this state a clear choice between the freedom they already enjoy and the higher taxes and smaller lives the other side is offering. A larger majority is not about comfort or about easier votes. It is about being able to pass the reforms that matter without watching them die by a single seat, and about finally putting an income tax ban in the Constitution where no future legislature can touch it.
I have never been interested in leading for its own sake. I am not running to be somebody, but to do something. I am interested in results, and the results we have delivered over six years speak for themselves. I am running for speaker to protect those results, to build on them, and to make sure that the New Hampshire our children inherit is even more free and more prosperous than the one we were lucky enough to find.
Let's go win it.
Jason Osborne is the Majority Leader of the New Hampshire House of Representatives and a state representative from Auburn.