Ethics committee recommends censure for NH lawmaker over “defamatory” X posts

A New Hampshire ethics committee wants to censure a state rep for being nasty on X. Not for taking bribes, not for cooking the books on a bill, but for posts. That alone should make people pause. Legislative bodies policing the tone of their own members' tweets is a road that ends somewhere none of us should want to go, no matter who's holding the gavel this session.

We're not defending Spillane's posts sight unseen. If he genuinely defamed a colleague, called someone a liar with no basis, made things up out of whole cloth, that's a real problem and there's a legal remedy for it already. It's called a defamation suit. What we don't need is a legislature's ethics panel functioning as a manners police, deciding which insults cross a line that shifts depending on who's in the majority that year.

Here's the practical worry. Once a body votes to censure a member for "harassing" colleagues online, the definition of harassment becomes whatever the committee wants it to be next time. Today it's a Republican backbencher with a big mouth on social media. Tomorrow it could be anyone who criticizes leadership a little too pointedly in public. Legislatures are supposed to be rowdy, argumentative places. Sanding down the edges in the name of decorum tends to protect incumbents and insiders more than it protects the public.

If Spillane crossed a real legal line, let the courts sort it out. If this is really just colleagues who got their feelings hurt by a loudmouth on X, a censure vote isn't accountability. It's a warning shot to anyone else in that building who might get too blunt for comfort.