SO NOW that Jeanne Shaheen has decided to depart the political scene at the end of her current senatorial term - and here’s hoping that another Shaheen is not waiting stage left to take the baton - the commentary has generally been to praise her.? This reaction of rote veneration is typical, understandable, and historically ignorant.

The Jeanne Shaheen many of us remember has been and remains a bane for New Hampshire and our country. This reality needs to be acknowledged before we elect another of her ilk.?

Sen. Shaheen came to New Hampshire with a fresh University of Mississippi master’s degree in political science, an extremist’s heart, and unbridled radical ambitions.? She stepped into our politics as an environmental activist opposing the Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant. Despite her efforts, one reactor came online at Seabrook, generating 56% of our electricity today.?

But that wasn’t a failure for Jeanne Shaheen. In the world of the extreme left, her efforts were deemed worthy: Public Service Company of New Hampshire went bankrupt in 1988. The primary reasons for the bankruptcy of our leading power company were more than a decade of delays in completing the construction of the Seabrook Station and the loss of one of the two planned reactors, all following the efforts of Shaheen and her cadre of climate militants.?

For Granite State electric ratepayers, however, the result was not as career-building as they were for Shaheen.? It took New Hampshire businesses and consumers almost three decades of surcharges on their monthly electric bills to pay off $2.3 billion in stranded construction costs following the radical left’s Seabrook victory.? During that period, our electrical costs ranged between 60% and 70% higher than the national average.

Seabrook was just the beginning for Jeanne Shaheen.? Her radical activist journey did not limit itself to harming our state and nation by opposing new energy sources, although she never seemed to forget to do so. For a more recent example of harm, Shaheen voted against the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, despite the fact that it would create jobs and boost our nation’s energy independence.

But there are so many other ways that Jeanne Shaheen has ill-served us.

When she was governor from 1997 to 2003, she stepped outside the New Hampshire mainstream and ran a tax-and-spend administration.? Although New Hampshire has no state sales tax, Shaheen supported “exploring” a sales tax using the always convenient claim that receipts would be used to increase education funding. Fortunately, she was stopped in her tracks. Still, her administration was marked by increased state spending, leading to severe budget problems seven years later.

Shaheen’s fundraising practices have been both hypocritical and atrocious.? On July 17, 2012, she gave a Senate speech supporting a bill to reveal the names of donors to tax-exempt social welfare organizations, no doubt so they could be doxed, cancelled, and harassed as if they are Tesla owners.  In her speech, Shaheen identified as a problem the “rising influence of millionaire donors and corporations.” She further lamented that “[p]eople in New Hampshire . . . don’t believe their interests are being represented.”

Well, she certainly knew all that to be true.? As Inside Sources noted in 2019, she has not only set contributions records but “she’s raised her money the old-fashioned way: She’s asked rich people to give it to her.” And not just rich people.?

Between 2019 and 2024, Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s campaign committee and leadership PAC raised approximately $20 million. Of this, about 13% (approximately $2.6 million) came from PACs, which include corporate-affiliated PACs.? Jeanne certainly deserves the Captain Renault Award. Despite his hypocrisy, Capt. Renault, in the movie Casablanca, received his winnings, just as Jeanne Shaheen gets hers.

Against all evidence, Sen. Shaheen has nurtured a reputation for moderation.? Yet, Shaheen’s voting record has always aligned with Democratic leadership.? According to FiveThirtyEight’s Senate vote tracker, she voted with President Joe Biden’s position more than 98% of the time, all the while ignoring New Hampshire’s independent and bipartisan political culture.

There is no end to Sen. Shaheen’s insincerity. Her record is long and filled with one example after another of expedient but disingenuous statements while remaining true only to her extreme left views. But let me end with a personal anecdote.

In 2010, when I was speaker of the New Hampshire House, and we had inherited a structural state budget deficit approaching a billion dollars, the federal government’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) reversed its prior position on New Hampshire’s Medicaid Enhancement Tax and, as a consequent, sought millions of dollars in restitution from us.? We knew that any such payment would put New Hampshire’s budget under further strain and require cuts to services. I called our senior U.S. senator, Jeanne Shaheen, for assistance.? And I called again; and again. I left detailed messages.? She never responded.