Written by Andrew Horn of Amherst, NH

The senate and house shall assemble biennially on the first Wednesday of December for organizational purposes in even numbered years, … and shall dissolve and be dissolved at 12:01 A.M. on the first Wednesday of December in even numbered years and shall be styled THE GENERAL COURT OF NEW HAMPSHIRE.

So says the New Hampshire Constitution, Part Second, Article 3, defining Organization Day, when legislators are sworn in and state officials are elected. Wednesday was Organization Day, 2024, coronation day of the Granite State’s representative, deliberative democracy.

I write this article to give the reader a panoramic view of Organization Day, without the messiness of showing up or wading through hours of YouTube recordings. But why does it matter?

Why Organization Day is Important

Organization Day is a ceremony, no different from a Thai coronation, a bar or bat mitzvah, an ordination, baptism, or wedding. In go 424 common citizens, and out come 424 law creators. A ceremony of metamorphosis, sanctification. I remember once, walking down the National Mall in DC with my father, he told me that the early Americans chose to model their civil architecture off of Greek and Roman religious temples. The Capitol building, the Supreme Court, the White House—all Greco-Roman temples in style. The Lincoln Memorial is, of course, the Temple of Zeus. The Washington Monument is an obelisk, which in Ancient Egypt symbolized the sun god or else a petrified ray of the sun. The deeply a-religious Founders chose not the civic earth but rather the infinite heavens as a model for their government religion. They knew what Ancient Greek and Roman civic buildings looked like. They just bypassed their design in favor of the religious.

The architecture, the art, the great expense of the State House building and its upkeep, is not the magic that endows 424 people with the holy consent of the governed. As a child, my pastor once told us that it matters not if our church building with its pews, meeting rooms, and rock band sound system were all to burn down in a fire set by some filthy arsonist atheist. If that were to happen, we would simply gather and sing on the church lawn. Church is not a building but a gathering. Church is the Body of Christ—church is holy, and it is made of flesh.

And such is the case with any House of the People. When King Louis XVI locked the doors of the room in Versailles where the self-declared National Assembly of the People had been meeting, the National Assembly simply moved into a nearby tennis court. There they signed the Tennis Court Oath:

nothing may prevent [the National Assembly] from continuing its deliberations in any place it is forced to establish itself; and, finally, the National Assembly exists wherever its members are gathered. … We swear never to separate ourselves from the National Assembly, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require until the constitution of the realm is drawn up and fixed on solid foundations.

The same is true in the Granite State as much as it was in 1789 in France: it is through our process of free and fair election, debate, and binding legislative vote that we create and maintain rule of law. This is how we, as a species, replaced rule by one man, above the law—monarchy—with e pluribus unum, rule by the many, rule of law—democracy. We, the human species, created deliberative, law-making bodies. This is how we got rid of kings. Our system rests not on a cornerstone of granite but rather on ideas—ethereal as the breath and just as vital.

It doesn’t matter who wins elections—just that the elections are subordinate to the ideas of decorum, equality, transparency, and freedom of expression. It doesn’t matter what arguments are made in debate—just that the debates are subordinate to the ideas of decorum, equality, transparency, and freedom of expression. It doesn’t matter what legislative vote comes out on top on one question or another—just that the legislative votes are subordinate to the ideas of decorum, equality, transparency, and freedom of expression.

On decorum, equality, transparency, and freedom of expression rest elections, debates, and legislative votes, and on elections, debates, and legislative votes rests holy democracy. And it is on Organization Day when we end one cycle at 12:01 am and start anew at 10:00 am, metamorphosing 424 common citizens into law creators with a sacred ceremony of transformation.

And like all legislative ceremonies, it opened with a prayer.

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Part Two coming soon…