At Tuesday's House Judiciary committee hearing on a controversial bill to promote free meals and junkets for state lawmakers and state employees, the Chair simply didn't want to hear testimony from the Ethics Commission.
SB671, in its current form, would allow unlimited free meals, golf club tickets, junkets and boondoggles for any Hawaii state employee or state legislator from a wide variety of non-profit corporations. Public opposition (including a newspaper editorial) has been universal, except, of course for the organizations salivating at the chance to buy influence.<
And why wouldn't they? The bill is not limited to charitable fundraisers--in fact, as Les Kondo, Executive Director of the Hawaii State Ethics Commission, was trying to explain, the bill apply to any non-profit, including chambers of commerce, service providers, unions, country clubs, state contractors and vendors, and a host of other organizations.
State employees who regulate these businesses would be eligible for what amounts to legalized bribery.
As you will see in the video, the chair of the Judiciary Committee did not want to hear the testimony.
It’s routine for state departments or agencies most concerned with proposed legislation to be allowed to testify at the beginning of a hearing. For this bill, that’s the Ethics Commission.
I have attended numerous legislative hearings and have not, to my recollection, ever heard a state representative cut off and his or her testimony refused. Nor did the chair apply a time limit to subsequent testimony. For example, I also testified, and was not cut off at two minutes, but was allowed to complete my testimony. Clearly, the chair just didn’t want to hear Mr. Kondo speak. I was going through some adjectives to fairly describe the situation but couldn’t settle on one. Watch the video and you decide.
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Judging from the committees questions later in the hearing, it might have been a wiser course to hear what Mr. Kondo had to say.
Let me interject a comment here. I was surprised at the questions from several House members simply because they demonstrated an ignorance of the current law. The questioning was not so much about the proposed bill but about what they are currently allowed to accept in the way of gifts. That they were asking and arguing in public was troublesome—each of us is responsible for knowing the law. We can follow it or choose not to. The Ethics Commission does not make the law, they assist legislators and government employees in understanding the law if necessary, and handle complaints. I thought of it this way: I know the jaywalking law, and I can jaywalk if I like, but I know it’s against the law. Legislators demonstrated, at yesterday’s hearing, that they simply didn’t understand this long-standing law. Since corporations use gifts and free meals as a way to buy influence, this is bothersome.
The next video illustrates this ignorance. In this clip, Rep. Blake Oshiro questions Kondo extensively, mostly, in line with similar questions by other committee members, about what is now allowed or not allowed. Oshiro is the author of the language in the current draft of the bill, and responsible for expanding its scope from 501(c)(3) charities to any kind of tax-exempt business. He is also an attorney, and should already be thoroughly familiar with this important law.
At the 15:30 minute point in the heated exchange he erroneously states that “suddenly, there is a flurry of activity in the form of bills“ on the gift law issue. In fact, no bill was introduced covering this issue. A bill with unrelated language, SB671 was only scheduled for a hearing by Senator Hee so that it could be discarded and replaced by a rather bad draft by Senator Galuteria attempting to blow the lid off of gift giving to legislators. That questionable draft was cut down to the final Senate version and then morphed by Oshiro into its current form. Not a single bill was introduced and heard on this subject.
More likely, a recent opinion by the Ethics Commission stating that legislators could not accept $200 tickets to a Hawaii Institute for Public Affairs (HIPA) fundraiser.spooked them, since some had perhaps already accepted gifts similar to that already. The Ethics Commission opinion was nothing new and did not change the existing law, but clearly Oshiro is not happy with the existing law.
Here’s the video.
Oshiro is in a precarious position, although it probably does not amount to a conflict of interest. He is an attorney with Alston Hunt Floyd and Ing, as is HIPA’s president and CEO. Given that relationship, Oshiro, in particular, should be alert to the possibility of improper influence by HIPA on state legislators. Instead, he’s effectively pushing for a red carpet to be spread out for state legislators and state workers to accept expensive gifts, junkets and boondoggles from organizations such as HIPA..
Decision making on the bill is scheduled for Thursday.
For more on the March 22 hearing, see the excellent article on Civil Beat, Bill to Ease Gift-Giving to Lawmakers, State Employees Finds New Life (3/22/2011), and David Shapiro’s Legislators fight for the right to freeload (cont’d) (VolcanicAsh, 3/23/2011). A snip from the latter:
Oshiro’s main motivation for loosening the rules seems to be that he’s tired of fielding calls from ethically challenged colleagues whining that they can’t have their freebies. Poor babies.