House public safety committee wins Rusty Scalpel award for hurricane Frankenbill
The committee voted to gut a criminal justice reform bill and replace it with a bill looking at hurricane-resistant school structures with no input from advocates or the community.
On March 15, 2018, criminal justice reform advocates discovered, with shock, that a Senate bill they had been tracking with high hopes had been gutted by the House Committee on Public Safety, which then turned the bill into an entirely different piece of legislation.
SB2858 SD2, the version of the bill that the House received after crossover from the Senate, would have required the Department of Public Safety (PBS) to “establish key performance indicators” to track the success of the department’s inmate reentry system. The department would have had to file reports using these performance indicators to the legislature, including an annual “corrections and program report” as a consolidation of these other reports. This is pretty basic, but important, data that advocates were hoping would help to inform a more intelligent approach to corrections that relies less on incarceration and more on community rehabilitation.
But by the time the PBS committee, chaired by Representative Greg Takayama, was done with its Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley operation, the newly-stitched SB2858 SD2 HD1 had an entirely different purpose: requiring the State of Hawaiʻi to consider hurricane resistant criteria when designing and constructing new public schools for the capability of providing shelter refuge.
The language for this new version came from HB2452, a dead bill that failed to be scheduled by the Senate. SB2858 SD2 HD1 was later approved, with minor amendments, by a conference committee and is now on its way to the governor’s desk.
Hurricane-resistant schools sound like a decent idea, but the data the criminal justice reform measure would have secured is critical to efforts to reform our racist, ineffective and cruel criminal justice system. With no input or oversight from the public, the PBS committee unilaterally stopped that data from being collected and reported by statute. Representatives Takayama, Cedric Gates, Richard Creagan, Calvin Say and Cynthia Thielen all voted aye on the Frankenbill (the other two committee members, Representatives Kaniela Ing and Lynn DeCiote, were excused).
Because of it was created through the unholy ritual known as gut-and-replace, SB2858 (SD2 HD1 CD1) has been selected by the League of Women Voters of Hawaii and Common Cause Hawaii as the 2018 Rusty Scalpel award “winner.”
The Rusty Scalpel award is a tradition that recognizes passage of a bill whose subject has been substantially amended without opportunity for adequate legislative review as required by the Hawaiʻi State Constitution. Article Ill, Section 15 of the Hawaiʻi State Constitution provides that, “No bill shall become law unless it shall pass three readings in each house on separate days.” The House Draft (HD) of SB2858, which is the version eventually presented to the conference committee, failed to meet this requirement as the content—the newly inserted language—was not considered in the Senate.
“The point of the legislative process as laid out in our state constitution is to ensure proposals are properly vetted and discussed before passage,” said Corie Tanida, executive director of Common Cause Hawaii.
She added, “Maneuvers like those used with SB2858 cut out both legislators and the public. Coupled with the high number of bills in 2018 that were subject to the gut-and-replace practice, it’s no wonder people are feeling disillusioned and discouraged from participating in government. We expect everyone, especially our elected officials, to respect and abide by our laws and constitution.”
“Apparently, some House members thought it was fine to use an overly generic title like “Relating to Public Safety” to deceive their Senate colleagues about what topic was under consideration,” said Ann Shaver of the League of Women Voters of Hawaii. “The legislature has failed to stop the use of shortcuts even though all legislators took an oath to uphold the constitution.”
A resolution that would seek to prohibit the practice of gut-and-replace has been introduced to—and will be discussed at—the Democratic Party of Hawaiʻi’s state convention this weekend at the Hilton Waikoloa Village on Hawaiʻi Island.
