The Constitutional Journey of a Very Unconstitutional Bill
SB2392 Passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, What's Next?
SB2392, the Karl (Marxist) Rhoads bill that he authored with Trump “in mind”, passed the Senate Judiciary Committee (JDC) hearing today. Senators Awa and Gabbard voted NO, Rhoads and Elefante voted yes, and San Buenaventura voted aye with reservations.
So what happens next?
SB2392 is a single committee referral bill with no House companion bill. Single referral bills have the least amount of required actions needed to pass into law. Single referral bills need to be heard (that was today) and filed by 2/29/2024 to crossover.
SB2392 needs to pass two Senate Floor hearings to make it to the crossover deadline to be heard in the House.
It may seem like there are a lot of hurdles left and multiple points where the bill could fail, but let us remind ourselves who introduced the bill and what the makeup is of our Hawai’i Legislature.
Rhoads has a known track record of leading the pack in passage rates of bills passed by introducer, even going back to his time in the House as a young tyrant, where in 2014 he was in the top ranking of bill passing success. Now he is an older Tyrant (with a capital T) in the Senate, and the Chair of a powerful committee-Senate Judiciary.
Of the 131 Senate bills that passed last year, 17 were introduced by Rhoads and he was a cosponsor of an additional 20 for a total of 37 of 131 bills, or roughly 30% of all the passed Senate bills.
Hawai’i has 25 State senators. If bill passage was more equitable, and you divided 131 passed bills by 25 Senators, passing 5 bills per introducer would be more in line with an equitable distribution. It’s clearly not equitable and Rhoads still holds the distinction of a top producer of passed bills.
Senate Political Party Breakdown:
Of the 25 senators, there is one Republican-Brenton Awa, and a pseudo-Republican, Kurt Fevella, who cosponsors awful anti-election integrity bills with the Democrats. We cannot count on Fevella to vote no on SB2392.
Even with the possible aye votes of the two Democrats that have shown some common sense lately, Mike Gabbard and San Buenaventura-if you recall, San Buenaventura voted “no” on the sham audit bill last year- there is no reason to believe that SB2392 will not easily breeze through the floor votes of the remaining 21 Democrats and meet the deadline for crossover to the House.
I anticipate the same pattern in the super Democrat majority House. There is no reason to expect SB2392 will not be passed into law before the summer.
On Thursday SCOTUS will most likely rule these XIV Amendment challenges to keep Trump off the ballot unconstitutional.
That does not address the glaring and overlooked other issue with SB2392- the blanket clause on the first page that makes the Chief Officer of Elections judge, jury, and executioner to disqualify candidates from appearing on the ballot:
“Specify that election ballots issued by the chief election officer or county clerk shall exclude any candidate who is disqualified by:
…(C) Another constitutional or statutory provision;…”
Is this legal? I doubt it- but who will fight it? It takes brave lawyers and money to challenge these corrupt election laws, two things that are in short supply in the election integrity movement and practically nonexistent in Hawai’i.
In the meantime, keep the testimonies coming in for all the bad bills. This one had almost 400 pages of written testimony, overwhelmingly in opposition. These legislators know we aren’t going anywhere, and they know We the People aren’t giving up. Courage begets courage and our strength grows in numbers.
The fight for secure and transparent elections continues.