The state House of Representatives has a new leadership team with Rep. Nadine Nakamura becoming the new speaker of the House. Because of the changes, advocacy groups are expanding efforts to change the rules in the House that they say will increase transparency.
Each chamber of the Legislature votes on its own rules at the start of each session. Those rules — which differ in the House and the Senate — govern how the Legislature operates, from when public testimony gets uploaded to the power of committee chairs.
Several advocacy groups are pushing for changes to the House rules to make the legislative process more transparent.
“ Getting the playing field a little bit more level is going to help everybody,” said Hawaiʻi Alliance for Progressive Action Program Director Aria Castillo. She sees how the current rules make people lose confidence in the way bills are passed at the Legislature.
“ If the process in general is broken, and it's not even being given a fair hearing to hear both sides of the argument, I think that's where the frustration really starts,” she said. “You don't even have a fighting chance to get your bills heard or moved on to the next stage. It feels like it's doomed from the start.”
Hawaiʻi Alliance for Progressive Action and other groups such as Common Cause Hawaii and Our Hawaiʻi, a progressive political action group, are circulating a petition that calls for changes to the Legislature’s rules.
Although they want the rules to change in both chambers, the focus is on the House because of the recent upheaval in leadership following the defeat of former House Speaker Scott Saiki. He lost the August primary to incoming Rep. Kim Coco Iwamoto.
House bill referral rules
Many of the changes revolve around the committee rules. For example, advocates want to see improvements to the committee referral process, which is how bills are assigned. Bills need to pass through committees to get the required three full votes on the floor of each legislative body.
In the House, the specific concern is with bills being referred to the Finance Committee – even if they have no fiscal component.
“You have a very high percentage of bills that don't see a money committee referral in the Senate, but they see one in Finance,” Rep. Amy Perruso said. “And that's because the Senate uses a different referral process.”
The Senate first has its drafting agency recommend where bills should be referred. In the House, bill referrals are assigned by House leadership.
When you look at the number of bills introduced in each chamber, the Senate introduces more than the House. However, the House Finance Committee has over 250 more bills referred to it than the Senate counterpart, the Ways and Means Committee.
Advocates think that the House should have a process more similar to the Senate when referring bills so that the bill’s future isn’t just up to House leadership.
“That's a way to depoliticize which bills go to which committees,” Perruso said. “I think that's really important because if you give one particular committee or one particular chair too much power, then they really create a bottleneck around the kind of work that we can do in the Legislature.”
Concentrated power of committee chairs
Also, the House’s current rules give only committee chairs the power to request to move bills in and out of their committees.
One example of this mechanism occurred with bills that would have allowed licensed nurses to practice in multiple states. In past sessions, other health licensure compact bills were referred to the House Health and Human Services Committee chaired by Rep. Della Au Belatti as the lead subject-matter committee.
However, in 2024, two bills were referred to House Labor and Government Operations as the lead committee instead. Belatti submitted paperwork to request a bill re-referral to make the Health and Human Services Committee the lead again, which required the signatures of all the committees involved.
Her request was granted. However, Common Cause Hawaii Program Director Camron Hurt explained that this process of re-referral shows how powerful committee chairs are, and why there should be term limits — another change advocacy groups want to see.
“It puts a lot of pressure on them to have to deal with their colleagues in a way that is very transactional,” Hurt said. “ It seems negligent almost that the House doesn't have a set policy for how a certain type of bill goes forward, period, full stop. It is based on the personality of somebody in a position and that's not really effective.”
Timely availability of public testimony
Advocates also want to see public testimony uploaded 22 hours before committee hearings – and two hours for late testimony. Currently, testimony is often uploaded just moments before hearings.
American Association of University Women of Hawaii Younghee Overly explained that having the testimony available ahead of time helps facilitate better conversation about bills during committee hearings.
During a committee meeting last legislative session, Overly was advocating for a paid family leave bill.
“We show up and it's the first time we see pretty lengthy opposition to the paid family bill from a very reputable national organization, and we didn't get to see it until we got there,” she said.
“I literally did the research on the spot to figure out why this group is objecting and what they're talking about and how to counter it,” she told HPR. “Now, if I had a little more time to do the homework, it would have, number one, saved me from high blood pressure. And number two, I would have done a much better job at countering.”
The bill did not pass.
“I wonder if us advocates here, who are for the bill, had more of a chance to really prepare, would it have made any difference,” Overly said. “We'll never know.”
Some committee chairs do upload testimony early voluntarily, such as Rep. David Tarnas who chairs the House Judiciary and Hawaiian Affairs committee. In other levels of government, this is also common practice such as at the Honolulu City Council.
New House Speaker Rep. Nadine Nakamura explained that she will be listening to all the suggestions that come in before the Legislature reconvenes in January. She pointed to previous changes to the rules, such as allowing remote testimony.
“We want to really go through that vetting process, get input from members and then put something forward,” she said after being appointed to the speaker position earlier this month. “I don't want to get ahead of that process.”
