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The Civil Beat Editorial Board comments briefly each Monday on multiple matters that caught our attention in the previous week’s news.

KONDO SURVIVES. State Ethics Commission Executive Director Les Kondo emerged last week from his uncharacteristically lengthy performance review with his job intact, as Civil Beat recently predicted he would.

Kondo has drawn a number of notable critics through his aggressive enforcement of the state ethics code, not the least of which is House Speaker Joe Souki, and rumors were flying by late May that he’d be sacked. In a letter Souki sent to the Ethics Commission, he challenged the group to change the ethics code through legislative remedies, if commissioners feel change is needed. So far, that tactic hasn’t work so well — not a single reform bill introduced by the Ethics Commission passed in the recently ended session.

We think Souki had it backwards to begin with. If he doesn’t like the way Kondo and the commission are doing their work, he should step forward with legislation to remedy the situation. Perhaps the optics of watering down the very ethics code that governs them aren’t very appealing to Souki and his fellow legislative critics. They couldn’t be much worse, though, than those of Souki sending a critical letter to the Commission in the middle of Kondo’s performance review.

Meanwhile, will Kondo continue to be the new sheriff in town, or will he and the commission, chastened by critics, decide a less aggressive posture is best? We hope it’s the former, and we’ll be watching.

UPDATE: Civil Beat has clarified the story below to make clear that the three recent HSTA elections consisted of two general elections and a runoff for the vice president position.

HSTA ELECTIONS. For Cory Rosenlee and his fellow reform candidates for the Hawaii State Teachers Association executive team, the third time was the charm.

Rosenlee and colleagues finally, officially triumphed last week in a seven-week elections process so poorly handled by the union that Civil Beat and others began to doubt the organization’s basic credibility. However, after three rounds of voting — a general election, followed by a runoff vote for treasurer, both of which were thrown out, leading to the general election re-do — Rosenlee won the HSTA presidency by a comfortable margin, and his vice president and secretary/treasurer candidates triumphed, too. (They had also won in the first round of voting, though the union refused to certify the results, fuzzily claiming “irregularities” it didn’t adequately explain.)

As difficult as that process was, it will be the easy part for the new leadership team. An outspoken critic of union leadership and efficacy, Rosenlee can be counted upon to lead an aggressive change agenda, one marked by a commitment to equity. The best school reforms, domestically and internationally, have been led by such a commitment, and for Rosenlee, equity puts issues ranging from the widespread lack of school air conditioning to inadequate teacher pay in proper perspective.

“We have to see the fight for good schools as a civil rights fight,” he told Civil Beat’s Jessica Terrell last week. “If you see it as a civil rights movement, then you use civil rights strategies.”

We like that mindset, but time will tell whether Rosenlee has the maturity and acumen to transition from outsider critic to effective insider.

SCHATZ EMERGENT. Brian Schatz seemed to be everywhere last week. There he was leading a high-powered press conference on proposals to eliminate student loan debt at public colleges and universities. Here he was offering an amendment to ban deployment of U.S. ground troops in Syria and Iraq and later announcing a new carbon tax proposal at the American Enterprise Institute. There he was in the pages of Foreign Affairs, as one of three Senate authors offering for the United States.

The breadth of policy engagement and indefatigable work ethic of Hawaii’s senior U.S. senator is making an impression, now 2½ years into his Senate service. The influential D.C. website, CQ Roll Call, published a glowing feature on Schatz last Thursday saying he “is at the start of what could easily be a decades-long career.”

“Sen. Elizabeth Warren might have the biggest grass-roots megaphone in the Democratic caucus, and Charles E. Schumer is in line to be the next Democratic leader,” . “On Wednesday, the Democrats from Massachusetts and New York appeared with a relatively new colleague with lower name ID, but with a rising profile on the left. Sen. Brian Schatz took center stage to highlight a campaign with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and a coalition for ‘debt-free college.’”

Some have criticized Hawaii’s entire Democratic federal delegation as back-benchers in a party now firmly ensconced in minority status. As Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has shown, though, aggressively cultivating a public profile is one way to increase individual relevance in Washington’s highly competitive environment.

Schatz appears to be following the same playbook, but through what is being seen — and covered — as substantial work on big, weighty issues. Still, in a city where image counts, both Gabbard and Schatz are to be commended for doing their best to elevate their own profiles and in so doing, the visibility of Hawaii and its concerns, as well.