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Voting their conscience: The Sunshine Blog was interested to hear Senate President Ron Kouchi’s speech that ended the floor session on Thursday. He apparently felt the need to stoutly defend his colleagues for the dramatic 13-12 rejection of Alapaki Nahale-a as a University of Hawaii regent.

“Somehow there have been allegations about strong-arming, arm-twisting, bullying of members,” he intoned at the end of floor session. “But if in fact that were happening, I don’t know how we get to 13-12, I don’t know how people would have the conviction to stand up and vote the way they see fit.”

Yeah, right. Surely he doesn’t really think his members are immune to the politicking that goes on every day the Legislature is in session. Perhaps he missed Senate Ways and Means Chair Donovan Dela Cruz dropping in on the Higher Education Committee’s grilling of Nahale-a to get in more than a few licks of his own.

Yet Kouchi insists that 13 senators — including himself when he cast the deciding vote — simply did their jobs and voted their conscience, that they did not think Nahale-a was the right person for the job, even though he had been serving as a regent since 2019 when the Senate first confirmed him for the position.

“And,” he said, “do not bend to the public trying to determine our action or characterize our action as anything other than carrying out our duties as described by the Constitution.”

Insert eye roll emoji here.

Meet the new boss, probably not the same as the old boss: In other UH regent news, in case you missed it, Nahale-a resigned as chair of the Board of Regents Tuesday night, just hours after he was rejected by the Senate.

That makes Gabriel Lee, the vice chair, the interim chair. And sets up an interesting conundrum for the search for a new UH president. The 11-member board is now one short and insiders say is split 5-5 when it comes to who aligns with who. That will make it quite difficult to agree on a replacement for David Lassner, who is retiring this year.

The Blog has heard some familiar names being bandied about as the potential new president: Mufi Hannemann, the former Honolulu mayor. Colleen Hanabusa, the former congresswoman and current HART board chair. And Brennon Morioka, the current dean of the UH College of Engineering.

In the meantime, Gov. Josh Green needs to find a replacement for Nahale-a, who held the Hawaii County seat on the board. We’re not holding our breath that it will be anytime soon, given that it will likely be tough to find a volunteer to face the political meat grinder operated by Sen. Donna Mercado Kim.

Primary concerns: No surprise that Joe Biden won the Democratic Party of Hawaii’s Party-run Presidential Primary Wednesday with 66% of votes cast. The surprise was the second-place finisher, Uncommitted, who (or maybe that?) took 29.1%.

That’s a considerably larger percentage of uncommitted votes than were cast by Democrats in other states on Super Tuesday, including Minnesota (19% uncommitted), Michigan (13%) and North Carolina (13%). It’s part of a movement opposing Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza situation, .

On a related note, a Hawaii Senate committee on Friday is expected to urging Hawaii’s congressional delegation to support an effort in the U.S. Congress calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Call it ‘Public Campaign Finance Lite’: to expand partial public financing of campaigns cleared the House on Tuesday and is headed for the Senate. Don’t confuse it with , the full public financing bill that has already been passed in the Senate and is now in the House.

Partial public financing already exists in Hawaii, but is seldom used because it is just too … partial. Only $71,878 in public funds were disbursed to 15 campaigns in 2022.

HB 1845 would double the amount of public funding available to most candidates who are not unopposed. To qualify, they’d have to generate a certain amount of donations from private individuals (the bill would lower that threshold so more candidates can take part) and agree to not exceed voluntary limits on total spending.

It’s a proposal from the Campaign Spending Commission, which also isn’t opposed to full public campaign funding, Executive Director Kristin Izumi-Nitao told Civil Beat in January.

The original version of the bill called for the changes to take effect this year, but of course things don’t tend to happen that fast in the Legislature. The latest version has stripped out all the specific dollar figures and added a “defective” effective date of 3000, assuring it’s headed for conference committee should it pass the Senate.

Also crossing over: We call them “sunshine bills,” and the partial public campaign finance measure is one of dozens that have now passed from one legislative chamber to the other. They include:

• , designed to encourage more people to run for office by allowing candidates to use campaign funds for child and household dependent care.
• , requiring public meeting notices to inform citizens how to provide remote oral testimony so that they are visible to board members and other meeting participants.
• , increasing penalties for public corruption by establishing new first- and second-degree bribery offenses.
• , prohibiting the use of campaign “deepfakes” — manipulated media messages that misrepresent opposing candidates.
• , increasing the maximum possible fines for ethics violations.
• , expanding the legal definition of “lobbying” to include communications regarding procurement decisions with high-level government officials.
• , establishing emergency management notice and reporting requirements for the transfer of public funds by the governor.

And we have a law: The first bill of the 2024 legislative session to be signed into law by Gov. Josh Green turns out to be a sunshine bill.

, now known as Act 1, requires that a mandatory election recount shall occur when the difference in votes cast is equal to or less than 100 votes, or one-quarter of 1% of the total number of votes cast for the contest, whichever is lesser.

And any complaint about the vote must also be filed with the Hawaii Elections Office no later than 4:30 p.m. on the 13th day after a primary or special primary election.

Milking it for all it’s worth: To voice his support for his own bill that would allow for , Rep. Mark Nakashima broke into song on the House floor Tuesday.

“Old MacDonald had a farm, E-i-e-i-o. And on his farm he had a milk cow, E-i-e-i-o. Milk, milk here, a milk, milk there. Here a milk, there a milk, everywhere a milk milk. Old MacDonald had a farm, and his milk wasn’t pasteurized either.”

Nakashima’s colleagues laughed and smiled, but the representative from the Hilo, Hamakua and Kaumana area was making a point.

“You people wonder why I keep pushing this bill,” he said. “And it is for one family who lives in my district who has four cows. Unless you happen to be 40 miles out of Hilo and 13 miles up a single road, you are never going to find this dairy. So, let me alleviate many of the fears that this is going to be a widespread enterprise. I am looking at a single family selling to their neighbors, and I don’t know how many other farms there may be out there, but I’m sure that none of them are near you. Mahalo.”

House Bill 1989 passed but with 10 reps voting no. It now awaits Senate consideration.