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They’re always pinched for time at the Hawaii Legislature.

With each legislative session limited to just 60 working days, it feels like a full-on sprint from opening day in January to adjournment in late April or early May.

The tight timeline is what legislative leaders point to when they say there’s no way they could operate under the Sunshine Law, which would require them to do more of the public’s business in public. All those secret meetings — especially in a session’s final days — are supposedly essential to stay on schedule.

So why does the Legislature pamper itself by allowing lawmakers to introduce thousands of bills each session when only about a tenth of them actually become law?

Each piece of proposed legislation takes precious time to process, from its pre-session drafting to the document dump that the House and Senate clerk’s offices endure in a session’s first week. And even though close to half of those bills never get hearings, every single one must be referred to the proper committee for its subject matter.

At this very moment, legislators and their ghost writers are writing up drafts of bills that they know have practically zero chance of passage.

During the two sessions of the 2023-2024 biennium, 5,810 bills were introduced, according to the Legislative Reference Bureau. Of those, 536 were approved by both the House and the Senate, and 516 survived the final threat of gubernatorial veto to actually became laws.

Think of just-hatched turtles scrambling across the sand for an ocean sanctuary that most will never reach.

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

There are 99 legislative chambers in the country (every state except Nebraska has two). In 24 of them, limits are placed on the number of bills lawmakers can introduce.

Those limits can be strict: five bills per year in Colorado’s Senate and House, six bills per session in the Florida House, according to the . Others are far more lenient: 50 bills every two-year session in the California Assembly and 65 in its Senate.

You’ll find no such restrictions in the official rules of the Hawaii Senate and House, although House Speaker Scott Saiki sent out emails before the start of the last biennium in an attempt to stanch the flood of legislation.

Saiki laid out an internal rule with a 20-bill-per-session limit for rank-and-file legislators and higher limits for committee chairs. But lawmakers were also allowed to request waivers and apparently many of those were granted, because 36 of 51 representatives introduced more than 20 bills in the 2023 session.

Some of the most prolific included Reps. Cedric Gates with 78 bills, John Mizuno with 71, Linda Ichiyama with 65 and Nicole Lowen with 61.

Senate President Ron Kouchi didn’t even attempt to limit the number of bills introduced in his own chamber, and even though there are only 25 senators they outdid their House counterparts in total bills both years of the biennium.

Each chamber does limit its members to a maximum of five bill introductions a day in the final three days before the deadline, which is one week after opening day. But that just means lawmakers must be prepared to file all their other bills with the clerk’s offices sooner than that.

About 10% of those bills become law, which is half the national average, said Colin Moore, a political scientist at the University of Hawaii Manoa. 

“If you were to limit the number of bills legislators could introduce, I do think it would lead to a more productive process,” Moore said.

“I think there’s an argument to be made that it does take resources and attention away from the bills that are deserving of serious consideration,” he said, adding, “time is in very short supply.”

The Politics Of Plenty

Moore has made a career out of studying all sides of political issues, so he also has no problem conjuring up justifications for unlimited bill introductions.

“You could imagine an argument that this is just part of the democratic process,” he said. “This allows for experimental ideas to be floated during a number of sessions to just get them out there, even if they’re not granted a hearing, as a service to constituents. But I don’t think most of those arguments are all that compelling.”

The truth is that lawmakers like to introduce a lot of bills because it’s good politics.

“For the most part, this serves the interest of legislators,” Moore said. “A lot of bills are introduced as just some sort of political signaling or as a way to add it to their resume, to say that they were working on an issue and demonstrate to their constituents that they introduced a bill.”

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But that’s politics as usual, and Kim Coco Iwamoto for one thinks the people of Hawaii are ready to move beyond that. Legislators shouldn’t be too quick to reject her views as idealistic, considering she just dethroned Saiki in the August primary.

She recently floated the idea of limiting legislators to introducing just seven bills per session “to streamline things.”

Seven bills per lawmaker might be enough, she said, if they did a better job of communicating and cooperating with each other before the session.

It’s a messy process when numerous bills are introduced to basically accomplish the same thing. “The more bargaining you get, the more collaboration we create from from the onset,” she said, the more efficient the Legislature would be. 

“Imagine if people are working together beforehand to say, ‘Hey, why are there so many bills on improving workers comp, why don’t we just work together and do one really good one and get a lot of support around it?’”

Count Moore among the skeptics.

“I don’t think it’s a communication issue,” he said. “Legislators talk to each other a lot. They have a good sense of what their colleagues are doing. And the legislative leadership has a good sense of that, too.”

But he acknowledges a firm limit on bill introductions could alter the landscape.

“At this point, there’s no cost to introducing their own version of a bill or almost an identical bill with their name attached to it,” he said. “I think for many of them, the thought is, ‘why not? There’s no cost to me to introduce a version I like slightly better.’”

In a perfect world, making the Legislature run more efficiently might be motivation enough. But good public policy incentivizes people to behave well, and lawmakers are no exception.