‘The Stopper Committees’: Are Bills Sent To Money Committees Just To Die?

Why do so many bills that seemingly have nothing to do with state spending get run through the money committees in the Hawaiʻi Legislature?

It depends on who you ask.

Some former legislators will tell you it’s all by design to give the already powerful chairs of those committees even more control over what happens at the State Capitol.

By referring measures to the Senate Ways and Means or House Finance committees, leadership can derail the bills it wants killed while setting up the money chairs to wield “ungodly power” during the end-of-session conference committee period when hundreds of amended bills meet their fate behind closed doors, said ex-Sen. Russell Ruderman.

Current legislators tend to be much more circumspect, acknowledging the heavy flow of bills to the money committees while noting that it’s always been that way and contending that the practice is gradually being reformed.

“Sometimes it’s inadvertent, or sometimes, when we’re doing referrals, we look at previous referrals and try to be consistent, but we are trying to take a closer look at how we do referrals,” House Speaker Nadine Nakamura said.

One thing’s for sure: It’s still going on, big time, and it’s hindering the adoption of needed reforms in state government.

Where’s The Money?

Of the 3,172 bills introduced this session, 2,141 were initially referred to the money committees — 67%.

Those numbers preceded the re-referral process in which committee chairs can ask for changes in the bill assignments, so they’re close but not necessarily exact.

Still, the percentages are nearly equal in the Senate and House, and basically unchanged from the last biennium that began in 2023, according to the Legislative Reference Bureau. So the firehose pumping of bills into the money committees remains standard operating procedure.

Civil Beat has been tracking what we call sunshine bills — most dealing with government transparency, accountability and reform. Several of those measures are currently stuck in money committees even though they don’t seem to carry financial costs to the state, and others have already died there.

Take Senate Bill 307, which would establish unequivocally that citizens have the right to use their cell phones to record police activities in public places. It’s clearly not a spending bill, and it wasn’t referred to Ways and Means before clearing the full Senate on a unanimous vote.

Civil Beat opinion writers are closely following efforts to bring more transparency and accountability to state and local government — at the Legislature, the county level and in the media. Help us by sending ideas and anecdotes to [email protected].

But for some reason when it got to the House, it was referred to a gauntlet of three more committees. It cleared the first two and then died Friday because no hearing was ever scheduled in — you guessed it — the Finance Committee.

Time also ran out on two constitutional amendments that were approved by the Senate but languished in House Finance.

One of them, Senate Bill 311, would provide that the right of free speech does not include spending money to influence elections. Under the other, Senate Bill 1225, Hawaiʻi would go back to just counting “yes” and “no” votes instead of considering blank votes and over-votes as being additional “no” votes when the public decides on proposed constitutional amendments.

There was no reason for a dollar sign in either one of those ConAms.

Finance was also the no-hearing graveyard for House Bill 772, which would have ended the candidate-to-candidate giving that’s currently allowed when one politician uses campaign funds to purchase up to two tickets to another politician’s fundraiser. A total of $386,038 was regifted this way during the 2024 election period.

So yeah, this measure contained dollar signs, but still had nothing to do with state spending.

House Bill 141, which sought to address the partisan dysfunction in the State Elections Commission by making its members subject to confirmation by the full Senate, died when it couldn’t get a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee. But even if it had, the Ways and Means Committee awaited next.

In past sessions, the money committee chairs have stopped other reform measures, including expansion of public campaign finance.

‘Understand What Fiscal Impact Means’

After House Finance and Senate Ways and Means, the judiciary committees are arguably the most powerful, and their chairs both say it’s appropriate for some measures to be referred to the money committees even if they don’t contain appropriations.

“I think it’s important to understand what fiscal impact means,” said House Judiciary Chair David Tarnas. “It’s not just if there’s appropriations in there, but it’s also if it has any fiscal impact, whether it’s impact on personnel workload, maybe not fiscal impact this year, but it could potentially have fiscal impact in the future.”

Senate Judiciary Chair Karl Rhoads agreed, saying, “There are ones that don’t have an actual appropriation and certainly have monetary impact. So those I don’t really argue with.”

Both said they’ve had occasional success in appealing leadership’s decisions to give Judiciary bills follow-up referrals in the money committees.

Shortly after she took over her new position as House speaker, Nakamura convened an advisory board and queried her colleagues about what changes they would like to see in procedural policies. Tarnas was not on the board, but he said the number of referrals to the Finance Committee was discussed.

“I think they took to heart the concern and rather than making a change to the rules, they would work to be discerning in their referrals, so that what went to Finance was clearly something that either had appropriations or fiscal impact now or in the future,” Tarnas said.

“A lot of the bills request funding that will require resources to execute programs, or if there isn’t an actual money ask in the bill, a study, for example, that might uncover information or lead to a future expenditure,” Nakamura said. “Sometimes it’s a study to look into something, but at the end of the day that study could result in some major commitments of funding.

Senate President Ron Kouchi, Ways and Means Chair Donovan Dela Cruz and Finance Chair Kyle Yamashita did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Who’s In The Best Position To Take The Hit?’

Former senators Ruderman and Gary Hooser, who blogs about the need for reform in the Legislature, aren’t convinced there will be real changes made because the power of money committee chairs is ingrained in the DNA of the Senate and House.

They have control over any measures that went through their committees and end up in the conference committee period. That’s the way top legislative leadership likes it, Ruderman said.

“I think that they’ll include them, call it a fiscal bill, and send it through WAM or Finance so that the chairs have veto power over what happens at the end,” he said. “They’re working closely together. If, say, there’s a bill for public financing of elections or something that’s got popular support but the bosses don’t want to have it, they want to be able to kill it.”

Leadership often wants to kill controversial bills before they go to final floor votes that could expose less powerful legislators to political liabilities, Hooser said.

“The money committee chairs are, without question, the most powerful individuals in the building,” Hooser said. “So who’s in the best position to take the hit?”

Nakamura denied referring bills to the Finance Committee for the sole intent of having them killed.

“We start off with 3,000 bills, and then at the end of the day we will send over to the governor 250 bills,” Nakamura said. “So there are many different ways in the process that bills don’t get heard. The Senate kills bills. We kill bills.”

Still, Rhoads acknowledges that a lot of that killing does happen in the “preeminent committees” of Ways and Means and Finance.

“Typically the A Bracket committees are the stopper committees,” Rhoads said. “If there’s something that the caucus feels like it needs to be killed, it’s probably going to die. And if it hasn’t died already, it’s probably going to die in one of those two committees.”