Posted on: Wednesday, October 22, 2003

EDITORIAL
Democracy means all lawmakers are equal

With the 2004 legislative session less than three months away, we join the ranks of government watchdogs who do not want to see important bills held hostage because of the personal bias of a committee chair.

Such a scenario played out last year when then-Senate Health Chairman David Matsuura, a devout Christian who opposes physician-assisted suicide, refused to schedule a hearing on a death-with-dignity bill modeled on the Oregon law. The House Judiciary Committee had voted 8-1 in favor of such legislation.

At the time, we proposed that if a committee chair is stonewalling a bill because of personal beliefs, he or she should step aside and let a more neutral member of the committee preside over that particular issue.

And there are also inequities in conference committees that could stand to be remedied.

Under the present rules, two chairs — House and Senate— hold absolute veto power in conference committee. This means either chair can kill a bill even if it has been approved by a majority vote. Granted, a majority of committee members can override a chair's veto, but committee members rarely go against their chairs.

And so, in preparation for the new legislative session, government watchdogs, including the Hawai'i Clean Elections Coalition, are calling on lawmakers to implement a process in which each committee member's vote counts equally, with no special weight to the chair's vote.

We cannot maintain a democracy in which some lawmakers are "more equal" than others.