Nothing will change until voters demand more of elected leaders

The Legislature can't seem to make it through a session without an episode that exposes the loose ethical environment in which lawmakers allow themselves to operate.

Alarm bells sounded this year about a report by The Advertiser's Rob Perez detailing how North Shore Rep. Michael Magaoay used his position as House grants manager to solicit tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the nonprofits whose funding he decided.

Shaking down charities, which helped Magaoay amass the richest political war chest in the House for two straight election cycles, would seem a clear case of exploiting his official authority for personal benefit.

But the Hawai'i State Ethics Commission said he didn't violate the law — not because there weren't issues of concern, but because campaign finance law set by the Legislature doesn't necessarily prohibit links between official actions and political fundraising.

Troubling questions of ethical judgment were also raised by a Pacific Business News report about how Senate President Colleen Hanabusa trampled the state Constitution to appoint retired Kaua'i Judge George Masuoka to the state Judicial Selection Commission.

The Constitution prohibits stacking a majority of lawyers on the nine-member panel that helps pick judges, and Masuoka would have been the fifth attorney. So the retiree skirted the Constitution, with Hanabusa's obvious complicity, by resigning from the bar association and giving up his license to practice law.

Masuoka has close ties to Chief Justice Ronald Moon of the State Supreme Court, to the point that one prominent attorney likened Masuoka's appointment to putting Moon himself on the Judicial Selection Commission.

In that light, it appears a transparent ploy to make sure that Republican Gov. Linda Lingle's options are limited when Moon must retire in 2010 because of the constitutional age limit and Lingle appoints his successor.

Like Magaoay, Hanabusa may not have broken any laws, but she made a mockery of the Constitution and failed the simple test of ethics offered by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: "Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do."

Fudging that line is becoming a pattern with Hanabusa, who was also embroiled in a conflict-of-interest controversy last year over the Senate's rejection of Peter Young as director of the Department of Land and Natural Resources.

As a private attorney, Hana-busa represented a company controlled by James Pflueger in a contested case before Young and the Land Board over a Kaua'i mudslide that resulted in her client being assessed one of DLNR's biggest fines ever.

In Young's confirmation hearing, Hanabusa approved a subpoena that allowed another attorney who represented Pflueger in the Kaloko Dam tragedy to make an extended, one-sided presentation.

Ironically, Hanabusa won her Wai'anae seat partly because of the ethics problems of her predecessor, Sen. James Aki, who solicited a businessman seeking Senate support for a convention center to develop Aki's own Wai'anae property.

Lawmakers say they're just playing by the rules, but neglect to mention that they make their own ethics rules and have consistently refused to give them teeth.

House Speaker Calvin Say tried to pass a tougher ethics law last year and had the initial support of 38 fellow Democrats, but the bill was gutted before it got out of the House and died in the Senate. The House formed an internal ethics committee with no force of law, and the Senate refused to go even that far.

Nothing will change until voters expect more of elected leaders and render their own ethics judgments at the polls more often.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net. His columns are archived at www.volcanicash.net. Read his daily blog at www.volcanicash.honadvblogs.com.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net. His columns are archived at www.volcanicash.net. Read his daily blog at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com.