Senate Standing Committee on Judiciary

Foreign. Welcome everyone to the Judiciary Committee Informational Briefing this Wednesday afternoon. My name is Karl Rhoads. I'm Chair of the Judiciary Committee. This Zoom meeting and YouTube live stream event covers the following agenda, the 2pm Informational briefing on the Rule of Law with Congressman Ed Case. As noted, this briefing is being streamed live on YouTube.

You can find links to viewing options for all Senate hearings and meetings on the Live and On Demand video page of the Legislature's website, which is www.capitol with an o.hawaii.gov in the unlikely event that we must abruptly end this briefing due to major technical difficulties, we've already rescheduled this once.

I don't know if we'll manage to be able to do it again, but we'll try. The Committee will reconvene and a public notice will be posted if we have to cancel. Since this is an informational briefing, traditionally we only accept testimony from the person or people who are there to specifically testify.

But any any Member of the public are welcome to watch, of course, or be here in the room and send their comments and concerns to our office or any other office at the Legislature. Let's see. Briefing materials from today's presenter are linked from the briefing notice and will also be posted online on the Senate JDC Committee page.

These can be accessed on the Legislature's website, capitol.hawaii.gov. Okay, the concept of rule of law is critical to the functioning of a democracy.

Rule of law has been defined as a durable system of laws, institutions, norms and community commitment that delivers four universal principles accountability, just law, open government, and accessible and partial justice by the World Justice Project.

Key feature is that there is a system to ensure that no one in the government has so much power that they can act above the law. As a country, the rule of law is an ideal that we strive for and we rely upon our citizens respecting the rule of law.

An apt description comes from former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in a 1947 decision, there can be no free society without law administered through an independent judiciary. If one person can be allowed to determine for themselves what is law, every person can. That means first chaos and then tyranny.

Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process, and that's from U. S versus United Mine Workers in 1947. We have unfortunately observed that the United States President observed the United States President mocking judges and deriding their decisions.

He's threatened judges with impeachment for adverse rulings and taken steps to silence lawyers and law firms and engaged in litigation against him and the Federal government. It is critical that all of us have and demonstrate respect for the rule of law. Also necessary to the rule of law is an independent legislating body.

Each branch of government has a defined role, set of authorities and limitations and acts in relation to the other two branches. Recent Presidential Executive orders and policies raise questions about whether the current President and his Administration is following federal law and adhering to the rule of law.

For example, a key right of Congress is the power of the purse granted by the Constitution makes Congress the decision maker on which money should be appropriated to which agency. This authority is executed annually through the appropriations process. The Executive Branch then oversees the Administration of the appropriated funds across federal agencies as intended by Congress.

The Congressional Budget and impoundment act of 1974 affirmed Congress's power and created procedures that the President must follow to obtain Congress's approval Approval to legally defer or withhold appropriated funds. The President does not have the authority on his own to impound federal funding. Thank you again Representative Case for being with us today.

Representative Case has been invited today to explore the rule of law and our current national political status and discuss how what effect recent Federal Government actions are having on Hawaii residents. As a refresher for many of you, Congressman Case's represented Hawaii's first congressional district, Honolulu for Makapuu, Mililani and Kapolei since 2019.

He previously represented Hawaii's second congressional district, which was the remainder of Oahu and the other Hawaiian Islands from 2002 to 2007 and is probably one of few people in the history of the country who has represented both districts of a two district two person representative delegation on the US House of Representatives.

He also served in this body as a State Representative from Manoa from 1994 to 2002. Congressman Case is a Hawaii licensed attorney who clerked for Hawaii Supreme Court Justice William Richardson and then worked at Honolulu firm- law firm Carl Smith Ball for two decades where he practiced litigation, property transactional business and government law.

He eventually became Managing Partner Carl Smith. He later practiced at another firm based Long Rose and Houma where he again was Managing Partner. He then worked for five years as Senior Vice President slash Chief Legal Officer at the hotel and resort company Outrigger Enterprise Group.

Currently Congressman Case sits on the Appropriations Committee and two of its subcommittees, Defense and Homeland Security. Again, thank you for being here and the floor is yours.

Thank you so much. Senator Chair, Senator Chang, good to see you again and thank you to the Judiciary Committee for highlighting here what I believe is one of the most major, if not the most major threat facing our country right now is, which is a threat from within, a threat to our foundations, the foundations of our country.

And for us to take the time as citizens to explore why this is the case, what's not going right and what we can do about it is an invaluable contribution to the public discourse. And by the way, I'll put up information at the end. I definitely would like to hear from people.

I welcome everybody that is joining us outside to listen in. Case.house.gov is the way into my office. I'm going to start with the basics that you already outlined, which is a very good quote. And I think there's a lot in this quote to unpack a little bit. And I'm just going to read it again.

What is the rule of Law by the World Justice Project? It is a durable system of laws, institutions, norms and community commitment that delivers four universal principles. Accountability, just law, open government, and accessible and impartial justice. There's a couple of words in there that I think we should just focus on as we get into this discussion.

Number one, durable. This has to be a system that passes the test of time. It survives and prospers from presidents to presidents, from downsides and upsides in our history, from one party or the other party being in the majority, challenges from without.

But the system itself survives and it has survived for 250 years, and we all want it to survive for another 250 years. It's made up of laws, institutions, norms, and community commitment. The laws is pretty straightforward. I'll get into that. The institutions is pretty straightforward, I'll get into that.

But beyond that, it's a collective commitment, as this quote highlights by all of us, that we are going to support the rule of law regardless of the outcome. And we're going to do it because we believe that that's good for our country. And so I think that that is foundation. It's not just about the Constitution.

It's not just about Congress. It is about what we all believe is, is the norm of governance in our society and the norm of community commitment, of division, of discourse, of civil debate. How do we fit that all together?

That's what the rule of law is, that combination of functional institutions and common understandings, regardless of our political principles. Of course, it starts with the United States Constitution. We always go back to the United States Constitution, which is our our guideposts, our most basic foundation.

It lays out all manner of things, including how we're going to put this country together. How does this country work in a way that will be durable, will ensure public support over time. It also consists of federal laws.

So the laws that are actually passed by Congress, that's part of our Rule of Law Foundation, the Constitution and the federal laws. Finally, I would say it consists of the concept of separation of powers, of checks and balances, because our founding fathers were concerned about abuse of power, and they were rightly concerned about it in those days.

And the fact of the matter is that there have been many times in our history where we've faced abuses of power. The foundations have held, and we're facing one of those times today. These are designed to check each other. The three branches of government.

The Executive branch, which is the President, the Legislative branch, which is the Congress, and the Judicial branch, which is the Supreme Court and all federal judges.

If I were to summarize the Rule of Law and kind of put it into Rule of Law 101, I would say first of all, it all starts and ends with the Constitution, number one. Number two, Congress makes our laws.

Number three, the President executes our laws and has other very specific powers, including Commander in Chief of our armed services. Number four, the Supreme Court and the federal courts are the final decider on whether Congress or the President are following the Constitution and laws.

And finally, and again, most importantly, we all as citizens buy into our system of government and agree to abide by its results, even if we don't like them. And we have mechanisms and ways to self correct our country within the rule of law, where we don't like how those results are turning out.

That's what the rule of law means for our country. And all of the leaders of our country swear to abide by the rule of law. This is what I swore. This is what I've sworn five, six or seven times now.

The President swears to faithfully execute the office of President and to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Congress swears to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

And the Supreme Court swears that it will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon them under the Constitution and laws of the United States.

So not only do we have the institutions, not only do we have the words of the Constitution, but we have the leaders of our country swearing to all of our fellow citizens and to ourselves that we will support and defend this structure. That's what the Rule of Law means.

Now, the Rule of Law means some things and it doesn't mean other things. And I should pause here to contemplate what my particular role is, or for that matter, any United States representative. And it may be a little different from what other people think the role of their Members of Congress should be.

My first role is to support and defend the Constitution. That's what I swore to do. My second role is to formulate the laws and policies for our country, to initiate, debate and formulate the laws of our country. Third, to act as a part of a separate, independent and co-equal branch of government. That's how this was contemplated.

That's how it was set up. Congress is not the President. It is independent of the President. It is not a subsidiary branch of government. It is separate, independent and co-equal. And it's supposed to provide a check and balance on the other two branches as they are on Congress.

And finally, my loyalty is to the Constitution, to the country and to my constituents, and not to any particular President. That's what my loyalty lies. So to those that somehow think that I'm supposed to do what the President says, no, that's not my job under the United States Constitution.

I think I also want to talk about what the Rule of Law is really not about, because we sometimes get the Rule of Law conflated and mixed up with the very deep divisions that we're having in our country over the right direction for our country. Should we cut Medicaid or not cut Medicaid?

Should we withdraw from the world from a foreign assistance perspective, or should we not? What's the right level of taxation? What's the right level of spending? Where in fact, do we protect and expand labor rights? These are all policy questions. These aren't about the Rule of Law. The Rule of Law is about resolving these policy questions.

So when we're talking about. About the Rule of Law, I am not here to express concerns about the Trump administration's or anybody else's policy direction. I can get into that if you want. I have very strong objections to many of the things that this Administration is doing. That's not the concern here.

And similarly, this is not about whether you like or dislike this President or any Member of Congress. That's the freedom of any citizen to. To react to a President's or a Member of Congress's personality. But that is. Is not really about the Rule of Law.

The Rule of Law is about what are the foundations of the country, how do we defend them, and what is going wrong. Right now, we're talking about the foundations of our country. And if we maintain those foundations strongly, then we will be able to navigate the very, very difficult issues and polarizing matters that we face today.

Now, it should be, you know, should be no surprise that I believe that this President is not complying with the Rule of Law in our country. And here are some, just a few selected actions taken by the Trump Administration to, to give example to areas that I think are not policy disagreements.

They are, but they are erosions of the Rule of Law, erosions of the foundations of our government. And by the way, I've given you chair a very long document there in which I summarize many of my actions in terms of the Trump Administration, from set legislation to press releases, to joint letters, to participation in lawsuits.

Provide the letters for you. All of that is on my website. I'm happy to mail that to anybody that wants it. So that's the policy side of things. But here are a couple of things just exemplary. Some of them you've already referred to.

So number one, destruction of federal agencies and funding that was already directed by law, destruction of federal agencies and funding that was already directed is already pursuant to law. And this has been ongoing in the current fiscal year. And here's what it comes down to.

Congress appropriates and directs the establishment of federal agencies and appropriates the money to Fund those federal agencies. And we did that for the current fiscal year. We have federal agencies. They are created pursuant to statute. And Congress has appropriated the money. That's for the current fiscal year.

The President came in to office in the middle of that fiscal year. The President commenced eliminating some federal agencies, significantly eroding other federal agencies and curtailing funding across the board. Billions and billions of dollars, much of which impacted us very severely here in Hawaii.

And the basic question there is why did he do that when the law already provided that he was supposed to do that?

Now, if he wants to do that for a future fiscal year where we haven't written the law yet, if he wants to come to Congress and say, I want to pass a law to eliminate the United States Department of Education, that's fair game. That's a policy question.

But to go against existing law, I think that attacks the foundations of our government. Number two, withholding already appropriated funds without an opportunity for Congress to object per law. This is referred to as impoundment.

When a President tries to hold back money already committed by Congress and signed by a President, and this President is trying to do that right now. This is referred to as a pocket rescission. This has now gone up to the U.S. Supreme Court. I believe that this is contrary to the Rule of Law.

Number three, a removal of inspectors General and others from key federal agencies. We have an entire system or had an entire system of providing independent internal oversight of our agencies in order to assure that somebody was looking over the shoulder, somebody was acting as an internal check and balance on the Administration.

That's our job, too, but we're not inside the Administration. So, for example, a whistleblower says, hey, we're wasting billions of dollars on this defense program. Where do we actually get that evaluated? We gave that to the Inspector General inside the Department of Defense.

This is particularly true in our intelligence community where it's very, very important for us to know that the intelligence that is being produced is realistic intelligence. We got rid of all those inspectors general under, under this President.

And I believe that that is not just a policy call, it's a Rule of Law question because it eliminates independent assessment and it assures that power can be centralized without question. Firing of key federal officials from independent agencies.

The Federal Reserve is the number one area, but there have been in many other examples where we have had agencies that we have set up by law to be independent of the President, to not be subject to the President's direction, because we want those agencies to act independently, not simply as an arm of the President.

And we did this, we, the President and Congress did this because we believed that there needed to be some Independence. And the Federal Reserve, again, is a very good example of this where, as we've already seen, there's great political attempts at manipulation of the outcome of our interest rates.

And those should be thought through on an independent basis by experts, not manipulated by a political system.

And the firing or the attempted firing of those officials, I believe is contrary to the rule of law, because we set that up as a foundation of government to make our government more efficient and to introduce sufficient checks and balances, failing to comply with the letter in spirit of federal court orders.

This is the most major or one of the most majors that we can consider here because this President has consistently flaunted federal orders. He comes right up to the edge, goes over even causing the federal courts to come in and, and, and actually order him to do what they ordered him to do once already.

Then he appeals, which is his right.

So I'm not saying that that's wrong, but I'm saying that a systematic attempt to ignore the federal courts, which are supposed to provide the check and balance and is a key part of the foundation, is a fundamental problem with the rule of law attacking the integrity of the federal courts when decisions are unfavorable.

You referred to this already. That's just A direct attack on the foundations of our government. The President evidently feels that we don't need a federal judiciary because they should not be available to say whether the Constitution has been breached or not. And whatever he wants to do, he can do. That's not the way we set this up.

And if we don't have an independent federal judiciary, we are going to lose one of the most key foundations of the Rule of Law.

Eroding the Independence of Key Federal Agencies such as the Department of Justice is highly troubling because the Department of Justice has the ability to wreck lives, to directly wreck lives if it is manipulated for political purpose.

And I for one believe that the Department of Justice, which had survived very well through a number of administrations that attempted to influence it in one way or the other and maintained Independence, which is, which is a core part of the Rule of Law in order to provide for the impartial Administration of justice, has clearly now been substantially co opted by this President.

That's very dangerous because we rely on the Department of Justice to enforce the law and to prosecute the law. Removal of dissenting or independent opinions. We've seen this as a repeated, a trend not only in the inspectors general area, but throughout the entirety of government where, where board members speak up, they're fired.

I, I questioned a witness for the, for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in my House Appropriation Subcommitee on Homeland Security, and we had a very positive discussion about, about whether he agreed or didn't with the pronouncements of somebody in Administration that we should close FEMA. And he agreed. And the next day he was fired.

Now, I think that's contrary to the foundations of our country. Abuse of power to intimidate opponents and leverage others to fall in line. We've seen this repeatedly. We saw this over the weekend with, with the Federal Communications Commission.

And regardless of whether you do or don't agree with Mr. Kimmel and what he said in the, in the monologue, free speech should not be punished by the threat to withdraw a license for you to televise at all. That was clearly an abuse of power.

And then finally and again most concerningly, attempted intimidation of the press, repeatedly excluding the press, really, the press is now excluded largely from covering the Defense Department. The press is significantly restricted from covering the State Department. The press is crowded out, at least dissenting opinions from the White House press conference, also subject to litigation.

So systematically trying to constrain dissent, to organize things. And really, if you sum it all up and you take all of these pieces and put them together, what's really going on. I've kind of fallen behind here. Here we go. I think we are facing a widespread and coordinated effort.

So this is not acting on an ad hoc basis. This is coordinated across government to maximize power in the Executive branch generally.

And President Trump specifically to eliminate dissent and independent voices and to neuter Congress and the federal courts and any effective check and balance, all to the detriment of the rule of law and the foundations of our country. Again, this is not about whether we agree or disagree with the President's policies and where the President wants to go.

It's not about whether we like him or not. It is not about any of that. It is about whether, taken together, these actions are risking the very foundations of our country. And I believe the answer is yes. So we talk about checks and balances all the time. What do we do about it?

Where are our checks and balances right now? Well, first of all, the main check and balance is supposed to come from Congress, a separate independent and co equal branch of government.

The reality is that under this President and under the current Republican majority in Congress, because the Republicans have the majority in both the House and the Senate, many of them are my friends and colleagues. I work with them. I, I have a good time with them a lot of the times.

But they are not providing a check and balance on this President. They have ceded their constitutional duties to this President. Now, whether that will continue or not remains to be seen.

We've seen some semblance or some spark of an independent streak in some parts of Congress and perhaps the President will simply go too far one of these days and they will wake up and say, no, this is really, really a huge risk to our country and or their constituents start to tell them that this is not what they signed up for.

The federal courts are really the only real check and balance currently. We've seen over 406 lawsuits to date against the Administration and federal court now and these come all over the place and they're in the materials that, that I've made available to you.

Some examples, by the way, the Administration has lost most of these and some of these are on their way up to the Supreme Court, if not already decided in the Supreme Court.

But we're going to see a flood of stuff getting to the Supreme Court in the next months and year as the Administration presses on all bounds to really undermine the foundations. But some of the examples, birthright citizenship, that should have been a no brainer. Whether you like it or not, it's in the Constitution.

Federal funding halts Dismantling departments, releasing citizens personal data. These have all been the subject of lawsuits that have gone really against the President. And then finally, if you want to talk about the ultimate check and balance, us, the people, and our check and balance is the vote.

Do we think that this is the right way to go for our country? Now, the vote is on this President is not for another three years, but the vote on Congress is next year. And certainly in the midterms. We need to.

Let me just interrupt real quickly to point out to people who might be watching that the next election is not, it says midterms 2028. It's, the midterms are in 2026. So please vote in 2026 too.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Thanks for, thanks for your diligence. Yeah, cancel that. Midterms 2028, that's 2026. Yeah. I usually operate about 1-2 years ahead of myself. So one of my, one of my, one of my issues, I suppose. So the midterms in 2026 are fundamentally going to be a question to the US American people.

Do you like where we're going or not? Do you like where this President is taking us? Do you believe in the Rule of Law? Do you believe that in the foundations of our government? Regardless of whether you support this President or not, is this the right direction?

And so ultimately, this is the check and balance and we will find out what the people of our country decide. Now, what can people do about all of this? Because certainly I feel a great sense of, for many of the people that I represent understand everything that I have said perfectly, feel it in their gut.

But there is a sense of despair sometimes and hopelessness about how can we actually stand up when this much power is amassed against some fundamental principles that we all believed in? And so these are a couple of things that I believe people should do.

First of all, I think we should all talk about this a lot more, and I mean really talk about it civilly. But to talk about the underlying issues here, what it means to be a country, what it means to survive for 250 years, what it means to have a foundation that takes some work.

We should talk with our families and friends and communities of whatever communities at work, at play, at faith, whatever it is, these discussions need to be had.

And I think people that believe as I do should say politely, firmly, what's happening now is not right because we have to have this national discussion and it has to knit together throughout the entire country. Number two, share your thoughts with your elected officials.

I welcome anybody to tell me what you think, share your personal stories about how you are affected. Were you a federal worker that was laid off unfairly?

Was your program defunded, what you think is illegally, and what is the consequence of that to our natural resources, to somebody in dire need who all of a sudden does not have a federal program that was eliminated by this government wrongly? Support national organizations that are opposing these actions, especially in the courts, they need help.

They need support in order to maintain these lawsuits. And many of these organizations are quite courageous. Contact your family and friends in other states and ask them to ask their Members of Congress to do our job as a check and balance.

And then finally, and I say this really with great respect to my constituents who do believe that President Trump offers the right direction for our country, who do support the policies and the direction of President Trump.

I'd like to ask you to ask yourself and those around you whether you actually believe that tearing at our foundations in this way to achieve a policy goal is going to be good for our country today or tomorrow?

And I hope you will agree that ignoring the Rule of Law is not going to be good for any of us over the long term. Mahalo. I appreciated you again for the ability to highlight the critical importance of the Rule of Law to our country.

Again, more information on my thoughts, actions, activities as Hawaii's U.S. rep or one of them, is at case.house.gov, email me with your thoughts at [email protected]. And then finally, I just want to note that I am doing another rescheduled, I guess more accurately teletalk story, District Wide Live.

It was I had it planned for the night of the tsunami, so I had to call it off.

I'm going to do this next Thursday, October 2nd, at 6pm Hawaii time, whether I'm in Hawaii or in D.C. I hope not D.C. because that's going to be midnight in D.C. The details on how to join the Talk story are at case.house.gov of thanks again for your time.

Thanks very much. Go ahead and take the.

Yeah. We have some time.

Questions did you want, do you have something you want to start with? Go ahead, please. Senator Chang.

Well, thank you so much, Congressman, for winning the Committee today. I really appreciated that briefing. What are the chances you think that Trump will be able to run for a third term?

I mean, I think the chances are, are low, very low. There's no plausible legal argument for it, no plausible legal argument whatsoever.

And so for him to gain a third term, it would either be a complete overturning of our, the foundations of our, of our country, including our Constitution, or some corruption or I don't want to say corruption, but collusion and co option of the federal judiciary. And I think those are unlikely possibilities.

And so I think frankly, like many things with this President, he throws things out there to, to sometimes get people riled up, sometimes to speak to his base, you know, sometimes to distract from a particular issue. And I think this is one of those issues.

So from my perspective, the less we talk about it the better because I don't think it's a realistic possibility. But countries have fallen for know, countries like us have fallen.

We sometimes think as the United States that because we've been around 250 years and because we just, you know, believe in democracy that it's just automatically going to continue. And I think what we have seen is no, it doesn't happen automatically.

You have to work at it and you have to self correct along the way and it can fail. And I think that's, somebody asked me this morning what's the difference between, you know, past years and this year? And I said, you know, I've been in Congress 11 years.

I served under George W. Bush and a Republican majority by the way. I served under President Biden, of course, I served under Trump 1 and I served under Trump 2. So that's the span of my, my service in Congress. And there were deep policy disagreements throughout.

We had knockdown, drag out fights over policy with W. I had some knockdown drag out fights even inside the Democratic Caucus during the Biden years. And yet, I never doubted that the foundations of our country were fraying even, even in Trump one, even though you could see it coming.

But this is a systematic approach, far more planned, far more organized, far more deliberate. And so this is, this is a different one. But I mean if the foundations are not going to hold well enough for us to comply with the requirement for a two term presidency, then you know, we're in trouble.

I was just reading a book actually recently about the rise of Hitler and You know, there are some troubling parallels. One is the escalation of political violence. It, it struck me that it would, you know, if, if this cycle continues and there were assassinations on both sides.

I mean, I don't think we're that far away from kind of a pretext for martial law or something like that. Do you think that's far fetched?

Well, first of all, I'm always uncomfortable to draw the parallel to the Nazis and to Hitler because that was of course far more severe, far more, you know, disastrous to the world. It is true though that, that Hitler took power through, through a vote. It wasn't like he took over government.

He got, he got a foothold and then he started to expand it through the erosion of the foundations. And so I think what we should take from, from that regime is a lesson again that democracy can be fragile and we all have to work at it. And to your question on political violence, we have to reject it.

And what I've been disturbed, obviously like many Americans been disturbed at the level of political violence over the last years, especially on both sides of the political spectrum and by the fact that it is driven by political beliefs as opposed to just, you know, you don't like somebody.

But it has definitely disturbed me over there, over, since, since Charlie Kirk's murder as well as the Minnesota House Speaker Emerita is, is the pull to discuss issues other than just we cannot accept political violence. Like there's no way to, to justify it, explain it, to blame it.

The only real issue is somebody was killed because they were participating in political discourse and because, and I believe this is true as well. I think we all have a responsibility for trying to prevent that from happening. And that does require turning down the tone of our political discourse.

That does require some discipline, some effort and we all have a part in that. We all get angry. I get angry, you know, people get angry at me just reading my social media and yours, you get this too.

So I think we have to be cautious right now and I think we have to be realistic and we, I think we all have to step back as fellow citizens and ask ourselves what's really going on and do we like this? And if we don't like it, I think we should self correct it.

I think that's my best thought on that.

Just one last question then, speaking about policy. So let's say, you know, the Democrats do win the majorities in Congress in 2026 or I guess 2028 and now you have a Democrat in the White House in the 2029 and 2029. What-

Are there any specific laws that you think that Congress and the White House could adopt that would combat or reverse some of these erosions of the Rule of Law that have taken place and prevent them in the future?

We certainly, we've certainly seen some gaps in our, in our ethics and ownership and financial interest laws governing public officials. So that's one where, you know, I think definitely too many people in government and on both sides of the aisle are too tempted to utilize their power, which we do have, for personal benefit.

And I think that's certainly true in this Administration. There are people that are. So I think that we can tighten that up quite a bit.

I think in the same spirit, the Supreme Court needs a code of ethics because we are too often losing faith in the Supreme Court, which always enjoyed one of the highest ratings of any institution of government, and now it doesn't. Part of that is because of ethical lapses. So there are disclosures, campaign spending.

You know, certainly I can, I can kind of get into the weeds with you on this stuff. For example, the Citizens United opinion that just opened the floodgates to billions and billions of, you know, corporate spending and elections and really has, has been a corrosive impact. But I don't think that there's anything fundamentally wrong with our foundations.

I don't think we need to amend our Constitution to make sure this doesn't happen. I don't think that there are main federal laws that somehow are contributing incredibly to the problem. I mean, yes, there's some.

No, what's happening is you've got an Administration that is taking the world that it has and trying to erode and undercut the areas that are resisting them with a compliant majority in Congress.

And you, you are seeing an erosion in that latter part of the definition of a rule of law, which is citizen commitment to the rule of law. Because people are polarizing, so they tend to see things as result oriented.

Like if you, you like where Trump is going, then it doesn't matter if he runs over the foundations and if you don't like it, then how can we stop him, regardless of the foundations? So we've all got to stop that.

Well, thank you again for taking the time. I know you're usually on this side of the table. I appreciate it.

I haven't, I haven't been on that side of the table for a while in the State Legislature.

Let's focus a little bit on how this is affected, Hawaii specifically. So I mean, the sort of, the General paradigm is that we, we Hawaii citizens pay federal taxes. Most of us pay more in federal taxes than we do in state taxes.

The money goes to DC and as you've described previous in your testimony, now there are laws about how that money gets spent. Can you talk a little bit more about, I mean, you're on the Appropriations Committee. Can you talk a little bit more about how the process is supposed to work for money coming back to Hawaii?

And I'll also just preface it by saying I think it's fair to say that Hawaii is one of the fairly few blue states that actually gets more money back from the Federal Government than we pay in. But there's, there's a process for how that money is doled out.

And I'd like to hear your thoughts on how that's going and is, and I accept your, your distinction between, you know, it's one thing if you, if you want to cut Medicaid by a trillion dollars and you have the votes to do it, okay, fine, that's a terrible policy decision, but you got the votes, you can do it.

But on the funding side, that has not, it does not appear to me that that's always been the case where they, a previous testifier, Professor Moore, said that a lot of the things that the Federal Government is doing now are sort of borderline legal. If they just review things, delay payments can be very disruptive.

So I just want to see what your thoughts on that dynamic are.

Yeah, so the way the process is supposed to work is that Congress authorizes programs, sets the conditions for those programs, locks it into law with the President's signature. These are the laws of our country, the laws that govern our programs that say what we're doing and why.

Then what happens is that my Appropriations Committee, which has control of all federal spending, comes along and on a yearly basis divvies up how much money overall we can spend that year and then what departments that money goes through goes to rather.

Well, you pass a law to do that.

We pass a law to do that. Session lying. Well, it's a, it's a formal law, it's a full on law, it's an appropriations law, and there's 12 of them. Because what we'll do is we divide the Federal Government up into 12 buckets, if you want to put it that way.

So we've got one Bill or measure, proposed, proposed law for the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. That's the one I have in my Subcommitee on Defense. We have one Bill on the Department of Homeland Security.

That's the one I've got in that Subcommitee, we've got one on education, we've got one on, you know, labor, we've got one on foreign affairs. We pass those laws.

Most of that money does not go directly out to, to recipients, flows usually through the federal department, the federal Executive branch, because the Executive Congress can't like, oversee all this stuff, right? Nor should we. It goes to the Executive branch and they get into the details of how that money is going to be distributed.

That money then goes a lot of it to the state and county governments and to private recipients because recipients come in and apply for grants. So that money flows down to Hawaii through the state and county governments and through individual federal grants. That money assume, assume that that money is for a law that was already passed.

So current fiscal year 2025 we've passed those laws.

Okay.

If the money doesn't get out of the Federal Government, then why not? We passed the law, the President signed it. It should be going out. What the President did at the beginning of this year and continuing to now is he just completely withheld it for starters. He got sued.

So then he backed off on that pedal a little bit. Then he came back and slow walked a bunch of it. Then he got sued for slow walking it on the basis that in reality all he was trying to do was to curtail that spending.

Then he came back and said, okay, well Congress, will you pass another law that rescinds the money we already appropriated? And Congress passed that for some of the federal funding. So there are a variety of ways how he can.

I'm Sorry, so you can, you can see this happen.

You can, you can look at the programs that are, you can look at programs or grantees or contracts that have gone to Hawaii in the past, and you can see that some of those have been held up, have been held up or would have been held up if it weren't for the fact that our Attorney General sued the Federal Government.

Yes, we, we definitely- and, and by the way, we are.

I am in close contact with our Attorney General because to, to address, to address the, the, the effort by the Administration to not fund programs that are funded by law and which, by the way, the state and county governments and places like the University of Hawaiian that are nonprofit organizations.

I just came this morning from Parents and Children Together Daycare. They relied directly on federal funding. If that money is withheld, then there's a two prong response. Number one is through the courts and number two is back through the Legislature.

And so I have to stay very close to Our Attorney General, I meet with her and my staff meets with her staff frequently to kind of coordinate, you know, what they're, what we're hearing, what she's hearing.

I tell everybody whose federal spending in Hawaii is, is, is questionable because they got some notice from somebody saying, oh, we're not going to fund you right away. Tell the Attorney General because she has to collate all of that into lawsuits across states. So to Professor Moore's comment, there's kind of three buckets.

One bucket is a legitimate policy driven curtailment of the money. That's for the most part not what's going on. Bucket two is putting on the semblance of legality when your real intent is to stop the money and where you just do whatever you can to kind of conceal what you're actually doing.

And then number three is straight out withholding of money. That's illegal and the courts have said so.

And it's, you know, there's a lot of weeds here, but are there examples that you can give that people would recognize as things that we value here in Hawaii? That's being there, that's being cut.

A natural resource, for example, marine protection being cut. NOAA programs eliminated. NOAA personnel laid off.

Partner good partners in, in taking care of our, our marine attempt to significantly curtail the Mauna Loa Observatory or on the Big island, which is the world's foremost laboratory for measuring climate change, has been doing it for over 60 years now.

In the University of Hawaii, they've seen major curtailment now in some of their minority serving institution programs where they have seen the government come back and say, no, we're not going to fund that anymore.

Does that include Native Hawaiian programs?

Some Native Hawaiian programs, yes. But we have worked very, very hard in the congressional delegation with our partners from across the country.

So the indigenous peoples of our country, Native Alaskans, American Indians and Native Hawaiians, to educate this Administration that these are programs that have existed for decades now and that they are part of the indigenous programs of the country.

So you're not going to be able to somehow take out Native Hawaiians and explain it away against American Indians and Alaska Natives who are the indigenous peoples of our country.

So the minority programs that we're really talking about are minority disadvantaged programs where legitimate programs are out there to assist folks that just need a little bit of a helping hand to get, get into a self sustaining area. Those programs definitely at risk.

We've seen cuts in education, we've seen some curtailment in federal law enforcement money for, for you know, things like, you know, contributions to state and county government, equipment needs, et cetera. So they're scattered throughout the Federal Government. I haven't quantified them to add it up, but I- It's in the hundreds of millions.

But, but in Hawaii, of course, I mean, 30% of the population is white and every, everybody else is something else. So does that mean that everything. All. All. I guess, I guess I'm just trying to drill down on the, the definition of minority because it seems like that could include just about all of us.

Well, think Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islanders, that would be a significant minority. We have programs that are targeted to those minority populations. If you take out Native Hawaiians, we've still got a lot of Asian American residents, Asian American students. We certainly have Pacific Islanders with major needs. And so these programs are at risk. They're being underfunded.

The social services programs are particularly hard hit. This Administration just-

Even in the bucket of, just of where they're not the policy bucket, but the illegality bucket buckets.

Yes, these are subject to lawsuits right now for illegal curtailment of funds. Now, I want to make a point here again and I've been talking to you and your colleagues in the state Legislature and the City Council and the mayor and the Governor since two days, I think after Trump's election this time around.

And I think I came to your caucus, what, in November or something like that. And this is what I basically said, right now we're functioning under fiscal year 2025. And so that money, unless the feds start to curtail it, which of course they did, that money should get here.

And so you've got a little bit of breathing room. But when you hit FY 2026, which starts on October 1st, that's a whole new ballgame because then you can't claim illegality anymore on the withholding of this funds. We haven't passed those laws yet and we're passing them now. And again I'm on a probes.

So I've been through weeks and weeks and weeks of these things and fundamentally what is happening is that defense, which is about half of our budget, is level, but everything that's non defense is down 10 to 15, you know, 10%. So in the.

So, so yeah, sorry, go ahead, make your point.

No, my point was simply that we can talk, we can talk about the illegality of FY 2025, but the story is going to be different very shortly.

No, I, I think there's a distinction between not having the votes and just not doing what you're supposed to be doing. So do you have any other questions Senator Chang? Okay, I do have a couple more if you've got the time.

I do.

Okay. I don't know how much this affects Hawaii, and I guess that's a good question for me to ask, but there's a number of federal agencies, and the one that's been in the news recently is the Federal Communications Commission that are, were intentionally set up to be independent from the President.

And they have a board that is, many of the Members are often, often the Members are named by the President, but they're subject to Senate confirmation. And, and some of them, I think, are nominated by other people. But the whole idea was to, to have some Independence. The Federal Reserve is another good example.

They're supposed to be independent from the, from the, from the President. And those were congressional acts, and probably, probably a President signed them at some point. I don't know the histories of these, but I'm guessing that they were actually signed into law as opposed to overriding a veto.

President Trump seems to be determined to get rid of that under. And, and I think his, his support or his, his lawyer supporters anyway, are looking to something called the unitary theory of the, of the Executive. And I guess my question is how- isn't that really the same thing as just ignoring a law?

Because we, we have the law. There's two, there's two ways. It seems like it could go to me, and you've practiced law a lot longer than I have. So either the, the Supreme Court can just say those laws are. That's not the, that's not what Congress meant when they said we're going to have an independent board.

They didn't really mean we're going to have an independent board and we're going to let you do whatever you want. Or they have to say, well, it was, it was set up as an independent board. It was an act of Congress. If you want to undo that, you will have to change the, the underlying statute.

Do you, can you comment on that whole how that's playing out? And if there are some specific effects on Hawaii, I'd like to know what they are. But I, I know I don't really see anything off the top of my head.

Well, first of all, I should say all of this affects Hawaii. Right? I mean, we're part of this country. We have just as much of a vested interest in the survival and prosperity of this country as anybody else.

And it is frustrating that on occasion, it is hard to drive home the very specific parts about how this affects people. And one of the reasons for that is that I don't believe the effects of what's going on now are going to be. I think they're still accelerating.

In other words, we haven't seen the last of this and we haven't seen the full effect come down into our state. All we can do right now is be very realistic about where this is going and what we can do to prepare for it. But if you want, you know, some, some, some comments along those lines.

Yes, back to my earlier comments. Congress passed and the President either signed them or his veto got overridden to create these independent agencies to insulate them from politics.

And in the case of the FCC, Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcast licenses in this country, the reason for the Independence was because we didn't want a President coming along and manipulating the broadcast companies in terms of what kind of speech content they put on the air.

The, the license was supposed to be about, you know, basic viability, about, you know, keeping your antennas going. And yes, some very, very specific, very limited content restrictions, like, you know, don't swear on the air, which seems to be kind of a bygone day at this point.

You know, don't talk about child pornography in a graphic, you know, those kinds of things. And so there was a reason for the FCC to be independent. And this President understands perfectly that he wants to manipulate and control the press because he wants to manipulate and control the information flow.

He doesn't really believe in an open debate for the most part, as far as I can tell. And so it's really important for the FCC to be independent. And that's the subject of a court case right now. Yeah, in terms of, we do have broadcast licenses here. I have not heard from any of our-

First of all, many of our broadcast companies are not owned here. Right. So I've not heard of any specific concerns thus far from them. But I wouldn't rest on, you know, the passes prologue.

Okay, let me ask one other line of, or go on one other line of questioning here. So my impression has been that at the lower court level, the, the, the district courts and the circuit courts, they have to follow precedent and they do for the, you know, they, that, that's, they understand that's, That's Law School 101.

You have to follow precedent if you're a judge. The Supreme Court, of course, doesn't have that exact same restriction. They are supposed to follow precedent, except that they can overrule it in, in the end if they want to. My impression so far is that this Supreme Court is often dismissive of, of precedent.

And you know, well, that was wrong. We decided we're going to change it. How do you, how do you think that plays into this?

It's at some level you could argue, I suppose, that that's not a violation of the Rule of Law because it's the Supreme Court and they can change their interpretation of the law if they want to.

But at the same time, it's a radical departure from the common law system of, of law that we have in the United States.

Well, nothing worse than two lawyers talking to each other about this kind of stuff. We can, we can go off into. This, save it to last, but we stop those things. We can go off into the weeds. Our court system has to work. We have to have faith in our court system.

Right now that faith is, you know, eroded in, in some areas for some people. I have not gone back into our deep history and analyzed whether this particular court is, you know, just departing from prior rulings more frequently than other courts.

And as a lawyer, I think we would know, as lawyers, we both agree that you need a pretty good mix of precedent for stability and foundational, you know, understandings, but you also need the ability to depart and to go with the times from time to time.

You know, the over overturning segregated schools is the best example of that. I mean, if we were just going to go with precedent, we never would have done that. So I, I just have a really nuanced view of this. But what I do, what I do believe we have to depend-

We have to defend our foundations. And we have to defend them whether we agree with the result or not, as long as they were arrived at in the course of our Rule of Law. And the courts and the Supreme Court specifically are no different. I don't like many of the decisions of the Supreme Court.

I'm not on that court and somebody's got to decide these things.

And so I think there is, obviously from my political perspective, or I suppose I would say policy perspective, I think there's, I think the thing that bothers me the most about some of the court's rulings that I fear the most is an acceptance of a highly expansive view of Executive power and a marginalization of legislative power.

I think that's very dangerous for a country. I think legislatures are just far closer to the people. They're capable of compromise. It's harder to abuse power inside a Legislature because you got 535 voting Members of Congress. Gotta, gotta work with each other to get things done.

If you're a President who just thinks you're right, you, you don't really, you're not really accountable to anybody other than, you know, somewhat to the court. So what, what, what I fear is that. And we'll see. You know, courts have surprised us before.

Some of the court members that we thought were going to be, you know, ruling one way, they're not ruling that way because I think they actually sense, many of them, that this is a, this is a dangerous direction and they've got to find the right balance of Executive power and leaving it to the people to decide direction in elections and making sure that they maintain the, the, the, the foundations that our founding fathers envisioned, which were three branches of government, separation of powers.

No, not, not a lot of power. Not too much power to any one branch.

All right, thank you very much. Any other questions Senator Chang? Okay, I appreciate you being here, Representative, and your time, and I know it's busy time up there, and hopefully I'm not very confident that things will be wrapped up by the end of the fiscal year, but for your sake, I hope they are.

Actually are you even going back up until the, until after the fiscal year?

We have- well, the answer is I don't know. We're subject to recall right now. I hope I go back, because if I go back, it's because we avoided shutting down this government. So I strongly want to go back to, to take that vote.

Yeah. Now, shutting the government down is never good for much of anything.

Yeah.

Thanks again and we're adjourned.