Cover Story

An off-season

Key players assess the 2010 Legislature
by adrienne LaFrance | Jun 9, 2010

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Cover image for Jun 9, 2010
2010 Legislature

Every winter, Honolulu Weekly anticipates the coming legislative session with the fervor of football fans. We discuss line-ups, make predictions and revisit the play-by-play of the previous session’s wildest victories and ugliest defeats. The session itself is a whirlwind of hearings, thick documents, rallies, impassioned speeches and crying foul. But before we know it, the clock runs out. No matter how attentive our legislative focus has been, there are always key plays missed, a feeling of not fully understanding exactly how the game went the way it did. And who better to ask than the players?

It’s an exercise we go through after each legislative session. We e-mailed every state senator and representative the same five questions, almost all of which were questions we asked last year, too. One addition: What percentage of State lawmakers do you believe would have made all of the same decisions this session, were it not an election year? Did we expect anyone to definitively know the answer? Of course not. But we did see the question itself as a kind of bellwether for, ahem, B.S. and an opportunity to assess the manner in which lawmakers answer questions about the some of the more slippery elements of life in politics. Not every lawmaker took the time to respond at all–some were too busy blast e-mailing us their campaign newsletters–and we’re enormously grateful to those who did. We reporters like to remind politicians that we’re really on the same team: looking out for the public’s best interest. We hope these excerpts offer you a better understanding of those who are making decisions on all of our behalves, so that we may all be ready next year when the games begin again.

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