Hanabusa fails
Sen. Colleen Hanabusa is an unabashedly political mammal. She aspires to higher political office, or, failing that, has her eye on the judiciary. However, she’s failed to learn the critical lesson that, at least sometimes, politics must give way to principles. And that’s where she falls short. The Senate president is uniquely positioned to lead, and she’s failed miserably.
Only a rarely used procedural device could have rescued HB 444 from the judiciary committee and placed it onto the floor of the Senate for a vote. Early murmurings from Senate insiders that Hanabusa would not use this procedural device to move this bill out of committee were realized. Through her minions—senators Taniguchi, Kokubun and others in the chicken wing of the Senate—Hanabusa silenced the bold, principled voices that tried to state their positions on the record. She effectively shut up Senate Majority Leader Gary Hooser, the bill’s champion, and Sen. Ihara, the conscience of the Senate.
Therein lies the contradiction.
Hanabusa’s leanings sway with the political winds, and she clearly wants to avoid any opportunity to take a position on this bill. However, contrary to her representations today, she is no stranger to using procedural devices or artifices when it suits her purposes. In 2008, Sen. Hanabusa used her political prerogative to appoint to the judicial selection committee a raging homophobe, former Kauai Circuit Court Judge George Masuoka. The rules permit only four attorneys to serve as members of the nine-member selection committee that proposes to the governor the names of lawyers recommended to the bench. By statute, the Senate president appoints one member of the public to serve on the committee.
Sen. Hanabusa could have chosen any adult member of the community—nearly a million of us—to serve in this important position. Instead, she appointed Masuoka, who had spent his career as a lawyer and had just retired from the Kauai bench. George Masuoka gave up his bar membership and Hanabusa appointed him to the position. Her procedural shenanigans seated on this important committee an attorney and former judge—a de facto attorney—instead of a member of the general public.
Why do I call George Masuoka a homophobe? Because I was the attorney who, in the mid-1990s, represented Kauai artist David Kelly, whose right to administer the trust of his deceased lover was challenged by his lover’s siblings. To remove my client as trustee Masuoka had to, and did, disregard the carefully crafted reciprocal trust documents that the life partners had created, and the glowing report about my client’s administration of the trust issued by none other than former Judge Patrick Yim, the highly-regarded Special Master whom Masuoka himself had appointed to independently investigate the alleged malfeasance.
In an outrageous display of judicial cowardice, Masuoka refused to place on the record the homophobic vitriol he uttered repeatedly in chambers over the course of months to an audience of two—myself and my opposing counsel. He took to the bench only to remove my client from the position to which his deceased lover had entrusted him. At the only hearing in the case—to remove my client as trustee—I addressed the judge in front of a packed gallery. I delivered a lengthy and impassioned speech that finally documented on the record the homophobic remarks that the judge had uttered in secret, knowing full well that Mr. Kelly would be the last Kauai client I would represent until Masuoka left the bench. His departure could not happen soon enough.
Ironically, my client and his partner had crossed their t’s and dotted their i’s to ensure that their trust documents clearly set forth their wishes. The terms of the trust were unambiguous. Judge Yim specifically validated that fact. Legally, these devoted partners had done everything “right” to memorialize their wishes. And yet, in the end, only marriage and its codified protections could have ensured that their respective wishes would survive them.
This, then, is the measure of the man who now occupies a seat on the judicial selection committee. And, frankly, the senate president either engaged in or facilitated the engagement of procedural maneuverings to ensure that she could appoint him. Why him? Why not someone else? We can suspect, but ultimately may never know.
That was last year. This year Sen. Hanabusa not only avoided placing her vote on record, but employed another device to silence those who would use the forum to make their record of support for HB 444. Do we sense a pattern here? Like Masuoka, the former judge she championed, Hanabusa has mastered the shameful practice of the weak—leading from the rear. For someone who greedily promotes herself and aspires to higher office or the bench, Hanabusa’s cowardice is anathema.
Mary A. Wilkowski
Honolulu
