Hawaii lawmakers are teaming up with colleagues significantly more this year to push legislation in the name of special beneficiary groups or causes.

Three new caucuses are introducing bills in the 2022 legislative session, which began Wednesday, joining eight other formal caucuses and some informal ones that have been around for many years with like-minded lawmakers trying to get laws enacted by banding together.

The new caucuses were formed to benefit the LGBTQ+ community, working families and progressive causes. They join a list of largely long-standing caucuses whose beneficiaries include the environment, Native Hawaiians, Filipinos, women, keiki and kupuna.

Legislative caucuses often generally play peripheral or esoteric roles in lawmaking. But in Hawaii they also tend to be more important and useful because of the state’s almost one-sided political party power and strong control of bills by legislative leadership, according to Colin Moore, director of the Public Policy Center at the University of Hawaii.

“I think caucuses are interesting in Hawaii,” he said. “It’s the only way to maneuver outside the leadership. It’s a way around the traditional hierarchy of the Legislature.”

New caucuses are often formed to benefit marginalized groups of people or causes. Another common feature of such groups initially is membership featuring junior lawmakers or ones who aren’t part of leadership factions.

For example, the Hawaii Women’s Legislative Caucus was formed in the 1980s and includes all 26 female lawmakers, including two Republicans.

A Native Hawaiian caucus among lawmakers was formed more recently amid criticism that the Legislature historically hadn’t done nearly enough to improve the plight of Hawaiians.

Moore said creation of the newest caucuses likely stems in part from frustration by some lawmakers in recent years that objectives they support have been stymied.

Sen. Chris Lee, co-chairman of the new Equality Caucus taking up LGBTQ+ issues, said a concerted effort among lawmakers was needed to better support legislation benefiting the LGBTQ+ community where individuals and private organizations have spent many years trying to obtain things including recognition and benefits for LGBTQ+ families.

“This issue needs more attention and work,” he said. “It’s always been small groups and individuals stepping up when needed.”

Rep. Adrian Tam, co-chairman of the caucus made up of 15 House members and seven senators, added in a statement announcing the caucus, “Government works best when all marginalized groups are represented, with the Equality Caucus, we have filled a void that has been missing for several years.”

Another new caucus, the Progressive Caucus, was formed in 2021 but didn’t have time to introduce any bills. This year the 18-member group, led by Rep. Matt LoPresti and Sen. Laura Acasio, is introducing five bills, the maximum allowed for caucuses this year.

These bills aim to increase the state minimum wage to $18 an hour, establish an empty-home tax that helps pay for affordable housing, institute bail reform, eliminate loopholes in state land leases for military use, and legalize adult recreational use of cannabis.

“Some of these are big issues that maybe a freshman couldn’t necessarily pull off doing something about, but as a group we bring attention to the issues and hopefully will move some of these through the House this session,” Rep. Lisa Marten, a Progressive Caucus member, said during a recent news conference.

LoPresti described the need for such a caucus as overdue. “I thought it was past time that the bluest state in the nation have a clear progressive voice, a unified voice in the Legislature,” he said.

The third new caucus is the 14-member Working Families Caucus, which has drafted bills to increase the minimum wage to $18 an hour by 2026, exempt unemployment payments from state personal income taxes, create paid sick and family leave programs for all workers, expand a tax credit for renters and make the state’s earned income tax credit permanent and refundable.

Starting a caucus

To form a caucus that can introduce bills, a Hawaii lawmaker must seek approval from the speaker of the House in a memo that defines the proposed group’s purpose and membership.

House Speaker Scott Saiki said he approved all caucus requests submitted this year by an annual deadline, though one request for the Small Business Caucus sought by Rep. Gene Ward was late and thus wasn’t approved.

Ward, a Republican, said the caucus he co-founded in 1993 with then-Rep. David Stegmaier, a Democrat, should have been afforded a bit of leeway for applying one day late, especially since many small businesses have been suffering from the pandemic since 2020.

“They need us now more than anything,” Ward said.

Saiki said the deadline needs to be respected or it will be meaningless.

Without the privilege to introduce bills this year, the nine-member Small Business Caucus will try to champion a couple of bills introduced by a senator on behalf of fellow caucus members, including one that seeks to freeze the unemployment insurance tax rate for small businesses, according to Ward.

“We’re not going out of business, if I could put it that way,” Ward said. “We’re still going to be the voice of small business whether Scott Saiki likes it or not.”

In all, 11 caucuses can introduce bills this year. There are also five other caucuses listed on the Legislature’s website, which includes the informal Senate Native Hawaiian Caucus and Senate Minority Caucus as well as others that don’t appear to be active.

For instance, the Future Caucus, created in 2014 to engage people under the age of 40 in government, hasn’t introduced bills since 2017.

This year’s total of 16 listed caucuses is up from 11 in 2021 and nine in 2013.

Moore said a major value of an approved caucus is that it can look bad publicly for a House or Senate committee leader to sideline a bill, perhaps by not scheduling it for a hearing, when the bill was drafted and promoted by a caucus representing a group of people or cause.

“Leadership is not out to make unnecessary enemies,” Moore said.

Bill success rate

It’s hard to gauge whether bills introduced by caucuses have higher rates of passage compared with bills introduced or sponsored by many lawmakers.

In recent past years some caucuses have had none of their bills passed, while others have done better.

For the three years in which the Future Caucus introduced bills from 2014 to 2016, none of its 15 bills passed, including one that proposed to have counties automatically register eligible people to vote when they receive a driver’s license or civil identification card.

Last year all bills introduced by the roughly 25-member Keiki Caucus, the 35-member Legislative Native Hawaiian Affairs Caucus and the 17-member Filipino Caucus failed. These caucuses introduced 10, five and four bills, respectively.

Two caucuses that had bills become law in 2021 were the 51-member Kupuna Caucus and the 30-member Environmental Legislative Caucus.

The successful Kupuna Caucus bill, House Bill 490, was one of 10 introduced by the caucus and in part ended up making enhanced penalties for crimes against seniors apply when seniors are at least 60 years old, down from 62.

The Environmental Legislative Caucus, which was formed in 2019, introduced 10 bills in 2021, and two were enacted. One made it a crime to intentionally or knowingly capture, entangle or kill a shark in state waters, while the other established a goal for state agencies to have all light-duty motor vehicle fleets be emission-free by 2035.

Bills’ paths

This year some caucus bills align with bills proposed by legislative leaders, including raising the minimum wage to $18 an hour incrementally over several years and making the state’s earned income tax credit permanent and refundable.

Other bills could face more daunting paths, such as House Bill 1202, which is the recreational cannabis bill that the Progressive Caucus is backing after the bill was introduced in 2021 by six law­makers and failed to get an initial hearing.

And still other bills may have better chances of becoming law because a caucus can raise awareness of an issue and gain the support of legislative leadership.

On Wednesday’s opening day of this year’s Legislature, Senate President Ron Kouchi spoke on the Senate chamber floor about a bill to have menstrual products available free in public schools for students because some teenagers are using makeshift substitutes or missing school because they can’t afford the products.

The bill, Senate Bill 966, was introduced in 2021 by five law­makers but didn’t get a hearing. Kouchi pledged to work with the Women’s Caucus to back the bill this session.

“This is something that I’m going to work with the Women’s Caucus on,” he said. “This is something that is important to me.”