 Hawaii on Think Tech Hawaii with Dennis Esa. Today we'll be speaking with Ed Case, our senior congressman from Hawaii. His work for Senator Spark Masunaga has been in the state legislature as a majority leader. He's representing Congressional District 2 in Congress before and now representing CB1, his urban law. He graduated from White Prop Academy and is an attorney. But we won't hold that against him. He has received many awards such as the legislator of the year and elected official of the year before. Ed has stood up for what he thought was right. In the meantime, we find out that he was right. Ed, welcome to the show. Please tell us about politics in Congress or particularly on the division on issues between party lives. Ed? Well, Aloha Dennis. First of all, it's great to be with you and all of your listeners. I like to come on Think Tech Hawaii as much as I possibly can. First time with you and I look forward to our discussion. Well, you know, I'm sitting here in Congress, of course. Behind me on the screen is Congress in action. I just came from the whole house for a vote and the vote is going on. And so I'm on the hill doing my constitutional duty. Of course, there's always going to be tension in Congress when different policy perspectives are presented for members of Congress to vote on. Members of Congress are very passionate as are the constituents that we serve and as is the country. And so we do have divisions and there's nothing unusual about differences in approach, differences in policy. We have to find some way to resolve those in a democracy and that's what our Congress is set up to do. Difficulty comes when it becomes about much more than just resolving differences in policy. When it becomes a win all game that is focused purely and simply on the politics of the moment, not on the long term benefit of the country. When it is focused on tearing down your opponent, discrediting your opponent, acting as if those concerns are not valid and refusing to look for consensus, concerns that may represent the mainstream of our country. And that's exactly what we have way too much of in Washington DC right now. We have major issues across the board. I can name just for a few of immigration. We have a broken immigration system. I think we might all agree on that. I think we might all agree that our federal budget is in dire straits. I think we might all agree that our infrastructure needs upgrading. I think we might all agree that China presents a threat to our country and to our world. We might well agree on lots of things. And within that agreement is the kernel of agreement also on what to do about it. But not if your goal is simply to deny the other side of victory at any cost and that your perspective is to be on an end all and and either you get 100% or 0% and you really just don't want to work with anybody else in Congress or especially the other party. And so my real challenge here in Congress is I guess I would say three or four full rising out of the same basic problem, which is how do you get anything done in a very dysfunctional Congress like any organization? Well, first of all, you have to find your friends. You have to find your folks that you can work with on any one issue. You have to try to listen to what they have to say. You have to see if you can solve their problem while solving your own problem. Yes, you have to compromise sometimes and you have to do it for the good of the country. And not because you necessarily want to. I mean, we all probably think we're right in some way, shape or form. But there's a lot of people in this country that all think they're right. And if we don't find some way to listen and adjust to other people's perspectives, it's a very hard road. So that is my focus here. Interestingly, on many occasions, it is possible to actually achieve that. For example, I'm a member of the Appropriations Committee, which is the Committee of Congress that is responsible for virtually all discretionary spending. So the year to year spending some $1.4, $1.5 trillion. And during COVID-19, we were responsible also for some $4 to $5 trillion of emergency assistance. And within that appropriations committee, you find a lot of people that are willing to work together to produce our annual bills and to produce our spending priorities. We try to accommodate everybody in that committee and reach mainstream consensus solutions. Yes, we disagree on some things, but we usually do it politely and civilly. But it's not true in other parts of our political discourse in there. I just have to navigate carefully. And of course, that is all with respect to national issues. And I have to get done for Hawaii, what Hawaii needs to get done. And I need to work with everybody to get that done, especially a very, very small delegation in a very, very big pool. And so that requires maintaining relationships and helping people where you can and trying to ask for their help where you need their help. Along the lines, you've been called a leader in the Blue Dog Coalition. What does that mean? Well, in Congress, again, there's 435 members of the US House and there's 100 senators. And so that's 535 voting members of Congress. And in our congressional delegation in Hawaii, we have four members, two senators, two representatives. So we're four out of 535. So when you do that math, it's pretty easy to figure out that you've got to work with other people that have your common interests. Sometimes you work with people in your own party and sometimes you work across the aisle and sometimes you do all of the above. And much of the way we do that is in our committees. I already talked about the appropriations of committee. My other committee is the Natural Resources Committee with jurisdiction over all of our nation's public lands and waters, as well as our indigenous peoples to include native Hawaiians. But we also have what we refer to as caucuses, which are our collections of members of Congress united around a common purpose. So for example, we have a US-Japan caucus that I'm a member of and always have them. That is because I care a lot about the relationship between the United States and Japan. We have the similar caucuses, the oceans caucus. That's pretty obvious one as well. The blue dog caucus or coalition, essentially a caucus, is a group of democratic representatives who are focused primarily on the fiscal stability of our country, the budgetary, the monetary stability of our country. We worry a lot about massive federal deficits and debt and what to do about that. We're also focused very much on our national defense and our national security. So we take very realistically and eyes wide open the threats around our world, such as Russia and China. We take very realistically and eyes wide open that we have to have a strong national defense and national security to try to work with the other countries of the world to ensure the international piece that we have mostly had for three generations against that kind of opponents and aggressions. And then finally we are focused on getting things done. So we're focused on pragmatic results oriented solutions. And so we're not adverse to working across the aisle where we need to do to get this done. So we're not really partisan in terms of how we approach things. And so that caucus tends to represent a slice of the democratic caucus. And we band together so that we can act collectively towards those debts. So that's the Blue Dog Coalition. It is a, I guess I would call it a moderate mainstream coalition, but in all honesty to call it a day with me just on the basis of being in that coalition is a little bit of a mistake because I have other interests and other caucuses and other perspectives in terms of my approaches to other issues. For example, the environment to go on another areas where I may not always agree with my blue dog colleagues, but on those issues, physical responsibility, national defense and result oriented legislation, we generally do agree. And so we try to help each other. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for clarifying that. You have long talked about and fought for repealing the Jones Act. Can you please explain? Well, the Jones Act is the federal law. So it governs the entire country. That was enacted over 100 years ago now. In fact, it's just over 100 years since the anniversary of the Jones Act one century. So a different time, a different place, a different world. And what the Jones Act basically says in so many words is that when the goods are shipped between two U.S. ports, they must use U.S. built shipping flagged IE license in the United States and accrued by U.S. basically U.S. citizens. And perhaps that made sense 100 years ago when there were just a ton of ships out there, including a ton of shipbuilding capacity in the United States and a ton of Jones Act ships in the United States. And because we had so many Jones Act ships, the law was not a problem in respect to it's basically restricting any cargo shipments to U.S. ships because they had to compete with each other. And so the difference between the price of shipping on Jones Act ships and the price of shipping on a ship that you could hire in the international market was not materially different. Today that's a far different story. We have very little shipbuilding capacity in our country. We're down to less than 100 Jones Act ships and they carry all the cargo between U.S. ports. So for example, obviously Oakland to Honolulu, which is our primary entry for 80, 90% plus of all of our goods in Hawaii, lumber, milk, you name it, unless it's produced in Hawaii, it usually comes in by the Jones Act. Now that's a problem because what that creates is monopolies. And in fact, we do have a virtual monopoly on that shipping lane between California and Hawaii because we only have two Jones Act shippers that transit that and let's not be surprised that their prices go up in sync. So they're both making far more on that transit than if those ships were non-Jones Act ships in the international market. Now what makes a Jones Act particularly devastating to Hawaii is that we have no alternative to that shipment. First of all, as I already said, we get most of our goods from shipments from California. And second, we do not have an alternative if that price of that shipping and that transshipment gets too high. So we can't truck it in instead, we can't train it in instead, can't do cheap airplanes in instead, are capped to two shipping companies and they take full advantage of that. And I've included from a policy perspective that that is unacceptable, that that is harmful to the people of Hawaii in significantly higher prices across the board, impacting housing, food, art and goods, agriculture, ranching, I could name any number of industries all impacted by the Jones Act to include, by the way, our workers in our labor industries who pay substantially higher amounts as a result of the Jones Act. And so I have opposed the Jones Act for quite a while. And as you can imagine, the folks that have a monopoly over that and have a lot of money to make from that, they very much opposed me. And so they don't like me talking like this. However, I think it's important for me to highlight, I have introduced the measures in Congress to repeal the Jones Act as it impacts Hawaii and the other island parts of our country, non contiguous, I can put it that way. So not the mainland, in other words, so Alaska, Puerto Rico, you know, Guam, etc. And I've also introduced bills that say, if you're not going to repeal the Jones Act, then at least regulate the cost of that shipping, so that you take the monopoly premium out of it and you essentially link the cost to the international market. So in other words, they don't get to gouge us because they have a monopoly. Does that refer to the cruise ship school? There is a similar bill that is called the Passenger Vessel Services Act. And that is essentially the Jones Act for passenger vessels. And it's quite topical, as a matter of fact, because let's say that you are a cruise liner who wants to take passengers from Seattle to Alaska, so the Alaska cruise, right? Now, the way that they work that, they can do that on US flagged passenger vessels, of which there are very, very few, by the way, same situation as the Jones Act. But if they are foreign vessels, then they have to make a stop somewhere along the way. And that's what they do. They leave Seattle, they stop in Canada, and then they go on to Alaska, because they're not going directly between Seattle and Alaska. They're not subject to that law. Now, what happened in the middle of COVID-19 was Canada shut down. And so that industry completely dried up. And as a result, the passenger vessels, certainly the cruise line companies who are American companies using foreign vessels, they went out there and just obtained an exception to the Passenger Vessel Services Act that allows them to take foreign vessels directly from Seattle to Alaska, at least as long as COVID-19 is around. So that'll indicate to you. Similarly, we saw recently disruption in some of our natural gas for various reasons. A lot of the natural gas is shipped around on non-Jones Act ships. And that was disrupted. And a waiver was granted so that that market could continue. So I guess that the lesson of all of that is the Jones Act works until it doesn't work. And then you get an exception to it. Well, it doesn't work for a boy. Okay. We're halfway through. Why don't we take a short break? Thank you for following. We'll be right back. I'm Mitch Ewan, host of Hawaii, the state of clean energy on Think Tech Hawaii. Hawaii, the state of clean energy is about following the many clean energy initiatives in Hawaii. Hawaii, the state of clean energy, appears weekly on Think Tech Hawaii at 4 p.m. on Wednesdays. Thank you so much for watching our show. We'll see you then. Aloha. Welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii with Ed Case. Ed, some have said you voted against one of the COVID relief bills. Can you please explain that? Well, that's incorrect, first of all. People that don't particularly like some of my votes say things that it simply aren't true. And that's politics today. You hang it out there. And because you say it, people start to believe it. The fact of the matter is that I voted for every COVID-19 relief bill since March of last year. So that was the CARES Act, which was the first major bill of three major bills that started us down the road towards some critical federal relief. I supported that. I voted for it and I implemented it. And that yielded significant amounts of money to Hawaii. I also voted for the emergency assistance bill at the end of last year, which was another almost $1 trillion. And then finally, I voted for the American Rescue Plan just a few months ago, which is the bill that's in effect right now. When you take all of those bills together, that was almost $5 trillion worth of emergency assistance that I voted for those bills. The vote that people are misconstruing was a vote against a obscure procedure, which is referred to as reconciliation. And reconciliation, in so many words, really forecloses any possibility of a potential consensus coming out, a consensus bill coming out of Congress, because it essentially, the purpose of reconciliation really is to allow the majority on a slim majority of one to implement the bills of that size. And I voted against a reconciliation bill at the beginning, one of those larger bills when we were voting on the procedure at the beginning, because I felt that we had not exhausted the possibilities of trying to find a consensus solution. And I felt that if I voted for reconciliation, I was essentially saying there's no way that we can do this. And I didn't believe that. And I didn't believe it was good for the country that we abandoned that. Later it became apparent that, in fact, the only way to get them passed was to proceed by reconciliation. And so on the second go around, I voted for reconciliation. That's along with saying the basic statement is incorrect. And the real reason for my negative book was that, again, I felt that the country needed to try to unite up around a reasonable package of relief. And relief was not possible at the end of the day with that approach. And so I went for it. Yeah, thanks very much for clarifying that. You mentioned on certain subjects, there's outside influence. I'm sure it has always been there. It touched upon a little bit. Let's observe, first of all, that I should be subject to outside influence. I mean, no member of Congress, nobody in the elective office should be cut off, should be insulated, should be put on the top of a tall mountain where nobody can talk to him or her or attempt to influence him or her. I mean, my constituents in particular, the people that I represent, should be able to try to influence me. And I welcome that. I learn a lot that how can I be truly representative if I'm not listening and if I'm not out there trying to understand what people think. I don't have all the answers. I have to make the decisions and I do make the decisions. When I need to make my decisions, I make the decision. That's my job. My job is to make the decision. But I can't do that in a vacuum. And so I welcome people walking into my office and telling me what they think and arguing with me and even getting very, very mad at me if I don't agree. And that includes people that are paid to do so. And so there's nothing per se wrong with outside influence. However, the sheer scope paid outside influence on Congress now is simply overwhelming and has really resulted in a very, very corrosive atmosphere in Congress where essentially that paid influence is starting to crowd out everybody else. You've got 1% of the folks in the country basically influencing what happens to the other 99%. And it's for a specific special interest for a tax credit for a company or for whatever it might be. And so how do you control that? Well, I think there's two ways to control it. First of all, you must have absolutely full disclosure of where all of that money, all of that influence is being bought and paid for. Right now we don't have that. It is possible for somebody to contribute large, large amounts of money to a particular poll to be implemented by paid lobbyists without anybody ever knowing who that person is. And that's not the way it has to work. We need to know who is trying to influence me and why are they trying to influence me and how much money are they paying to try to influence me. And then second, of course, if it becomes an influence that corrodes my independent ability to make my decision so that it becomes a pro quo. In other words, the influence is used to purchase my vote or my influence, my own influence on something. Well, that's completely wrong. I think we would all agree on that. And frankly, the laws are not strong enough to prevent that and to fully prosecute it when it does happen. Sometimes it can be very, very gray what's happening. And so you've got to toughen those laws. We passed in the first month that I came back to Congress in 2019. And again, just a few months in the current Congress, HR1, which is the first bill introduced in Congress. So number one bill, HR1. And then we call that the For the People Act. And the For the People Act is basically us saying we're not going to take that. It is corrosive to the country. It is leading people to be disgusted with their government generally and with their Congress specifically. Congress has, last I checked, a 24% approval of this country. Now, I'm not proud of that. I'm sitting here as a member of Congress and people of our country think that my institution that I care about and that I want to make work is rated 24%, meaning three quarters of the country doesn't think we're doing a good job. That's a great concern to me. And so HR1 is an attempt to reverse that. And that's our number one priority. Frankly, it is now stymied. It passed the House. It's stymied over in the Senate. And the reality is because the changes that it would implement will remove the ability of people to exert undue special influence on Congress. And so very people that are benefiting to start with are very committed to making sure that doesn't happen. So I hope that it prevails. Thanks. Another vote that I guess you voted against the voting rights for jail criminals and no other congressman voted for it. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Well, you know, that's one of those bills that, you know, you say it like that. And it completely loses the subtleties. The fact is that let's take the most extreme example. First of all, the bill that I voted against would have provided voting rights to any incarcerated felon. So it doesn't matter, you know, what you are convicted of. It doesn't matter what the circumstances were. Nothing matters. You still get the right to vote. And of course, in our country, we have followed the general principle that if you act contrary to the laws of our country, you should not, you know, generally be entitled to choose the direction of our country that that is a consequence of criminal behavior. Now, let's take two examples. And let's see what you think about those two examples. So what if I were to say that somebody was prosecuted when, you know, he was, he was 21 years old on the second marijuana possession offense, and he was convicted of that. And it was a felony and he was incarcerated. And here, 20 years later or whatever, the question is whether he should have voting rights. Should he? I think he should. I think that that is too harsh a consequence for a law that today we look back on and ask ourselves why were we throwing people in jail for felonies on simple possession of some, some, some drugs, opposed to dealing them. But let's, let's, let's, let's take the other example. Let's, let's talk about the Oklahoma bomber. He was, he killed hundreds of people. He was convicted. He was sentenced. Does he get the vote? I don't think so. And so I voted against the bill because the bill said that the Oklahoma bomber could vote. And that was a bridge too far for me. So if I had gotten a different bill, I probably would have voted for it. But again, you know, unfortunately, in today's, you know, soundbite world, the soundbite is, as you presented it, and I need to explain it, but I'm not complaining. That's, that's my job. My job is to, is to talk about the, the reasons why I make the decisions that I do in the, in the true context, even if somebody is actually trying to use it against me. Okay, we've got a minute left. We've got a lot more things to talk about. I think we'll be here one more. Well, one of the minute things more. I wanted to talk about politics effects. You touched upon it a little bit on the rising prices of goods now. You say something there and have your closing statement. Well, I mean, you know, the goods are going up for a number of reasons. Number one in Hawaii certainly is the Jones Act. Number two, COVID-19 has certainly disturbed our supply chains and, and so it may be temporary. But frankly, I don't think it's all temporary. And then number three, back to my point earlier about physical stability in our country, the fact is that excessive debt leads to inflation. And we've seen that in countries around the world, countries like, you know, Greece and Argentina, who have spent too much and borrowed it all. And so, you know, there are things we definitely can do about inflation. But we have to first acknowledge why it's happening and look in the mirror and face the music as to the changes that need to occur in order to claim inflation. It is doable, but not by simply yelling and screaming at each other. And maybe that's the best way I can think about the end. Because if all politics and government is about nowadays is simply yelling and screaming at each other across your redivide. And that's not a good future for our country. And I choose otherwise. And that's the way I approach my job. And I will continue, I will continue to do that and hope people believe as I do that that's really the only way forward. Thank you. Thank you for your service. And thank you for expanding a lot of things to the people of Hawaii and the world. This concludes this portion of Politics in Hawaii on Think Tech Hawaii. Mahalo to Ateez, Congressman from Hawaii for joining us. Aloha. Aloha.