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One of the Legislature’s most canny and astute members, House Speaker Joe Souki, pulls a pile of House roll call sheets from his desk drawer.
“This is my bible,” he says with a smile.
The sheets are his own projections on how his members will vote on his important bills.
Parsing how his 44 House Democrats will vote is both higher mathematics and an art form for Souki.
Right now he is tallying up the votes for Senate Bill 1129, which would allow a terminally ill person to get a prescription for medication to be self-administered to end the patient’s life.
Souki voted for a similar bill when it passed the House in 2002 and now he is doing all he can to have the bill become law.
“This has to do with compassion. Pain is not a birthright,” Souki said in an interview.
“They should be given the right to do what we think is right. A number of churches don’t think it is bad to help a person in their eternal journey.”
Fifteen years ago, an assisted suicide bill cleared the House and then was bottled up in the Senate, only to be defeated with 14 “no” votes.
Then-Gov. Ben Cayetano had assembled a special study group to recommend a bill. The committee took two years to offer up its recommendations and it formed the basis for the push.
Hawaii church groups, mostly led by the Catholic Church, opposed the bill and had a skilled lobbyist working in opposition.
Now supporters of the bill have no major institutional supporter. If you support assisted suicide, no one has your back; you are voting on your own.
But remarkably, the effort has become the key issue for one of the state’s most powerful lobbyists, John Radcliffe, who has been diagnosed with stage four colon and liver cancer.
“On the outside I should have died by July of 2016, and here it is February of 2017. So far, so good,” Radcliffe said in testimony.
With what time he has, Radcliffe is launching his most passionate lobbying campaign. He was Souki’s guest of honor when the House opened its first session in January and he was also the Senate Health Committee chairwoman’s guest of honor in the Senate. So top legislators were sending a strong signal of their support for the bill.
“This is just one more small advance for the remarkable Catholic philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas who wrote that ‘Mercy is the compassion of our heart when considering the misery of another person,’” Radcliffe, a Catholic, said in an interview. “It was Aquinas’ view that Man’s justice was never complete without God’s mercy, and that God’s mercy perfects Man’s law.”
Radcliffe is predicting victory, saying, “This is an organic national movement.”
Souki, however, is more cautious. He is also Catholic and knows the power held when Hawaii’s Bishop Larry Silva appears in a front-page Hawaii Catholic Herald piece urging Hawaii parishioners to “pray fervently that physician-assisted suicide will not be permitted in our state.”
Still Souki goes back to his vote tally bible and ticks off every possible Democratic vote against the bill that needs 26 votes to pass.
“We have 44 members — 30 up but even this … it could go down to 28,” he predicted.
It will be a close vote. Legislators will get little political benefit, but the public benefit of voting for compassion and empathy is immense.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.
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