A Circuit Court judge Thursday rejected a legal challenge to the “gut-and-replace” maneuver in which state lawmakers strip the contents out of some bills and insert entirely new language into the measures.

Common Cause Hawaii and the League of Women Voters of Honolulu filed a lawsuit in September to try to invalidate Act 84, which started out as a bill to require the state Department of Public Safety to publish data measuring the rehabilitation rate of inmates.

By the end of last year’s session, lawmakers had removed any reference to prisons and inmates and inserted new language requiring the state to consider hurricane- resistant building criteria for new schools.

The rewritten bill became law, and Common Cause and the League sued, alleging the “gut-and-replace” violated the state constitution and prevented the public from any meaningful participation in the lawmaking process.

They said the state constitution required lawmakers to consider the rewritten bill in three floor votes, but Circuit Court Judge Gary Chang rejected that argument in his decision. The groups said they will appeal.

House Speaker Scott Saiki said “gut-and-replace” is sometimes necessary. For example, lawmakers used it to provide $125 million last year to pay for recovery efforts in the wake of heavy flooding on Kauai and Oahu.

Nancy Davlantes, president of the League of Women Voters of Honolulu, said lawmakers must sometimes act quickly in an emergency, but there was no emergency involved in the passage of Act 84. “They do this practice all the time,” she said. “They do it as a general practice, and they’ve been doing more of them every session.”

“We’re just asking that they think about this,” she added. “I don’t think they should use it as a tool of convenience.”