DC 808: Amends anyone? Hawaiʻi Congressman Ed Case angered some of his fellow Democrats in April when he was one of four Dems to cross party lines and vote with Republicans to pass a controversial measure requiring people to show proof of citizenship before registering to vote.

Case was being his kind-of-conservative-for-a-Democrat self with his vote for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, saying at the time, “Noncitizen voting is illegal, and we should all know that noncitizens are not voting.”

Fast-forward four months and the emergence of a viable primary challenger in state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole, and suddenly Case is all about expanding protections of voting rights. He announced on his X account that he is co-introducing four, count ‘em, bills to that effect.

They include the Expanding the Vote Act, the Election Mail Act, the Voters on the Move Registration Act and the Time Off to Vote Act.

Whew.

None of these proposals directly contradict Case’s earlier support for requiring proof of citizenship, a concept the State of Hawaiʻi is challenging in court, by the way. But The Blog predicts that when voting rights come up during the primary campaign, you’ll hear a lot more from Case about his support for these latest bills than you will about that one way back in April.

Elsewhere in the Hawaiʻi congressional delegation, Rep. Jill Tokuda has been making the island rounds during the recess.

Among her many stop-offs, she met with representatives of MauiWES to see how they track long-term health impacts on wildfire survivors and with military families at Marine Corps Base Hawai’i to connect with our service members & military families and discuss quality of life issues such as child care, health care and safety from domestic abuse and sexual assault.

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Sens. Brian Schatz and Mazie Hirono joined some of their Democratic colleagues in signing a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio raising concerns about the recent killing of journalists by Israel in Gaza and introducing the Reproductive Rights Are Human Rights Act.

The latter would require the U.S. State Department to include reproductive rights in its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. The State Department omitted reproductive rights from its most recent human rights report released earlier this month, renewing a practice started under the first Trump administration.

Schatz also announced he led a bipartisan group of 10 senators in writing to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to complain about the lack of safeguards around children’s use of AI chatbots, “particularly in light of recent reporting that the company’s policies allowed chatbots to have romantic and sensual conversations with children.”

Mission of mercy: Gov. Josh Green is expected to meet Pope Leo XIV during a visit to Italy later this month, an opportunity that Green said he will use to invite His Holiness to Kalaupapa on Moloka‘i. The isolated peninsula is the site of a former colony for sufferers of Hansen’s disease (leprosy).

“As the last survivors begin to pass, that’s a very sacred place,” Green told HNN’s “Spotlight Now” this week, noting that Kalaupapa produced two Catholic saints, Father Damien and Sister Marianne Cope.

Green, who this year formed the Heal America PAC to support pro-health and pro-science candidates for office, also hopes to talk about “humanitarian leadership” with Leo — “You know, kind of things that we did in Samoa, what we’re doing as we recover from Maui. There’s a lot of humanitarian needs in the Indo-Pacific, and so apparently he’s eager to talk. And so it’s going to be quite cool.”

Green leaves Sunday with his family for the East Coast to take their daughter to college. Then he’ll head to Italy later this week in his capacity as the president of the Council of State Governments, which involves participating in meetings with other Italian leaders. The CSG is a nonpartisan organization serving all three branches of state elected and appointed officials.

“I do admit seeing the pope is probably the most extraordinary part, although to tell you the truth, I’m much more concerned about dropping my daughter off at college than I am about seeing the pope,” he confided.

The NeverEnding story continues: Last month, we updated you on the wild lawsuit against Sean “Diddy” Combs and a bunch of other people, including Maui Police Chief John Pelletier, that is slowly playing out in a Northern California federal court. Then, U.S. District Court Judge Rita Lin had just heard a motion for sanctions brought by famous comedian Druski against lawyers for three people who say Combs, Druski, Pelletier and a number of other defendants played various roles in the gang rape of a woman and the kidnapping and trafficking of two still-unidentified others.

Druski pretty convincingly documented he was nowhere near California in 2018 when all this was alleged to have occurred. He wasn’t even a famous comedian then and was living at home with his mom in Georgia and working at a local steakhouse. He says he’s now spent more than $50,000 on attorney fees in this case which, he argues, shouldn’t have included him in the first place.

Much has happened in the past month. Last week Lin declined to fine the plaintiffs’ attorneys for including him in the lawsuit, saying information provided by the woman and John and Jane Doe (as they are called in the lawsuit) seemed to implicate him.

But now Lin thinks otherwise and is pretty miffed that the lawyers keep saying publicly they think he might be involved and refuse to drop him from the case. She’s now ordered the plaintiff’s attorney to dismiss Druski by Sept. 9 or explain in detail why he should still be held to account.

In a separate order last week, Lin also pointed out that the complaint against Druski, Pelletier and others was filed in March and they still haven’t been officially served with the required paperwork which, among other things, would presumably finally give the defendants’ attorneys some idea who the mysterious John and Jane Doe are. If that’s not served on the defendants by Sept. 18, then she’ll toss the whole case, she says.

As The Blog has reported in previous episodes of this saga, it’s the Does who say Pelletier kidnapped them in Las Vegas in 2018 and drove them to a house in California where the gang rape occurred. Pelletier denies doing any such thing and has also produced documentation he says shows he was in Las Vegas the whole time the Does say he was driving them across the desert to Orinda, California, in the Bay Area.

And in another twist, now Beckham, a former New York Giants and Miami Dolphins wide receiver who’s now a free agent, last week filed his own motion for sanctions against the plaintiffs’ attorneys. He’s also disputing that he was anywhere near the place where the alleged rape occurred and says the attorneys know this.

“The inclusion of Beckham in Plaintiff’s graphic account – involving kidnapping, sexual assault, impersonating a police officer, gun play, bribery, government cover-ups, an attempted stabbing, and the unsolved murder of Tupac Shakur – is beyond the pale,” he says in the motion.

Beckham contends he has provided documentation to show he was in Los Angeles at the time of the alleged sexual assault, participating in a training session, hanging out with friends at his house, meeting with a Nike shoe representative, followed by more drinks and dinner out with friends and attending the televised Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards presentation the next day. He was filmed and photographed at various times over those two days, he says, and has receipts and other records to prove his whereabouts.

Beckham says he’s incurred close to $62,000 in legal fees and is asking for sanctions of at least that amount.

Looks like The Blog will have another update next month.

Common causes: Just when President Donald Trump is making it harder for people to vote by vowing to end mail-in voting throughout the country, Hawaiʻi voting rights advocates say they will make another push this coming legislative session to expand automatic voter registration systems. Similar bills died in the 2025 legislative session.

That’s the word from last week’s “People’s Promise” town hall at the Capitol Modern (formerly known as the Hawaiʻi State Art Museum), sponsored by Common Cause Hawaiʻi. Democratic Rep. Della Au Belatti, a co-author of two of the AVR bills, and Republican Sen. Brenton Awa, were featured speakers at the forum and both said they’d like to see more places to vote in person on election day. On Oʻahu, only two locations are open — Honolulu Hale and Kapolei Hale — creating long lines and late closing of the polls.

Awa stood in line for hours to vote on Nov. 5, which he said meant he was probably the last person to vote in the nation. When asked, he didn’t directly answer whether he supports Trump’s plan to do away with vote-by-mail systems but said that “the people who vote on our side, they statistically like to show up on the day of in person.”

Camron Hurt, Common Cause’s state director, asked Belatti why Democrats are the biggest obstacle to campaign finance reform. Belatti acknowledged that it’s difficult for lawmakers who are part of the system to change it. Hawaiʻi, she said, needs to give public financing of campaigns a “fighting chance,” and provide more robust funding to a program that is already in place. Something that Democrats who overwhelmingly control the Legislature have failed to do.

The People’s Promise town halls will continue through the year. One was held recently in Honokaʻa on Hawaiʻi island and the next is planned for Molokaʻi and then maybe Kauaʻi.

New hires: Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi has appointed Deborah Zysman as the new deputy director of the City and County of Honolulu’s Office of Economic Revitalization. Zysman is the former executive director of the Hawai‘i Children’s Action Network and, before that, executive director of the Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Hawai‘i. She’ll now help lead the city’s efforts to “drive equitable growth, support small businesses, attract investments, and build resilient communities across O’ahu,” according to a press release.

Josh Stanbro joins the Hawaiian Council (formerly Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement) as chief administrator of Kalāhiki, a new initiative focused on advancing energy sovereignty, climate resilience and economic security across Hawai‘i’s communities, the council says.

Stanbro most recently was deputy director for policy at Elemental Impact, a Hawai‘i-based climate tech nonprofit. Before that he was Honolulu’s first chief resilience officer and executive director of the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency, led the environmental program at the Hawai‘i Community Foundation and ran The Trust for Public Land’s Hawai‘i program.