Senate Wants More Time For Judicial Picks. Should You Vote Yes?
Supporters of a Nov. 3 ballot measure argue it will allow senators more scheduling flexibility and save the state money.
Voters in the upcoming election are being asked to help the Senate juggle judicial appointments with their other duties.
By law, the Hawaiʻi Legislature meets every year from about the middle of January to late April or early May.
If the governor or chief justice makes a judicial appointment before or during that time frame, the Senate Judiciary Committee can usually accommodate confirmation hearings and recommend to the full Senate whether to approve or reject the appointments.
When a judicial appointment comes between April 1 and Dec. 31, however, the Senate typically schedules a special session for later in the year to fill those vacancies. They are required to meet within 30 calendar days of the time the appointment is made, but the month of April is dominated by a two-week conference committee period when the House and Senate try to reach compromise on hundreds of pending bills.
In recent years the 25-member Senate, which is the legislative body that handles confirmations, has had to hold two special sessions to take on judicial nominees. In 2022 it held three.
And special sessions cost money — about $5,000 for airfare and per diem for neighbor island senators as well as senator and staff time.
The Senate would like to extend the time period to 60 days, but that requires amending the state constitution. It is one of two ConAm questions on the Nov. 3 ballot. The other seeks approval for a type of bond financing for county infrastructure projects.
Hawaiʻi court vacancies are a perennial challenge, in no small part because Hawaiʻi justices and judges are forced to retire by age 70. The judiciary has also struggled to keep salaries, which are approved by the Hawaiʻi Legislature, competitive with the legal private sector.
Since March of this year, the judiciary has advertised for an associate justice on the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court, a Circuit Court and a District Court judge on Maui as well as a family court judge, and a District Court judge on Kauaʻi.
It is also not uncommon for the Judicial Selection Commission to extend application deadlines because it has not received enough applicants. The commission reviews, evaluates and votes in secret ballot on applications for all judicial vacancies before sending an agreed-upon list of candidates to the governor and the chief justice for consideration. The governor makes nominations for the Supreme Court, the Intermediate Court of Appeals and Circuit Court, and the chief justice makes nominations to the District Court.
And if the Senate fails to reject any appointment between April 1 and Dec. 31 within those 30 days, it’s deemed to have consented to the appointment.
Sen. Karl Rhoads, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee that considers judicial appointments, is the lead author of the bill that led to the ConAm question. He said that it can be challenging to gather the Senate during the summer months and later in the year around the holidays when legislators are traveling for conferences and speaking engagements as well as taking vacations.
Senate Bill 121 was unopposed in the Senate when it passed in 2025, while only a half-dozen House representatives voted against it, all of them minority Republicans. One of them, Rep. Garner Shimizu, pointed to testimony from the judiciary itself opposing the legislation.
The written testimony by Rodney Maile, the administrative director of the courts, argued, “If the constitutional amendment proposed by this measure passes and is approved by voters, it could leave judicial vacancies unfilled for an extended period of time, depending on when a vacancy occurs.”
“We would note that the current process of filling judicial vacancies is already time-intensive, with the posting of notice of the vacancy, application deadlines, candidate interviews, and the determination of qualified applicants in some cases taking more than a year after a vacancy occurs,” he added. “This proposed change would prolong the period of vacancy for certain appointments thus delaying the onboarding of new justices and judges.”
But Rhoads was not persuaded by the testimony. He said a 60-day time frame would allow for “bunching” — that is, taking up more than one nomination during special session.
“If we get a couple of judges appointed at different times, we may slow one of them down, but it will probably speed another,” he said. “There’s a very high likelihood that some of them will also be speeded up just to put them both in the same special session. And so I think the net result may be a slight delay but that delay will be counteracted by the fact that the Senate will try to bunch the appointments.”
Rhoads also said that a 60-day time frame would be “way quicker” than the Judicial Selection Commission vacancy process.
“There’s a big lag between when they put out a notice and when they get the applications and they’ve interviewed everybody and done the background checks, et cetera, et cetera,” he said. “They have a fairly long period after they’ve interviewed everybody to announce who they’ve picked. That’s the part that takes a long time.”
Of note: In order to pass, constitutional amendments require that yes votes outnumber no and blank votes combined. Rhoads has tried but failed to get his colleagues to change that rule via ConAm.
