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April 12, 2022
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THE BUSINESS OF WASHINGTON
Hawaii Democrat Kahele is a working commercial pilot. Huh?
The Honolulu Civil Beat had a fascinating story that we featured in the Midday edition yesterday about Rep. Kai Kahele (D-Hawaii). Kahele hasn’t been to Washington much this year. Instead, he’s voted by proxy since January.
Buried in that story was an interesting nugget: Kahele, a commercial pilot, is still working for Hawaiian Airlines. Kahele is licensed to fly the Airbus A330, Boeing 767 and Boeing 757, according to the FAA – all long-haul aircraft. Hawaiian Airlines flies between Hawaii’s islands, in addition to multiple destinations in Japan, South Korea and Australia. In addition, the airline services multiple airports on the West Coast, New York, Austin, Orlando and Boston.
Kahele’s office says that he is earning less than $29,595, the maximum amount allowed in outside income for members of Congress and some senior staff. Hawiian Airlines says its first officers make $81 per hour and they fly a minimum of 1,500 flight hours a year, for a total of $121,500.
But in the years we’ve been covering Congress and congressional ethics, we’ve never seen an arrangement quite like this before.
Here’s why:
| → | First of all, we asked Kahele’s office for any documentation from the Ethics Committee that shows that they approved this arrangement, whereby Kahele serves as a member of Congress but moonlights part-time for an airline. They didn’t produce it. |
| → | Kahele has only voted five times in person in 2022 because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Civil Beat story. This is permitted, of course, under the Democrats’ proxy voting rules. We asked Kahele’s office if he has been flying for Hawaiian Airlines while voting by proxy. They didn’t answer this either. |
| → | Hawaiian Airlines has business in front of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, on which Kahele sits. The airline lobbies the federal government. So this means that Kahele is collecting a salary from a company that is trying to lobby the federal government, and more specifically the committee on which he serves. |
| → | Kahele has, on one occasion, talked about Hawaiian Airlines in a congressional hearing, expressing dismay about furloughs. |
We’re going to keep reporting on the propriety of this, and we’ll report back when we have more. But again, we’ve never seen anything quite like this.
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| → | First in Punchbowl News AM: Winning For Women Action Fund, a group devoted to electing Republican women to Congress, will report raising $4.6 million in the first quarter of 2022. More than $2 million of that haul is in hard dollars, meaning they are subject to the federal donation limits. This is the group’s best quarter yet. WFWAF has raised $8.4 million this cycle. |
| → | New: Mandela Barnes, the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, raised $1.7 million in the first quarter as part of his bid to capture the Democratic nomination to take on incumbent GOP Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.). Barnes is facing Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry and Wisconsin State Treasurer Sarah Godlewski for the Democratic nomination. |
| → | Some of us on the Punchbowl News team – ahem, Jake – are big golfers. So this fundraiser that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is throwing is interesting to us. No. 1: RTJ is one of the top courses in the country. No. 2: You get points shaved off of your score if you have attended the outing before and another if you can get someone new to attend the fundraiser. Here’s the invite: |
| → | New: Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) will report raising $512,740 last quarter, nearly four times what he raised in the first quarter of 2020. Let’s not be coy here: Gallego is looking at a run against Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), so his fundraising numbers will be of intense interest. It’s not as if Gallego needs the money for his own re-election campaign; Gallego represents a D+24 district. But Gallego will need to show that he can raise millions of dollars to mount a serious bid against Sinema in 2024. |
| → | Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), up for re-election this cycle, raised $1.3 million in the first quarter and has $2.4 million on hand. |
| → | HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge donated $50,000 from her congressional campaign account to Emily’s List, and $25,000 to Collective PAC, which works to elect Black Democrats to public office. |
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