Hawaii’s delegation ranked 47th out of the 50 states. The criteria are a bill by bill analysis of the votes our legislators concerning issues that effecting small business. A perfect score by a legislator counts as 100. There were 23 votes in both the House and Senate that were used for the evaluation.

Senators Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka achieved scores of 14 and 13 respectively. Both had only voted positively on 3 business friendly issues: Against the opening of ANWR to oil drilling (voted to open), a vote against an oil and gas leasing program on the Coastal Plain (voted for the leasing program) and a unanimous consent vote on the U.S. – Bahrain Free Trade Agreement. The difference between the two ratings reflects the fact that Sen. Inouye did not vote on 2 of the 23 issues and this changed the weighting since Sen. Akaka actually voted on issues that were rated as unfriendly to small business by the SBE.

U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie got a rating of 21 having only voted 4 times for issues friendly to small business according to SBE.

However Rep. Ed Case had a 46 rating since he voted 11 times out of the 23 rated issues in favor of small business. Without these votes Hawaii’s standing would have been even closer to the bottom.

For a full listing of the issues and how each elected official voted follow the link below.

http://www.sbecouncil.org/uploads/Ratings2005Scorecard.pdf

Don Newman, senior policy analyst for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, Hawaii's first and only free market public policy institute focused on individual freedom and liberty, can be reached at:mailto:don@grassrootinstitute.org