Kai Kahele symbolizes Nancy Pelosi’s problematic Congress

I wanna share that story today with you about a member of Congress named Kai Kahele who represents Hawaii’s Second District. He replaced Tulsi Gabbard who ran for president and I know Tulsi and I actually like her. She’s very idiosyncratic, she was for Bernie Sanders, but she’s also very critical of the Democratic Party and sort of speaks her mind. I like just her independence. 

But Kai Kahele is gonna turn out to be a big national story because he is a symptom of the sickness you get with Speaker Pelosi’s rules. Remember she set it up so you could vote by proxy. Well, he decided if that’s the case, why come back? He’s been missing for months and months and months, voting by proxy from Hawaii where supposedly he’s also still flying as a commercial pilot for Hawaiian Airlines. Which, you would think … breaks the rules, particularly since he serves on a committee which supervises the airlines.

So you have a guy being paid by the airlines, while he serves on the committee to watch over the airline, while he refuses to come back to Washington. Now, I mean, I love Hawaii. I can appreciate why you’d like to stay in Hawaii, but there’s something profoundly wrong about the total breakdown of the legislative process. 

If members don’t come to Washington, if they don’t get to know each other, if they don’t talk through legislation, if they don’t get smarter by being a collective group working on things, and they just sit around randomly back home voting by proxy, the whole legislative process breaks down. Which is fine if you’re Speaker Pelosi and you wanna run a dictatorship, because all you want is the votes in your pocket. You get to vote the way you want to, which is apparently what he’s been doing.

I think this will become a scandal. It sort of resembles.. we’re seeing ongoing scandals all around the country. The current active Lieutenant Governor of New York apparently turned himself in today on bribery charges. The whole process of thinking that government should matter, that you should be honest, that you should obey the law. As you know, the longest serving speaker of the house Madigan, in the Illinois legislature, is now under indictment. The Federal Bureau of Investigations has found rampant evidence of Madigan having been a crook. And so again and again, we’re seeing these kinds of things. 

But the idea that you could serve in Congress, I mean just the sheer arrogance of saying, “I’m serving in Congress from Hawaii. I’m not going back. I’ll send in my proxy. Nancy can vote for me, but I would like to get my salary and my staff paid for, et cetera.” I think Kai Kahele may become the symbol of how sick  the Pelosi Congress is and how sick her technique for running the House as a petty dictatorship is.

So take a look for it. K-A-I K-A-I-K-A-H-E-L-E, Congressman from Hawaii. And I think you’re gonna find that it’s a fascinating story. It’s gonna keep growing. I’m sure there will be ethics charges filed against him the next day or two. And I’m sure that he will become a much bigger national story.