Death of Inouye Means Loss of Power for Hawaii

After he died last week at 88, this state went into a mourning period usually reserved for monarchs and presidents. His remains were flown to four islands so people could pay their respects, like Abraham Lincoln’s cross-country journey by train after he was assassinated.

When his coffin was carried into the state Capitol, the local news stations all broadcast the live scene. And on the day he was honored at a memorial service at the veterans’ cemetery here, Honolulu city buses flashed “Mahalo Dan” on their electric displays, using the Hawaiian expression for “Thank you.”

They have good reason to be thankful.

Hawaii has had only six United States senators since it became a state in 1959. And since 1962, Mr. Inouye had been one of them, all the while heaping the federal government’s largess on his small state.

When he died, he was the senior member of the Senate, the second-longest serving member in the Senate’s history, and the chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, the ideal perch for directing billions of federal dollars back home.

The state ranked the highest by far in per-capita federal earmark spending, according to the most recent figures from Taxpayers for Common Sense. The $412 million spent on Hawaii in 2010, before a moratorium on earmarks went into effect, was equal to almost $320 for each of the state’s 1.3 million people. (North Dakota was second, at about $233 per person.)

Hawaii, it is often joked here, has three industries: tourism, the military and Dan Inouye.

But with his death and the retirement of the state’s other senator, Daniel K. Akaka, Hawaii will lose all of its seniority in the Senate, raising concerns here that the influence the state has accumulated over the last half-century will be greatly diminished and that federal aid will be harder to obtain.

“Going from first to last is a hard pill to swallow,” said Justin Hughey, a teacher from Maui who sits on the central committee of the state’s Democratic Party. “With all the money Dan was able to raise, those are some big shoes to fill.”

Mr. Inouye’s appointed successor, Brian Schatz, was sworn in on Thursday. Representative Mazie Hirono, a Democrat who was elected in November to replace Mr. Akaka, will be sworn in when the new Congress meets next week.

Like many people here, Mr. Hughey can point to a particular project that he associates with Mr. Inouye. For him, it was the Lahaina Bypass, a highway on Maui that helped alleviate traffic congestion. “That money wouldn’t have been there if it weren’t for Dan,” he said. “There’s no bridge to nowhere here.”

Mr. Inouye, who lost his right arm in combat during World War II, also persuaded the United States military to leave its bases in Hawaii open, even though the state is no longer as vital for strategic defense purposes. The Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force and Marine Corps all maintain installations here.

“There were several times that there was talk of Pearl Harbor being shut down, but he protected us from that,” said Jeanne Ishikawa, who attended a memorial service for Mr. Inouye on Oahu over the weekend. “What he did is huge. You can’t define it. You can’t quantify it.”

Complicating matters even more, the state’s House delegation will be especially junior in the next Congress. Colleen Hanabusa, 61, a Democrat, will be the state’s senior representative, but she will be in only her second term. Tulsi Gabbard, 31, who will succeed Ms. Hirono, was just elected in November.  

If Hawaii’s loss of seniority is worrying some residents, its elected officials are putting on stone faces. “Let’s not be wringing our hands,” Ms. Hirono said. “He would expect us to show strength and to build on the foundation he laid.”

Gov. Neil Abercrombie, himself a former member of the House, characterized the seniority shifts as an inevitable changing of the guard. “Between Tulsi Gabbard coming in at 31 in the House and Brian Schatz coming into the Senate at 40, we’re investing in the long run,” said Mr. Abercrombie, who decided to appoint Mr. Schatz, his lieutenant governor, this week. “Sooner or later, it has to begin again. That’s what we’re doing. We’re not whining. We’re not complaining.”

Hawaiians often describe Mr. Inouye’s contributions as immeasurable or unquantifiable. In one way, they are.

Unlike Senators Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia or Ted Stevens of Alaska, whose legacies of pork barrel spending are evident in the structures named for them, Mr. Inouye’s name appears on almost nothing here. A soft-spoken man whose small stature belied his influence, Mr. Inouye was always reluctant to herald his work.

But there is already talk of memorializing him. “I guess we’ll have to name a highway after him, or put up a statue,” said Grace Fujii, whose father is a veteran of the same Army combat team as Mr. Inouye. “But he’d probably say, ‘Who, me? Why?’ ”   

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Silent Since Shootings, N.R.A. Could Face Challenge to Political Power

“How much more pro-Second Amendment can you be when you allow guns in a place that’s serving tequila?” she asked.

But when she and other Tennessee Republicans decided earlier this year not to move forward with an N.R.A. bill that would have allowed people to keep firearms locked in their cars in parking lots, Ms. Maggart became an object lesson in how the organization deploys its political power.

Upset that the bill, which the N.R.A. called the “Safe Commute Act,” had stalled, the group began working to unseat Ms. Maggart, the only member of the House leadership with a primary opponent. Billboards with her picture next to President Obama’s went up in her district, along with radio ads, newspaper ads and mailings. The N.R.A. and the other groups that opposed her in the primary spent around $155,000, she estimated. It would hardly be enough to register in many political races these days, but it was more than enough to beat Ms. Maggart — and draw notice in the State Capitol.

“They said I was shredding the Constitution, I was putting your family in danger, I was for gun control, I like Barack Obama,” Ms. Maggart said.

Even when the N.R.A. is silent — as its Web site and Twitter feed remained Monday, after the second-deadliest school shooting in United States history — it wields one of the biggest sticks in politics: A $300 million budget, millions of members around the country and virtually unmatched ferocity in advancing its political and legislative interests.

Over the years, the N.R.A. has deployed armies of lobbyists around the country to knock back efforts to regulate guns and expand owners’ ability to carry concealed weapons in schools, parks, bars and churches. It has formed close partnerships with gun makers and business organizations around the country, working to protect manufacturers from liability and introduce model bills in state legislatures.

The group spent millions of dollars on political ads this year and, since the beginning of 2011, has spent 10 times more on lobbying than every gun control group combined. It claims majorities of lawmakers in both houses of Congress under the “pro-Second Amendment” banner. When Representative Carolyn McCarthy of New York introduced a measure last year to ban high-capacity magazines — used in Tucson by the gunman who shot her colleague, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, in the head — more than 130 Democrats signed on as co-sponsors. Not a single Republican would.

Yet the crucible of Newtown, some opponents argue, may provide the N.R.A. with the first genuine test of its political power in over a decade.

Having already won their most important priority — Supreme Court recognition of an individual constitutional right to bear arms — gun rights groups are increasingly fighting on terrain where they have less support, including pushing bills at the state and local level to carry concealed weapons in virtually any public setting. The N.R.A. continues to fight aggressively to dismantle existing law enforcement gun databases and to defeat efforts to apply background checks to more gun purchasers, measures that typically have solid public support.

In the post-Citizens United world, where checks from a handful of billionaires can rival the fund-raising of an entire presidential campaign, the N.R.A.’s treasury gives it less clout than before. The group’s $17 million in outside spending in 2012 was a small fraction of the total spent by the big outside groups. Moreover, some opponents believe the N.R.A.’s ever-tighter relationships with Republican officials and an electorate that evermore comprises suburban and urban voters who are female and nonwhite, give it less leverage over Democrats, even in red states.

On Monday, two pro-gun-rights Democrats, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Mark Warner of Virginia, said they would consider supporting new measures to limit guns. Both have “A” ratings from the N.R.A.

But any such measures would face an uphill battle. In 2009, the N.R.A. failed to muster enough votes in the Senate to pass an amendment allowing anyone granted a concealed-weapons permit in any state to carry their gun in any other state. Gun control groups hailed it as the N.R.A.’s first defeat in a floor vote in years — but 58 senators voted for the amendment.

Over the years the N.R.A. has perfected its strategy for responding to mass shootings: Lie low at first, then slow-roll any legislative push for a response.

After the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999, for example, an effort to close the so-called gun-show loophole, requiring unlicensed dealers at gun shows to run background checks, ultimately died in conference after being stalled for months.

After the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007, Congress did manage to pass a modest measure that was designed to provide money to states to improve the federal background check system. But the N.R.A. secured a broad concession in the legislation, which pushed states to allow people with histories of mental illness to petition to have their gun rights restored.

Gun control proponents say that perception of the N.R.A.’s vast political clout largely dates to the 1994 midterm elections, when Republicans seized control of the House and Senate after passage of an assault weapons ban under President Clinton. That image was further enhanced in the 2000 election, when the N.R.A. claimed credit for helping elect George W. Bush to the White House. But later studies of those elections have tempered these assessments of the N.R.A.’s decisiveness.

In 2012, the group’s $14 million effort to rally voters against President Obama — the N.R.A.’s most important political priority — failed. In Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a founder of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, gun control advocates have a public face with a significant bully pulpit and the financial wherewithal to back it up. Mr. Bloomberg spent $10 million nationally on political advertising in 2012, hoping to boost centrist candidates and those favoring gay rights and gun control. One notable success: A $3.3 million campaign by Mr. Bloomberg’s “super PAC,” Independence USA, helped defeat Representative Joe Baca of California, an N.R.A. favorite. Perhaps tellingly, the ads attacked Mr. Baca over water pollution, not guns.

“I put $600 million of my own money into trying to stop the tobacco companies from getting kids to smoke and convincing adults that it’s not in their health,” Mr. Bloomberg said in an NBC interview on Sunday. “That’s one issue. Who knows with this?”

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