Disappeared News

The story ran on the Big Island but has not appeared yet in Oahu papers, unless I'm missing it. West Hawaii Today carried the story on its front page this morning: Big Island Attorney Calls for Lingle Impeachment. The article explained:

Big Island attorney Lanny Sinkin submitted a proposed resolution to state representatives and senators on Thursday that states Lingle abused her authority by calling upon federal, state and local law enforcement agencies "to further an illegal enterprise."

A Hawaii Tribune Herald story, Hilo attorney pens Gov. Lingle impeachment resolution over her handling of the Superferry, observes:

If Lingle were to be impeached by the House, it would take a two-thirds vote of the state Senate for her removal. Lt. Gov. James "Duke" Aiona would then succeed Lingle as Hawaii's chief executive.

The papers suggest that this is a long shot at this time.

The idea has had some currency behind the scenes even on Oahu. An undated poll posted by a reader on the Advertiser's website and either expired or removed is still in Google's cache. Date is unknown.
Not yet removed is a forum entry, Tar and Feather Lingle? These are of course quite frivolous. Sinkin's proposal is not.

One choice in the above poll caught my eye: posse comitatus. The1878 Posse Comitatus Act is federal law that makes it a crime to use the military as a domestic police force in the United States under most circumstances. The law was designed to end the use of federal troops to supervise elections in the post-Civil War South.

I was interested in this because I followed the link given on Ian Lind's blog to the State Procurement Office website where there is a procurement request for protective body equipment and "etc." Yup, the stuff our soldiers don't have enough of in Iraq.  The posted document specifically mentions that the equipment is to be used for harbor protests.

I wanted to find out what the "etc." means. Could it be weapons? So I called the SPO a couple of days ago to get the purchase requisition, which is mentioned in the procurement request but which was not posted. Today I got a voice message to say that the document can't be released because it is multiple pages long, each one marked "secret" or something by the Coast Guard. So my first thought was posse comitatus, what is the Coast Guard doing specifying what state harbor police have to order? Why is a Coast Guard document driving a state purchase request?

Well, according to the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia definition of posse comitatus, the law doesn't apply to the Coast Guard. Darn.

Realistically, I'm not going to get a secret Coast Guard document very easily. Perhaps there is some other document like a purchase order that would be considered public.

This sort of thing is at the heart of the governor's  "Unified Command" that so smacks of martial law and is part of Sinkin's call to impeach her. I received a little bit of the reasoning behind the impeachment resolution in an email that has been circulating. I'll give you a flavor of it, but please understand that there's lots more behind this:

Conspiracy (civil or criminal) is an agreement between two or more natural persons to break the law at some time in the future.  The agreement between the Governor, the Director of the Department of Transportation, and the management/directors of Hawai′i Superferry, Inc. to continue operations of the Superferry illegally after the Supreme Court ruled that an environmental assessment is required constituted a conspiracy.

Again, this is a mere snippet lifted out of context. But I think you'll see that a case might be developed around this, the details of the "Unified Command," and much more.