Je récuse ... !

It’s been over a century since Émile Zola’s famous letter:

Yes, I had to learn about the Dreyfus affair in school here in Hawaii, thousands of miles from France.

Today’s phrase in my state is “Je récuse”:

Five of the seven judges on the state Intermediate Court of Appeals have recused themselves from Honolulu City Council Chair Tommy Waters’ appeal of the ruling that found him ineligible to seek a third consecutive term.

On Tuesday, ICA associate judges Daniel M. Gluck, Keith K. Hiraoka, Sonja M. P. McCullen and Clyde J. Wadsworth, as well as Chief Judge Karen T. Nakasone, each filed a one-page “Certificate of Recusal” stating, “I hereby recuse myself from sitting on this case.”

The Hawaii State Judiciary declined to further explain.

“The judges do not provide a reason for recusal,” a Judiciary spokesperson said Tuesday.

Transparency is Wacist, imperialist, and KKKolonialist.

Seriously, I suspect the judges have conflicts of interest that they don’t want to reveal. And if they do have such conflicts, it could have been worse if they hadn’t recused themselves. A Honolulu Pravda commenter speculated:

The judges could be known friends or associates of Ozawa or Waters, or known haters of Ozawa or Waters, which in either case requires them to recuse.

Hawaii is a very small place, which is why I have to write anonymously. Although everyone doesn’t know everyone else in Hawaii - language and class barriers make that impossible - Hawaii’s English-speaking legal world might be one big clique. Tami (Tommy Waters) and Chreva (Trevor Ozawa) from these posts, are both lawyers in The One Party. Perhaps it would have been surprising if neither had anything to do with the five judges.

Part of the appeal for the Feds among our propaganda class, the sliver of people in Hawaii who can read thousands of words of English and who rilly rilly care about prettywords and politics, is their outsider status. The assumption is that our local legal system is full of buddies who won’t prosecute each other.

Hence the grotesque spectacle of folks who cheer for ‘sovereignty’ one moment and dependence on the Feds the next.

This land is so beautiful. Unlike the society on it …