Hawai‘i reps Jill Tokuda and Ed Case introduced last week a federal bill to crack down on illegal fireworks.
The bill, called the Fireworks Trafficking and Money Laundering Prevention Act, would include illegal transportation of fireworks over state lines within federal anti-money laundering measures.
On Friday, May 22, Case said on the House floor that the current maximum penalty for transporting illegal fireworks over state lines is only one year in prison, an insufficient consequence to actually deter people from doing it. If passed, the new bill would make fireworks trafficking prosecutable as potential money laundering, which carries much more severe sentences.
Someone who is found guilty of conducting unlawful transactions and attempts to conceal the nature of the transaction can be fined up to $500,000 and imprisoned up to 20 years, under current statutes.
“Investigations have repeatedly shown that traffickers frequently engage in related financial crimes, including money laundering, to conceal profits and evade law enforcement,” Case said Friday.
Case did not specifically invoke the Āliamanu fireworks explosion that killed six people, including a 3-year-old boy, on Jan. 1, 2025. But he did say that the dangers of illegal fireworks are “especially acute” in Hawai‘i and that a single explosion in a densely populated neighborhood can threaten entire communities.
After being introduced on Friday, the bill has been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.
Meanwhile, U.S. Congress passed a handful of other bills last week, including:
• H.R. 2616, which the House passed last Wednesday, May 20, prohibits any elementary or middle school that receives public funds from changing a student’s stated gender, pronouns or name on school forms without the consent of the student’s parent. It similarly also prohibits schools from changing the accommodations — e.g. locker rooms or bathrooms — available to a student without the parent’s consent.
The bill also prohibits the use of federal funds to teach “gender ideology,” referring to a 2025 executive order by President Donald Trump which defined “gender ideology” as “[replacing] the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity.”
The House voted 217-198 to pass the measure, with eight Democrats breaking with the rest of the party to vote in support of the bill. Case and Tokuda were not among them, and voted against the bill.
• The Terminating Restrictive Enforcement of Youth Settlements Law or TREY’s Law, would nullify nondisclosure or confidentiality agreements that prevent people from disclosing the sexual abuse of minors.
The preamble to the bill state’s that such clauses can and have been used to conceal ongoing or repeated sexual abuse. The bill is named after a Texas man who was a victim of sexual assault as a child, and who took his own life in 2019.
The bill would apply retroactively to any nondisclosure clause entered into before or after the bill’s passage and would prevent anyone from enforcing any such clause.
The Senate voted unanimously Wednesday to pass the bill.
• The Veterans 2nd Amendment Protection Act prohibits the Department of Veterans Affairs from including certain information about a veteran to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS.
Among the information collated by NICS is whether a person has an appointed fiduciary to manage their assets. But veterans who appointed a fiduciary to manage their VA benefits have been prohibited from purchasing firearms because, according to NICS, the appointment of a fiduciary suggests that the person isn’t mentally competent to own a gun.
The bill therefore prohibits the VA from disclosing a veteran’s appointed fiduciary to NICS, unless there is a court order declaring the veteran to be a danger to themselves or others.
However, the VA announced in February an internal policy change that would do effectively the same thing.
The House voted Friday to pass the bill 216-201. Case and Tokuda voted against it.
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