Goodbye, Hawaii
WSJ.com - July 21, 2005; Page A10
Sometime in the next few days, Congress may endorse secession. If this is the first you've heard of it, that suits Hawaii's Democratic Senator Daniel Akaka and Republican Governor Linda Lingle just fine.
We exaggerate, but not by much. On Tuesday, the Senate debated Mr. Akaka's Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, which would grant de facto sovereignty to the 400,000 or so people who identify themselves as native Hawaiians, aka "Kanaka Maoli." To listen to the Akaka bill's supporters, that means nothing more than extending a polite gesture to Native Hawaiians by giving them a kind of parity with other Native Americans such as the Navajo or Cherokee. Yet according to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, a state agency, under the terms of the bill this new tribe could declare "complete legal and territorial independence from the United States and the re-establishment of a Hawaiian nation-state." Jefferson Davis rides again.
A bit of background: Back in 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that a Hawaii practice that allowed only Native Hawaiians to elect Office of Hawaiian Affairs trustees was a violation of the Constitution, which forbids abridging the right to vote on account of race. (The losing side was represented by one John Roberts.) The ruling paved the way for further challenges to various entitlement programs that benefited Native Hawaiians exclusively. In order to skirt the clear language of the 14th and 15th Amendments, supporters of the old system had to resort to the current gambit of turning Native Hawaiians into a "tribe."
However, there's a problem: Just who, exactly, are Native Hawaiians? Because of a high rate of intermarriage between the state's various ethnic and racial groups -- Polynesians, Japanese, Chinese, whites -- there are almost no "pure-blooded" Native Hawaiians left. The 400,000 figure cited above is a product of the U.S. Census, in which people self-select their identity. By what formula are we now to ascertain who really is a Native Hawaiian and who is just writing himself into an entitlement? The idea of the U.S. government devising a precise racial test -- will 1/128th "Native Hawaiian" do, or does it have to be at least 1/16th? -- has unpleasant connotations, to say the least.
Then, too, unlike Native Americans, who govern reservations and often live on them, Native Hawaiians live commingled among the broader Hawaiian population. Under the Akaka bill, next-door-neighbors would suddenly coexist under different legal regimes, a clear violation of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause. At the same time, vast tracts of land, possibly even whole islands, could be set aside as Native Hawaiian domains. By what law, and by whom, would these places be governed? The Justice Department is still trying to figure this out even as the bill nears a vote, just as it is trying to resolve the little matter of gambling, which the bill neither authorizes nor expressly forbids.
But the greatest problem with the Akaka bill is that Hawaiians -- by which we mean residents of the Aloha state -- oppose it by a 67% margin according to a recent poll; only 18% support racial preferences for Native Hawaiians. With a little more time, perhaps, a plebiscite could be called to drive this point home to Hawaii's political classes. In the meantime, the least the Senate owes the people of Hawaii is to vote this unconstitutional, and un-American, bill down.
|
