Sneaking Race‐​Based Government Through the Tropical Back Door

Those of you who follow this blog know of the special place in my heart for Hawaiian constitutional issues. Cato has even filed several Hawaii‐​related amicus briefs; here’s my post about the latest one, last month. This is in part because thinking about the Constitution and individual liberty is even more fun in the context of palm trees, trade winds, and tiki bars, but more than that, developments in Hawaii tend to get overlooked or dismissed as parochial and “not really” relevant to the American project.


Unfortunately, that sort of benign neglect plays into the hands of those who want to wreak all sorts of havoc with our constitutional order. And once those who don’t care about limited government, individual liberty, and equality under the law gain a toehold anywhere, Honolulu as much as Hartford, that creates a dangerous precedent — a political and jurisprudential tsunami, if you will, that threatens to swamp the mainland.


Such is the case with the infamous Akaka Bill (which I most recently covered in a blogpost that links to my previous work on the subject). This bill, introduced in every Congress since 2000, would create a race‐​based governing entity that would negotiate with the federal and state governments over all sorts of issues — effectively carving out a system of racial spoils. 


Now, Hawaii’s senators, Daniel Akaka and Daniel Inouye, have long said that their pursuit of this legislation would always be above‐​board and transparent… until a couple of weeks ago when Inouye, as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, had a sentence inserted into the massive Interior Department funding bill allowing the federal government to recognize Native Hawaiians in the same way that American Indians and Native Alaskans are recognized (but without immediate federal benefits). This, combined with a state resolution labeling the “Native Hawaiian people” as the only indigenous Hawaiians, is part of a piecemeal strategy to get the Akaka Bill in through the backdoor.


For more coverage of these developments, see this report, as well as these two articles ($). For Hawaii’s fuzzy relationship with the Voting Rights Act, see this article. For reasons on why this is all not just sneaky but a terrible idea — and unconstitutional — again, see my previous writings. 


At base, Hawaiians have a very different history and political sociology from the tribes that were accommodated in our (dubious and counterproductive) Indian law, which itself is a unique compromise with pre‐​constitutional reality. It would be a shame to destroy that beautiful state’s spirit of aloha (welcome).