Hawaii regresses to racial government

All the forces of Hawaii converged to get the US Congress to allow race-based government in the currently 50th state.

To allow such a government requires setting aside our US Constitution and our civil-rights laws. The Akaka Bill classifies citizens by race, defying the express provisions of the 14th Amendment.

Slade Gorton of Washington was a senator when a previous bill passed. He says this bill breaks promises that Senator Inouye made in 1993 when a resolution for apology was passed. Wall Street Journal - this one is free!

The Apology Resolution distorted historical truths. It falsely claimed that the U.S. participated in the wrongful overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani in 1893. The U.S. remained strictly neutral. It provided neither arms, nor economic assistance, nor diplomatic support to a band of Hawaiian insurgents, who prevailed without firing a single shot, largely because neither the Native Hawaiian numerical majority nor the queen's own government resisted the end of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The queen authored her own ouster by planning a coup against the Hawaii Constitution to recapture monarchical powers that had been lost in a strong democratic current.

She later confided to Sen. George Hoar that annexation to the U.S. was the best thing that could have happened to Native Hawaiians.

The resolution falsely asserted that the Kingdom of Hawaii featured a Native Hawaiian government exclusively for Native Hawaiians prior to the 1893 events. In fact, the kingdom was a splendid fusion of both native and nonnative elements in both government and society. The definitive historian of the kingdom, R.S. Kuykendall, elaborated: "The policy being followed looked to the creation of an Hawaiian state by the fusion of native and foreign ideas and the union of native and foreign personnel, bringing into being an Hawaiian body politic in which all elements, both Polynesian and haole, should work together for the common good under the mild and enlightened rule of an Hawaiian king."

The apology falsely declared that Native Hawaiians enjoyed inherent sovereignty over Hawaii to the exclusion of non-Native Hawaiians. To the extent sovereignty existed outside the monarch, it reposed equally with all Hawaiians irrespective of ancestry.

The apology falsely maintained that Native Hawaiians never by plebiscite relinquished sovereignty to the U.S. In 1959, Native Hawaiians voted by at least a 2-to-1 margin for statehood in a plebiscite.

Finally, the Apology Resolution and its misbegotten offspring, the Akaka Bill, betray this nation's sacred motto: E pluribus unum. They would begin a process of splintering sovereignties in the U.S. for every racial, ethnic or religious group traumatized by an identity crisis. Movement is already afoot among a few Hispanic Americans to carve out race-based sovereignty from eight western states because the U.S. "wrongfully" defeated Mexico in the Mexican-American war.

Now is not the time to regress to race-based government. And the Senate should surely reject a bill that is based on a list of untruths. I don't see how Gorton and Brown believe that Daniel Inouye is a man of integrity. The bill hasn't passed yet, but the vote will be soon.

My previous post in July
See Hawaii Reporter for the views of Hawaiians.
Also Grassroot Institute of Hawaii.