Hawaii Five-0-Five - Aloha to the Constitution

by Jed Babbin, Human Events: Why are Republicans so split on an unconstitutional bill that carves a group of Americans out of our society and sets them -- like an Indian tribe -- as a separate sovereign state? Yesterday, by a vote of 261-153 the House passed . . . HR-505, the “Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2007.” That bill, and Sen. Daniel Akaka’s (D-Hi) version, attempt to create a new “sovereign” state within the United States: a new Native Hawaiian “tribe” comprised of descendants of indigenous Hawaiians. . . .

The bill creates a nine-member commission that will create and maintain a roll of members of the new tribe entitled to participate in the “reorganization” of Hawaii and the benefits (remembering Abercrombie’s “land and money”) it will create. Naturally, the eligibility criteria can be interpreted several ways that presumably the commission will decide and probably have to set up its own court system to adjudicate. That same House staff analysis said that the bill, “allows for negotiations between the ‘three governments,’ the U.S., the State of Hawaii, and the new Native Hawaiian governing entity on the following matters: . . . In effect, the new government will negotiate with the United States to create its own, separate mini-nation, invisible to most of the people who live in or around it. Within it, the new government can write, enforce and adjudicate civil and criminal law. And there will be two classes of citizens in Hawaii, natives and others. The result could be that neighbors in Hawaii -- one a native Hawaiian and one who’s not -- could have vastly different rights to land, tax obligations and voting rights. . . .

The idea of creating a new sovereign tribe is clearly unconstitutional. In 1913, in the U.S. v. Sandoval case, the Supreme Court stated that the federal government’s power, under Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution (the commerce clause which mentions regulation of commerce with “the Indian tribes) did not include creating new tribes. Sandoval’s reasoning covers only preexisting tribes that lived apart from other Americans, and had their own societal laws and rules. Hawaiians obviously don’t meet the Sandoval criteria, so the bill cannot be constitutional. Any doubt of the unconstitutionality of the bill was put to rest by the US Civil Rights Commission which said that this legislation would, “…would discriminate on the basis of race or national origin and further subdivide the American people into discrete subgroups accorded varying degrees of privilege.” . . . [Read More]

---

Tags: discrimination, Hawaii, Hawaiian Government bill, racial quotas, US Constitution To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!