The undoing of America
Articles
The U.S. Senate is scheduled tomorrow [September 6, 2005] to decide whether to clear the way for the most odious, anti-American piece of legislation in memory: S. 147, the "Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act." Incredibly, as of now, more than 61 senators are expected to vote to begin a process that would ineluctably unravel the United States as a nation.
This legislation has been advanced in the spirit of pandering that has come to characterize all too much of our national political life. In this case, the pandering is on behalf of an ethnic community that is largely a figment of some politicians' imaginations -- a once-sovereign, identifiably blooded race of "Native Hawaiians" that are, if S. 147 were to become law, to be given the right to govern themselves as they see fit. This could involve creating a new Hawaiian monarchy and perhaps lead to the islands' secession from the Union....
The result is a clearly unconstitutional effort to legislatively manufacture a new "tribe" out of one of the most heterogenous and fully assimilated populations in America: people who can claim through one of two qualifications to have had something to do with Hawaii....
Instead, S. 147 uses as its test for membership in the so-called "sovereign" Native Hawaiian "race" what amounts to the ability to claim a one-drop-of-blood connection to a "aboriginal, indigenous, and native person" who lived in Hawaii at the designated times. This test is complicated by two inconvenient facts: The "Native Hawaiian's" governing regime was a monarchy -- under which sovereignty resided in a single individual, not in a people -- and it was not racially based. And since the 19th century, the Hawaiian "people" included many native-born and naturalized subjects who were Americans, Chinese, Samoans, etc., not "ethnic" Hawaiians.
As it happens, in 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an earlier effort by Hawaii to create a state-sanctioned, race-based entity composed solely of Native Hawaiians (defined in a manner similar to S. 147). The court -- citing the Constitution's 15th Amendment, which forbids discrimination in voting based on race -- ruled such a race-based government in Hawaii was unconstitutional.
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