THE OPPOSITE OF PROGRESS
E Pluribus
Unum? The Akaka Bill classifies citizens by race,
defying the express provisions of the 14th Amendment. It also rests on a
betrayal of express commitments made by its sponsors a decade ago, and asserts
as true many false statements about the history of Hawaii. It should be
defeated.
The Akaka Bill's justification rests substantially
on a 1993 Apology Resolution passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton
when we were members of the Senate representing the states of Washington and
Colorado. (We voted against it.) The resolution is cited by the Akaka Bill in
three places to establish the proposition that the U.S. perpetrated legal or
moral wrongs against Native Hawaiians that justify the race-based government the
legislation would erect. These citations are a betrayal of the word given to
us--and to the Senate--in the debate over the Apology Resolution.
We specifically inquired of its proponents whether
the apology would be employed to seek "special status under which persons
of Native Hawaiian descent will be given rights or privileges or reparations or
land or money communally that are unavailable to other citizens of Hawaii."
We were promised on the floor of the Senate by Daniel Inouye, the senior senator
from Hawaii and a personage of impeccable integrity, that "as to the matter
of the status of Native Hawaiians . . . this resolution has nothing to
do with that. . . . I can assure my colleague of that." The Akaka
Bill repudiates that promise of Sen. Inouye. It invokes the Apology Resolution
to justify granting persons of Native Hawaiian descent--even in minuscule
proportion--political and economic rights and land denied to other citizens of
Hawaii. We were unambiguously told that would not be done.
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.
The U.S. Constitution scrupulously protects the
liberties and freedom of Native Hawaiians. It always will. Native Hawaiians have
never been treated as less than equal by the U.S. Their economic success matches
that of non-Native Hawaiians. Intermarriage is the norm. Sen. Inouye himself
boasted in 1994 that Hawaii was "one of the greatest examples of a
multiethnic society living in relative peace." In other words, e pluribus
unum is a formula that works. We should not destroy it.
Messrs. Gorton and Brown are former senators
for Washington and Colorado, respectively.
Not in Hawaii.
BY SLATE GORTON AND HANK BROWN
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
The Senate is poised to sanction the
creation of a racially exclusive government by and for Native Hawaiians who
satisfy a blood test. The new race-based sovereign that would be summoned into
being by the so-called Akaka Bill would operate outside the U.S. Constitution
and the nation's most cherished civil rights statutes. Indeed, the champions of
the proposed legislation boast that the new Native Hawaiian entity could secede
from the Union like the Confederacy, but without the necessity of shelling Fort
Sumter.
