The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which three years ago opposed tenets of the so-called Akaka Bill that would create a process for Native Hawaiian self-governance, today issued a letter once again opposing the bill.
In its letter to Democrat and Republican leaders of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House, the Commission wrote that it "recommends against passage of the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act...or any other legislation that would discriminate on the basis of race or national origin and further subdivide the American People into discrete subgroups accorded varying degrees of privilege. "Congress has the constitutional authority to re-organize racial or ethnic groups into dependent sovereign nations unless those groups have a long and continuous history of separate self-governance."
The Commission called the Akaka Bill "an attempted end-run around the Supreme Court's decisions in Rice v. Cayetano and City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. The Constitution, however, cannot be circumvented so easily. And even if it could be, we would oppose passing legislation with the purpose of shoring up a system of racially exclusive benefits."
The letter ends by quoting the 1840 Kingdom of Hawaii Constitution, which was signed by Kamehameha III and Keoni Ana, the son of British-born Hawaiian minister John Young: "God has made of one blood all races of people to dwell upon this earth in unity and blessedness."
|