Idiocy of the Month: Segregating Hawaii

National Review (print edition only) picked up on this inanity in its 7-18-05 edition and John Fund follows that article with an entry in Opinion Journal on what some Congressional staffers call the "worst bill no one has ever heard of". If sunlight is the best disinfectant, here's a little Lysol:

In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7-2 to undo a previously established race-based system. Under that system non-Native Hawaiians were barred from voting for trustees overseeing the state's Office of Hawaiian Affairs. The [Court held] that a Hawaiian law requiring that the trustees be Native Hawaiians and elected only by other Native Hawaiians was obviously discriminatory. "There can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia. "In the eyes of government, we are just one race, it is American."

Rather than accept colorblind government, however, supporters of racial restrictions have tried for five years to negate the court's ruling by pushing a measure called the "Native Hawaiian Reorganization Act" or, for short, the "Akaka bill," after Hawaii's Sen. Daniel Akaka, a Democrat. The bill would skirt the Fifteenth Amendment's constitutional ban on race-based governments by requiring that Washington, D.C., recognize Native Hawaiians in the same manner it recognizes separate governments for American Indians and Alaska natives.

Big deal, the government already allows Native American tribes their own self-government, right? Wrong. Congress negotiated separate treaties with the Native American tribes, who were situated in locations separate from the rest of the US population (often forcibly, read: Trail of Tears). Not so the Native Hawaiians, who are geographically entwined with the rest of the state's residents and who were purposefully NOT separated from non-Native Hawaiians when the islands became a state in 1959:

When the island chain became a state in 1959, there was a broad consensus in Congress that Native Hawaiians would not be treated as a separate racial group, and that they would not be transformed into an "Indian tribe." Indeed, Native Hawaiians have never asked to be recognized as an Indian tribe; they not only lack their own system of laws, but are widely geographically distributed throughout Hawaii and have a high rate of intermarriage with other groups.

Not good enough for the one-size-fits-all-Natives policy of Hawaii Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Haw., naturally) and some allies in Congress. Read all about it.