The American Bar Association’s ABA Journal, perhaps unsurprisingly, backs a truly bad idea: Native Hawaiian sovereignty. This is an idea that was pushed by former Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, and the state Office of Native Hawaiian Affairs. Attempts to conduct elections limiting the vote for the ONHA trustees to those of Native Hawaiian ancestry were rejected soundly (7-2) by the U.S. Supreme Court in Rice v. Cayetano (2000), on the sensible ground that limiting the franchise to members of one race violates the 15^th Amendment to the Constitution.

Nonetheless, some activists seek what they call “independence” for Native Hawaiians, as I have noted in 2013, 2016, and this year. This would be more than problematic in practice. The ABA Journal article notes matter-of-factly that Native Hawaiians “compose 6 to 26 percent of the state’s population”—quite a wide range! That’s because there are, thanks to Hawaii’s high historical rates of intermarriage, very few Americans of 100 percent Native Hawaiian ancestry.