Can a U.S. state or territory “exclude otherwise qualified voters in participating in an election where public issues are decided simply because those otherwise qualified voters do not have the correct ancestry or bloodline”? You get a perfect score if you answer yes, and if you take six years of litigation in federal courts to arrive at that answer. That’s one way to describe the decision by Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood overturning the Guam government’s requirement that only citizens of Chamorro descent to vote in a referendum on the political status of Guam.
The suit was filed in 2011 on behalf of a non-Chamorro-descended resident of Guam by J. Christian Adams and the Center for Individual Rights, as Hans von Spakovsky recounts in National Review Online.
Judge Tydingco-Gatewood’s original decision denying relief was reversed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and her decision granting relief was issued on March 8. That’s a long time to reach a decision clearly compelled by the 15th Amendment of the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision Rice v. Cayetano. That case, which I discussed in this blogpost, limited voting for the state’s Office of Hawaiian Affairs to people of Native Hawaiian descent. The most recent litigation in Hawaii was sparked by the state’s establishment of a Native Hawaiian Roll Commission to enroll voters of Native Hawaiian descent to propose amendments to the state constitution and to pass one affirming the sovereignty of “the Native Hawaiian people.”
I’m guessing these efforts in Hawaii and Guam are politicians’ attempts to appease the demands of activists seeking to establish some form of separatism, or even independence from the United States, of people of indigenous ancestry.
Of course, this is profoundly at odds with the words and spirit of the United States Constitution, which begins with the words “We the people” — with no adjective included. And the indigenous populations are a minority in both the state and territory. The most generous definition of Native Hawaiians — “race alone or in combination with one or more other races” — shows they make up only 23 percent of the population of Hawaii; estimates are that there are only about 1,000 people there completely of Native Hawaiian ancestry. And Chamorros account for 36 percent of the population of Guam.
Hawaii, when it was admitted to the Union in 1959, was considered a model of racial tolerance and harmony — one reason statehood was opposed for many years by segregationist Southern Democrats. Now Hawaii, or at least some nontrivial number of activists supported by appeasement-minded politicians, and Guam seem to be bent on racial separatism. Tragic!
By the way, support for these measures is bipartisan. Guam Gov. Eddie Calvo, a Republican, decried Judge Tydingco-Gatewood’s decision and called on Congress to somehow reverse it. And while Republicans are scarce on the ground in Hawaii (they currently hold only 6 of 51 seats in the state House and none of 25 in the state Senate), former (2002-10) Republican Gov. Linda Lingle supported some but not all measures to establish a Native Hawaiian entity.
