The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution is brief and unambiguous. Section 1 states that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Section 2 authorizes Congress to enforce Section 1 “by appropriate legislation.”
It would seem improbable that the Supreme Court should be ruling on alleged violations of the Fifteenth Amendment in the Twenty-First Century. But such has been the case.
The cases arise in the Pacific, in terrain obtained by the United States in 1898 and inhabited then and now by some — though not very many — people of indigenous ancestry.
One is the state of Hawaii. In the 1950s, segregationist Southern Democrats opposed the admission of Hawaii to the Union, because its population was a majority non-White (and a majority or near-majority classified as Asian) and because its multi-ethnic people seemed to live in harmony and equality, tolerance and color-blindness.
More recently, there has been a movement among those who classify themselves as Native Hawaiian for what they call “Native Hawaiian sovereignty.” Because of extensive intermarriage over nearly 200 years, only a small minority of Hawaii’s residents — perhaps no more than 1,000 of 1.4 million — are entirely of Native Hawaiian descent. Nonetheless, Native Hawaiian activists have sought some kind of quasi-governmental status, perhaps analogous to Indian reservations in the Lower 48 states. They persuaded the Hawaii legislature to create an Office of Native Hawaiian Affairs, with directors elected only by those of Native Hawaiian descent.
That’s a no-no said the Supreme Court by a 7-2 margin in the 2000 case of Rice v. Cayetano. The Fifteenth Amendment stands in the way.
Advocates of Native Hawaiian separatism were undeterred. As I wrote in December 2016, “Despite this decision, in 2011 the Hawaii legislature passed a law creating a Native Hawaiian Roll Commission to enroll certain voters who could then submit amendments to a convention to revise the state constitution and to vote on the sovereignty of the ‘Native Hawaiian people.’ In 2012 the Office of Hawaiian Affairs launched a campaign to enroll people of Native Hawaiian descent with a view toward creating a race-based sovereign government. To gain voting status, people had to affirm not only that they had Native Hawaiian ancestry, but also that they believed in ‘the unrelinquished sovereignty of the Native Hawaiian people’ and that they had ‘a significant cultural, social or civic connection to the Native Hawaiian community.’” The Supreme court enjoined these elections, obviously in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment in December 2015.
Similarly, a law in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas restricting voting for certain councils to those of “Northern Marianas descent” was struck down by a federal judge in 2014. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld it in 2016.
