Hawaii Heads Toward Secession?

Sometimes I wonder what it is that we actually teach our kids about how this country was started. Some people in Hawaii apparently don’t think we got it right the first time.

Yesterday 261 Members of the House of Representatives said Aloha to the principles set forth in the Constitution by voting in favor of H.R. 505, the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act. The bill declares that anyone with at least one ancestor indigenous to Hawaii would have a right to autonomy and self-governance and would require the U.S. to assist them in creating their own new separate government.

Is that completely insane or is it just me?

The U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. v. Sandoval declared that the U.S. Congress does not have the power to create an Indian tribe where one does not exist. Even more recently the U.S. Civil Rights Commission noted that this legislation “would discriminate on the basis of race or national origin and further subdivide the American people into discrete subgroups accorded varying degrees of privilege.” These concerns meant nothing to supporters of the bill. [link]

So… we’re allowed to discriminate by ethnicity for certain things but not others? Yeah, that makes sense.