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A Blogospheric Eruption Over Hawaii's Future

Back in 1893, a small band of U.S. Marines, acting at the behest of a renegade U.S. diplomat and greedy businessmen, staged a successful coup against Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii. President Grover Cleveland fired the diplomat, condemned the "subversion of the queen's government," and urged Congress to seek a solution "consistent with American honor, integrity and morality."

Instead, the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898. And in the century since then -- even after Hawaii voted overwhelmingly to become the 50th state in 1959 -- battles over the sovereignty of the Aloha State have continued to erupt. In 1993, for instance, the U.S. government officially apologized to Hawaiians for the overthrow of their monarchy.

The latest fight is over "the Akaka bill" in Congress, and blogs have become a weapon in the ongoing warfare over that legislation. From Hawaii to Washington, blogs both large and small, with audiences national and regional, have demonstrated the power of their technology to explore a niche topic in great detail and to try to rally opposition to a relatively obscure proposal.

The bill, authored by Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, would recognize native Hawaiians much like the federal government recognizes Indian tribes. That step would make Hawaiians who meet certain ethnic standards eligible for federal aid in education, housing and other arenas.

Although the measure has the support of the state's congressional delegation and its governor, some Hawaiians still want to live in a sovereign nation and see the bill as a threat to that goal. Some conservatives, meanwhile, oppose the measure on racial grounds because it would grant federal aid based on Hawaiians' blood lineage.

Opponents from both angles are blogging against the legislation. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin's rants are generating the most attention because of her broad readership. She dubbed the measure "the worst bill you've never heard of" and has characterized it as "apartheid in Hawaii."

"[G]iving native Hawaiians Indian tribal-like status and immunity from federal civil rights laws is historically absurd and legally treacherous," she wrote. "At no time in their history have native Hawaiians organized, acted or existed as a tribe."

Scott Crawford of The Hawaiian Independence Blog also opposes the bill but because he is among those advocating the return of Hawaii as a sovereign nation. He has been blogging about the Akaka bill since 2003, with the dual goals of providing a clearinghouse for links and a forum to debate the issues surrounding the legislation.

In addition, the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii launched a blog called Akaka Talka about a month ago. Although the group said it is not technically against the bill and is simply trying to inform the public about the issues, the institute's polling has received favorable mentions at MichelleMalkin.com.

Other Hawaii-focused blogs like Poinography also are covering the debate over the Akaka bill.

Malkin's influence on the issue is obvious. She has spurred mini-blogswarms against the legislation, with other blogs linking to her posts and offering criticisms of their own.

Betsy Newmark, for example, wrote this admonition in September: " I have no faith that [President] Bush won't sign this mess or that the Supreme Court won't find it constitutional. ... Don't count on five justices on this one. Better to strangle this bill before it gets to that stage."

But even smaller sites like Crawford's can have influence. "I can't point to one place where I've had some major impact but more just a lot of small impacts in helping to raise awareness and shape the debate," he said in an e-mail interview. "I guess one example would be when I see language I have used show up in someone else's letter to the editor in the Honolulu dailies."

Crawford added that people have told him of journalists who are readers -- and the media report the stories that lobbyists, policymakers and other stakeholders in the debate see. Crawford also said many Hawaiian groups and lobbyists read his blog, post comments, send him e-mails or reference the site in their own blogs.

He further noted that he criticized the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii for its "push poll." "Shortly after that, I heard one of the advocates of the bill on [a National Public Radio] program call it a 'push poll' and use very similar language to what I had blogged," Crawford said.

David Keanu Sai, chairman of the pro-independence group The Hawaiian Kingdom, said that while he has not paid much attention to blogging about the Akaka bill in general, he occasionally reads Crawford's blog and considers it "a great forum to discuss these issues.

He cautioned, however, that it "is also apparent that some people who write comments on this blog don't understand certain legal and political frameworks, and it looks like a war of words and emotions [rather] than constructive dialogue of some very technical and complicated issues."

The fate of the Akaka bill remains unclear. The debate has been going for about six years, with a few senators who have placed procedural roadblocks to a floor vote being the chief obstacle to enactment. The Senate appeared to overcome that obstacle last year, when supporters of the measure and the Senate leadership agreed to take a floor vote by this past August. The Senate Indian Affairs Committee approved an amended version of the legislation in March.

But in September, after Hurricane Katrina altered the legislative agenda in Congress, the Senate reversed course on the Akaka bill by withdrawing a motion to limit debate. The measure has languished since then, and last month, Akaka told the Honolulu Advertiser that a Senate vote is unlikely this year.

That is just fine with bloggers like Malkin, who celebrated when bad weather forced the legislation off the short-term agenda. "Just about the only good thing about Hurricane Katrina," Malkin wrote in a September appeal for readers to call Congress, "is that it delayed a planned vote on cloture for the awful Akaka bill."

Posted by | 09:25 AM

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» National Journal: Blogs in the Akaka bill debate from Hawaiian Independence
In the National Journal's Beltway Blogroll, Daniel Glover has posted a piece about the role of blogs (including this one) in the Akaka bill debate. Glover had asked me to comment on Malkin's blog, and though he didn't use this in the interview, I ... [Read More]

Tracked on December 5, 2005 02:26 PM

Comments

Back in 1893, a small band of U.S. Marines, acting at the behest of a renegade U.S. diplomat and greedy businessmen, staged a successful coup against Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii. President Grover Cleveland fired the diplomat, condemned the "subversion of the queen's government," and urged Congress to seek a solution "consistent with American honor, integrity and morality."

And the Congress discovered in a bi-partisan Committee, that Cleveland had been wrong on all of his assertions. It's called the Morgan Report, and it thoroughly repudiated both Cleveland and his lackey Blount's assertions of U.S. intervention in the matter.

Many pro-royalists stop their reading of history at Blount, and then magically skip to 1898 and the annexation of the internationally recognized Republic of Hawaii. This kind of omission is revisionist history of the worst kind. It is akin to asserting that it is still illegal to drink alcohol in the U.S. today because of the 18th amendment, because you haven't read about the 22nd.

Jere Krischel | 12.05.05 07:59 PM

Thanks to Daniel Glover for calling attention to the Hawaiian Government Reorganization bill (Akaka bill), S.147/H.R.309. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. For a 5-paragraph summary of what's bad about the bill, with extensive documentation of all the main points, see http://tinyurl.com/5jp5r And for items of special interest to the media and the public, see http://tinyurl.com/6ad8w

Unfortunately Mr. Glover's first sentence (and most of that paragraph as well) is factually incorrect. The 162 U.S. peacekeepers who came ashore in 1893 never fired a shot and never took over any buildings. All the heavy lifting of the revolution against the monarchy was done by local residents, including 1500 armed members of the Honolulu Rifles. Following the regime change, the independent nation of Hawai'i continued to be independent for more than five years, and was given diplomatic recognition by all the nations that had previously recognized the monarchy. The treaties between Hawai'i and other nations remained in effect; and no nation ever filed any protest of either the overthrow (1893) or the annexation (1898) with either the U.S. government nor the Hawai'i government. The revolutionary government held power without any assistance from the U.S. under a hostile President Grover Cleveland throughout Cleveland's 4 year term, and successfully defeated an attempted counter-revolution supported by rifles and bombs smuggled in with U.S. connivance.

In 1959 Hawai'i voted 94% "yes" to become a State. Even if all 6% of the "no" votes were cast by ethnic Hawaiians, there would still be 70% of ethnic Hawaiian voters casting "yes" votes (because 20% of the population is ethnic Hawaiian). Some say the Statehood vote was tainted because U.S. military personnel stationed in Hawai'i might have voted; but (a) most military personnel vote in their "home" state rather than where they are stationed; and (b) even if all military votes were removed, the vote would still be overwhelmingly in favor of Statehood. See a webpage about 120,000 signatures on a petition demanding Statehood in 1954: http://tinyurl.com/68ygp

Commentator Scott Crawford, who strongly supports the Hawaiian independence movement, says that independence activists oppose the Akaka bill. That is partly correct -- there are independence activists (including himself) who fear that ethnic Hawaiians who sign up for the U.S.-sponsored Akaka tribe would thereby be seen as surrendering their "right" to independence under "international law." However, there are also independence activists of much greater standing than Crawford (such as Hayden Burgess alias Poka Laenui, and Charles Kauluwehi Maxwell, who argue that the Akaka bill is a pathway to independence, because it would provide federal handouts for the present while also providing recognition and resources to a "Native Hawaiian" governing entity that could then negotiate increasing levels of self-determination and also seek recognition from foreign governments (some of whom had treaty relations with Hawai'i prior to 1898 and are now opponents of U.S. foreign policy). Please see a webpage about how supporters of the Akaka bill see the bill as a pathway to secession (including Senator Akaka himself), at http://tinyurl.com/4cho6

Anti-Americanism is widespread among Hawaiian sovereignty activists, including supporters of the Akaka bill, who claim the U.S. colonized Hawai'i, then overthrew the monarchy by way of an "armed invasion", then have engaged in a belligerant military occupation of the ancestral homeland for 112 years and ongoing, illegally annexed Hawai'i, stole native lands, and stripped ethnic Hawaiians of their culture and language. For a webpage on anti-Americanism in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, see http://tinyurl.com/5t3nc

Kenneth R. Conklin, Ph.D. | 12.05.05 08:37 PM

we've been having this discussion ad nauseum at my blog so I don't want to rehash the whole thing here, but the Morgan committee never left Washington, did no actual investigation, and took testimony only from the pro-annexationists who were involved with only one side of the situation. Morgan himself was a bigoted racist with an inherently biased view of the situation. It is the Morgan report that has been thoroughly repudiated.

Blount, on the other hand, a respected former chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, did an exhaustive report interviewing people on both sides of issue, and including extensive primary source documentation in his 1300+ page report, upon which Cleveland's address was based. A lot of what Cleveland concluded actually came directly from the incriminating correspondence of those involved.

The U.S. admitted at the time and again 100 years later that their minister had acted in violation of the treaty with Hawaii and that the marines had been landed under false pretenses and through illegal foreign intervention had helped to cause a change in the effective government of the islands, and that this change would not likely have occurred without U.S. illegal intervention. These are broadly accepted facts of history that only an small fringe still try to dispute.

scott crawford | 12.05.05 10:07 PM

1) The Morgan Committee was bi-partisan, public, took testimony under oath with cross-examination, and was open to both sides;

2) Morgan's racist idealouge views do not invalidate the findings of the committee of Blount's error and inaccuracy, including Blount's reliance on the testimony of Admiral Skerret, who was not an eye-witness to the events in question - Captain Wiltse and Lieutenant Young WERE there and contradicted his testimony;

3) Cleveland himself forwarded the matter to Congress and the Morgan Committee, and after their investigation and findings, NEVER ONCE DENIED THEIR ACCURACY;

4) The success of the pro-royalists to get the '93 "Apology" Resolution (103-150) passed was done with no debate on the merits of the wheras clauses, and represented only the historical views of the secessionist fringe.

Although it is common to ignore the Morgan Report amongst pro-sovereignty activists, it is not intellectually honest to proclaim all of its clear, factual findings invalid because of the racial bigotry of one of the committee's members.

For a more thorough look at the Blount investigation versus the Morgan Committee investigation, see http://www.hawaiimatters.com.

Jere Krischel | 12.06.05 01:08 AM

There was a vigorous debate on the Apology Bill (with Sen. Gorton saying, btw, "...the logical consequences of this resolution would be independence"), and here's what was said at the time about the historical facts which you seek to dispute:

Sen. Gorton:
This Senator finds that he has been unable to disagree in most respects with anything that either of the Senators from Hawaii has said about the history which led up to the overthrow and the annexation of Hawaii by the United States.

Sen. Akaka:
Americans do not understand that without the active support and intervention by U.S. diplomatic and military representatives, the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani on January 17, 1893, would have failed for lack of popular support and insufficient arms.

Finally, few Americans know that in a message to Congress on December 18, 1893, President Grover Cleveland described the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii as "an act of war committed with the participation of a diplomatic representative of the United States without the authority of Congress," and he acknowledged that by such acts, the government of a peaceful and friendly people was overthrown.

Sen. Inouye:
Mr. President, a century ago, a company of uniformed U.S. Marines and two companies of U.S. sailors landed on the shores of the Kingdom of Hawaii at the behest of the Minister of the United States of America, Mr. Stevens, and by so doing, assisted a handful of American and European businessmen, the pillars of society, in an illegal overthrow of the kingdom, a kingdom which was then internationally recognized by treaty by the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany with exchange of Ambassadors.

The overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani on January 17, 100 years ago, Mr. President, was not supported by the people of Hawaii. It was not supported by the elected members of the legislature of the Kingdom of Hawaii, and most certainly, it was not approved by the Queen.

It was an illegal act committed in violation of the constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii, and most importantly, it was an act which was supported without proper authorization by agents and representatives of this country.

Sen. Brown said he could not vote for the bill for other reasons (wanting not to seem to apologize for private property and representative democracy), but "not because I do not sympathize with the very eloquent remarks of the distinguished senior Senator from Hawaii," and he also did not say anything disputing the historical facts of the bill.

The secessionist fringe, you mean like Senators Inouye, Akaka, AND Gorton and Brown?

scott crawford | 12.06.05 02:05 PM

Say NO to the Akaka Bill. Support Hawaiian independence!

http://homepage.mac.com/ke_kuokoa_ff1/iMovieTheater1.html

Mahalo.

M. Kesa | 12.06.05 03:20 PM

Learn the TRUTH about the Akaka Bill here:

http://homepage.mac.com/ke_kuokoa1/iMovieTheater1.html

M. Kesa | 12.06.05 03:47 PM

There was a vigorous debate on the Apology Bill (with Sen. Gorton saying, btw, "...the logical consequences of this resolution would be independence"), and here's what was said at the time about the historical facts which you seek to dispute:

n October 27, 1993, the U.S. Senate
passed a joint resolution to
“acknowledge the 100th anniversary
of the January 17, 1893, overthrow
of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i,
and to offer an apology to Native Hawaiians on
behalf of the United States for the overthrow of the
Kingdom of Hawai‘i.” It passed 65 to 34, with only
one hour of debate on the Senate floor during which
serious questions were raised that went unanswered.
On November 15 it passed the House in even less
time, with no debate and no objections. There were
no public hearings or input. It was a triumph for sovereignty
activists. It is an insult to the rest of
Hawai‘i’s taxpayers and to the American people.

http://www.hawaiimatters.com

Gorton and Brown took the resolution at face value, not knowing how absolutely factually inaccurate it was:

http://www.hawaiireporter.com/file.aspx?Guid=aefef5f6-a533-486a-9459-691138355dd1

Jere Krischel | 12.06.05 06:52 PM

he also did not say anything disputing the historical facts of the bill.

Like I said before, the Senators took the statements made at face value, not knowing they were lies. It was stealth legislation of the worst sort, and both senators Gorton and Brown have since expressed their extreme displeasure with the factual inaccuracies of the bill.

Perhaps if the process of getting the bill to congress was more open, and had input from more than just one fringe historian, we would have had a better bill.

Instead, special interests managed to lobby powerful senators to get a "simply apology" as Inouye put it, that they could try and leverage for something more.

The Apology Bill has as much factual accuracy as a bill that would claim that Maui is actually on the moon, and the reincarnated Queen Liliuokalani still lives there in a spacesuit. Although it is bandied about by pro-sovereignty activists as gospel, it has been thoroughly repudiated by the facts.

Jere Krischel | 12.06.05 07:01 PM

well, jere, i agree only on the point that it should have been directed toward all Hawaiian nationals, not just Native Hawaiians. But other than that, you have the right to be wrong :)

scott crawford | 12.07.05 05:52 PM

:) Aloha Scott, I'm more than happy to share the right to be wrong with you!

If we had been given the floor, I'm sure we could have debated for at least 4 hours on the apology bill :)

Jere Krischel | 12.07.05 08:03 PM

indeed.

scott crawford | 12.10.05 01:17 PM

I'm proud to present to the public, the complete Morgan Report online: http://morganreport.org

This valuable document is now available for examination by anyone on the net. Commissioned after the Blount report, and taking into the Blount report's evidence (aw well as testimony from Blount himself), this official finding of Congress caused Cleveland to completely reverse himself on the matter, and clearly established the legitimacy of the overthrow.

Jere Krischel | 01.15.06 02:17 PM

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