The administration of President Barack Obama is quietly trying to create a two-tier legal system in Hawaii that is based on race, according to Fox News and The Daily Caller. One set of spending, taxes and law enforcement will govern one race and the second set will govern all other races.
The proposal is being billed as an effort to create a separate government in the state for ‘native Hawaiians.’
Gail Heriot is a commissioner on the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights and a law professor at the University of San Diego.
Heriot said that if Obama succeeds, “what’s to prevent creating similar [self-governing racial] groups out of say, Cajuns, or Orthodox Jews or Amish? If you can do that with groups that are already part of the mainstream, you can balkanize the country.”
Heriot also said that the president does not have the authority to grant one group of citizens the status of a separate government, making this proposal illegal.
“There is no constitutional basis for conferring such status, and Congress has repeatedly refused to confer this status,” said Carissa Mulder, a spokeswoman for two members of the federal Commission on Civil Rights.
“This seems to be yet another case of the Obama administration ignoring the law to achieve its policy objectives,” she added.
The proposal is outlined in a document that was released on Friday of Memorial Day weekend and is titled “Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.”
“The Secretary of the Interior is considering whether to propose an administrative rule that would facilitate the reestablishment of a government-to-government relationship with the Native Hawaiian community,” the document stated. The document continued with a goal “to more effectively implement the special political and trust relationship that Congress has established between that [Hawaiian] community and the United States.”
This system is still a long way from being put into place and faces many legal hurdles.