Rice V. Cayetano - Background

Background

Beginning in 1978, Hawaii held statewide elections for the trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), an agency charged with disbursing particular funds and benefits to those who may be classified as "Native Hawaiians" ("any descendant of not less than one-half part of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778"), or those who may be classified simply as "Hawaiian" ("any descendant of the aboriginal peoples inhabiting the Hawaiian islands ... in 1778, and which peoples thereafter have continued to reside in Hawaii"). By law, only Native Hawaiians or Hawaiians could vote for, or be elected to, this Board of Trustees.

Harold F. Rice was a rancher of European descent whose family had resided in Hawaii since the mid-19th century. In March 1996, he attempted to register to vote for the OHA trustees. Where that application asked for confirmation that "I am also Hawaiian and desire to register to vote in OHA elections," Rice scratched out the words "am also Hawaiian and" and checked "Yes." Denied eligibility because he was not Hawaiian, Rice sued under the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

The District Court for the State of Hawaii ruled against Rice, due to its conclusion (as summarized by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals) that "the method of electing OHA trustees meets constitutional standards for the essential reason that the restriction on the right to vote is not based on race, but upon recognition of the unique status of native Hawaiians that bears a rational connection to Hawaii's trust obligations." The District Court held that the OHA does not sufficiently resemble a typical government bureau, with governmental powers, and that it is "carefully constrained by its overall purpose to work for the betterment of Hawaiians."

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals also denied Rice's claim. For one thing, Rice contended that the legal status of an eligible voter is contingent solely upon race, and that Hawaii's contention that such status is a political designation, rather than a racial one, is an obvious effort to circumvent the Constitution with semantics. The Court of Appeals agreed that it might indeed be the case that the political designation is a racial designation under the state's statute, yet "the constitutionality of the racial classification that underlies the trusts and OHA is not challenged in this case. This means that we must accept the trust and their administrative structure as we find them, and assume that both are lawful." Because Rice had not challenged the OHA's very existence, which is predicated on a racial classification, the Court could assume that "the state may rationally conclude that Hawaiians, being the group to whom trust obligations run and to whom OHA trustees owe a duty of loyalty, should be the group to decide who the trustees ought to be." Thus, despite an apparent racial classification for eligibility to vote, within the context of the OHA's creation and mandate, the classification is actually "not primarily racial, but legal or political."

Furthermore, the Court of Appeals decided that the OHA trustee election was a "special purpose election" such as that upheld in Salyer Land Co. v. Tulare Water District (1973). In that case, the election for directors of a certain "special purpose water district" was limited to landowners in that district. The weight of a landowners vote was proportional to the amount of land that was owned, and thus seemed to contradict the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause. The Court held that because these landowners were disproportionately affected by the policies of the water district directors, and that such directors existed for a "limited purpose" and exhibited a "lack of normal governmental authority," the districts did not violate the Constitution when they denied a vote to those who did not own land in the district, and granted votes proportionally to the amount of land owned. The elections for the OHA Board of Trustees is similar to that of the water district directors, in that "the vote is for the limited purpose of electing trustees who have no governmental powers and perform no governmental purposes." Also, because Hawaiians, as defined by statute, are those disproportionately affected by the OHA, the vote for its trustees may be limited to them. Thus this exception to the 14th Amendment was used to justify the Hawaiian voting scheme under objections based on the 15th Amendment.

Finally, the Court of Appeals concluded that "the voting restriction for trustees is rooted in historical concern for the Hawaiian race ... carried through statehood when Hawaii acknowledged a trust obligation toward native Hawaiians ... and on to 1993, when Congress passed a Joint Resolution 'apologiz to Native Hawaiians on behalf of the people of the United States for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii ... and the deprivation of the rights of Native Hawaiians to self-determination'." Thus the 9th circuit held that native Hawaiians were entitled to "special treatment" much like the special treatment accorded Native American Indians in Morton v. Mancari, where "preferential treatment that is grounded in the government's unique obligation toward Indians is a political rather than a racial classification, even though racial criteria may be used in defining eligibility."

Rice appealed to the Supreme Court. There, he would argue that in addition to being a naked violation of the Constitution on its face, the eligibility requirements subverted the original intended purpose of the public lands as written in the Annexation and Organic Acts, both of which granted subsequent benefits to all "inhabitants" of Hawaii, regardless of race. The elections do not qualify as "special purpose" under Salyer, nor does the eligibility requirement denote a political rather than racial classification. Finally, the protection under Morton v. Mancari is inappropriate. The Petitioner would deny that there is any "special relationship" at all, for there is no "former sovereign" or "historical relationship" clause in the Constitution, and the analogy with Indian tribes thus has no legal standing.

The State of Hawaii disagreed. For them, whether the elections qualified as "special purpose" or contained explicit racial qualifications for participation were secondary concerns. The native Hawaiian people had a "special relationship" with the United States, indeed a sort of semi-sovereign status, analogous to that of native Indian tribes, which affords them a large measure of self-determination. They would seek to demonstrate that this status had been legitimized repeatedly by Congress, though it had never been made explicit by treaty or codified in the U.S. Constitution. No matter, because the Court would be sharply reminded that granting such status falls within the powers of Congress, not the Courts, and that the understanding was legitimized by ample precedent and circumstances.

In order to understand this extraordinary defense, some background is necessary. The Kingdom of Hawaii was an independent, sovereign nation from 1810 until 1893. Throughout this period, the increasing economic interests of American businessmen began to clash with the interests of the Hawaiian government. In 1887, under the threat of violence, the Kingdom's Prime Minister was compelled to resign, and a new Constitution was implemented. This heavily curtailed the administrative power of the monarchy and granted suffrage to the Western immigrants. When Queen Lili'uokalani took steps in 1893 to counter this imposition, she was overthrown in a coup d'état organized by John L. Stevens, the U.S. Minister of Foreign Affairs, along with a committee of Western businessmen, and with the support of U.S. Marines. The businessmen set up a provisional government led by themselves, and the next year declared the existence of the Republic of Hawaii. In 1898, the Republic accepted annexation by the United States, and when President McKinley signed the Annexation and Organic Acts soon thereafter, Hawaii became a U.S. Territory. At this time, 1,800,000 acres (7,300 km2) of land, formerly overseen by the crown, were ceded to the United States. The Annexation Act stipulated that all revenues and proceeds from the use of this public land would "be used solely for the benefit of the inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands for educational and other purposes." The Organic Act similarly held that that all "funds arising from the sale or lease or other disposal ... shall be applied such uses and purposes for the benefit of the inhabitants of the Territory of Hawaii."

Seeing the subsequent cultural and economic decline of Hawaii's native population, in 1920 the U.S. Congress passed the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (HHCA), which placed 200,000 of those acres under the authority of said Commission, such that they could be leased by Native Hawaiians for token sums. A "Native Hawaiian" was defined as "any descendant of not less than one-half part of the blood of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778." That date, 1778, is the year in which Captain Cook "discovered" the islands, and thus the date of the first known Western presence.

When Hawaii became a state in 1959, it was agreed that the state would include the HHCA in its own Constitution, including the specific definition of Native Hawaiian. In 1978 the state Constitution was amended to provide for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), which would hold the lease on those lands not already under the purview of the HHCA. The OHA lands would be similarly held in a "trust" managed for the benefit of Native Hawaiians.