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Criticisms of Public Law 103-150 (draft 1)

By those who say it was rushed through / proponents misled them

The Apology Resolution passed the Senate with only one hour of debate on the Senate floor and only five senators participating, three opposed (Slade Gorton, Hank Brown, John C. Danforth) and two in favor (Daniel Akaka and Dan Inouye). It passed the House of Representatives on November 15 in even less time with no debate and no objections.

Senator Inouye, wrapping up the debate in the upper house, said: "As to the matter of the status of Native Hawaiians, as my colleague from Washington knows, from the time of statehood we have been in this debate. Are Native Hawaiians Native Americans? This resolution has nothing to do with that."

Some supporters of the Akaka Bill, which would "recognize" Native Hawaiians as on a par with Native Americans, argue that this is already implicit in the Apology Resolution. This does not square with statements such as the above made by Inouye on the matter in 1993.

By those who dispute its historical basis

Washington-based constitutional lawyer and Grassroot Institute consultant Bruce Fein has outlined a number of counterarguments challenging the historical accuracy and completeness of the assertions made in the Apology Resolution in this PDF file (592 KB): Hawaii Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand.

In 1993, Senators Slade Gorton and Hank Brown …

Recently, Senators Gorton and Brown have come out …

By advocates of Hawaiian independence

Some non-ancestry-based nationalist Hawaiian groups have criticized Senators Akaka and Inouye for acting as accomplices of the U.S. in a long-term anti-Hawaiian strategy. These groups see the language of the Apology Resolution as deceptively conflating the strong, universally accepted definition of sovereignty—which the Hawaiian Kingdom possessed as an internationally recognized nation-state—with an immeasurably weaker notion of the "inherent sovereignty" of an "indigenous" or "Native" people within, and subordinate to, the United States. They reason that citizenship in the Kingdom was not defined by ancestry; that an entire country was the victim of the conspirators' misdeeds, not merely certain individuals or groups; and that all loyal Hawaiian nationals were deprived of their right to self-determination, not just "Native" Hawaiians. They also point out that it was the U.S. Congress that introduced blood quota requirements in the first place, in the Hawaiian Homelands Commission Act of 1921, over the opposition of their ancestors. Accordingly, most of these groups also reject the Akaka Bill, saying that the proper arena for redress is at the international level.