"The flight path of the Akaka bill now in the Senate has an eerie resemblance to what happened in previous years. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana).

Will the Akaka bill pass or fail? In either case, will the end come with a bang or a whimper? Let’s review the whimper of Senate stealth maneuvers in 2000 and 2001, and the bang of the cloture motion on the Senate floor in 2006, to compare them with what’s been happening during the past year and what’s plausible for the upcoming period of September through December, 2010.

If we work hard and are lucky the bill will either die lonely, and quietly forgotten, as happened in 2000; or will crash and burn spectacularly as happened in 2006. But this will be the period of greatest danger in ten years, because of the large number of Democrats. No Democrat in the Senate has ever opposed the Akaka bill. However, there are quite a few Democrats newly elected in 2006 or 2008 who have never had to take a stand on the bill and might be willing to oppose it if properly informed — there were actually a few Democrat votes against the bill for the first time in the House earlier this year after a decade of unanimous support, even with Abercrombie yelling at them in his usual bombastic way.

The few Republican Senators who previously voted the wrong way on cloture might be open to changing their minds, especially one of the bill’s cosponsors, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, who faces a tough re-election battle. One inspiring example for her is Senator Orrin Hatch (R, UT): early in the decade he was a co-sponsor of the bill; then in the next Congress he refused to cosponsor it; and in the 2006 cloture debate he spoke out strongly against the bill as a matter of principle. So there’s hope that people can come to their senses! It would be wonderful if Senator Hatch would tell the story of his conversion to righteousness, to Republican Senators Murkowski, Snowe, Collins, and Brown, and perhaps also some Democrats or independents like Senators Webb, Lieberman, and others."

Get the Story:
Kenneth R. Conklin: Akaka bill maneuvers coming up from September through December 2010 (The Hawaii Reporter 8/17)

Native Hawaiian Bill:
H.R.862 | S.381

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