TINA Sablan’s Commonwealth Manifesto is exactly what the CNMI needs to hear in these troubled times. Her rousing call to the people of the commonwealth to rise up, band together, and solve their own problems is a definitive answer to those who doubt that we are “capable of effectively managing our own affairs,” or who claim that we don’t “have the capability to do a good job in controlling unhealthy activities.”
Of course the CNMI people are capable of managing their own affairs, as Ms. Sablan’s own vigorous civic-mindedness demonstrates. For that matter, the very concept that any people, anywhere on earth, is not capable of managing its own affairs is archaic. It is a relic of colonialism that went out, at the latest, with the dissolution of the last trust territory. Yet there is such defeatism in the air these days, and such failure of confidence in the CNMI’s hard-won political maturity, that it has become commonplace to hear it said that we need Congress to save us from our own incompetence. Indeed, one sometimes senses an almost masochistic view that the proposed federal takeover legislation is the punishment that we deserve for our past sins.
We need to banish all such regressive nonsense from our minds, and face a truth that is at once daunting and liberating — that, for free citizens of a self-governing commonwealth, which we are, the only punishment for bad policy choices in the past is bad economic and social conditions in the present, and that the only people who can save us from those conditions are ourselves. If we find ourselves in a mess, whether or not of our own making, we have the right, the power, and, indeed, the duty to get ourselves out of it. I thank Ms. Sablan for making that point with both the clarity and the passion that it deserves.
Ms. Sablan is therefore also correct to state that we should “question the legality of imposing federal law on us without our consent, and when we lack representation in Congress.” Indeed, whatever Congress may think it can do, I firmly believe that it cannot lawfully impose internal legislation on the CNMI contrary to the wishes of the CNMI people. Anyone interested in a more detailed discussion of why is welcome to review my article entitled “The Right of Self-Government in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands,” published in Volume 4 of the University of Hawaii’s Asian-Pacific Law and Policy Journal in 2003. It is available online at www.hawaii.edu/aplpj/pdfs/v4-horey.pdf.

JED HOREY
As Matuis, Saipan