The feds may decide to send money for voter education, but that could turn out to be more problematic than they — or our elected officials — imagine.
Guam P.L. 25-106 that enables the so-called “Chamorro only vote” can’t pass Organic Act or constitutional muster. For the U.S. Interior secretary to provide financial support for a racially discriminatory process would imply condonation, and that’s a sticky issue that several U.S. administrations and Congresses previously addressed. They don’t buy it.
If Gov. Felix Camacho — or any of his predecessors — had truly wanted to leave an enduring legacy they could have long ago done so by insisting that Guam’s political status/self-determination issue be resolved. Not kicked around as the perennial and elusive election-year football it has become but resolved: no ifs, ands or buts.
A political status plebiscite won’t happen any time soon. The reasons are many, convoluted and often obscure, but mainly relate to a single insurmountable obstacle: it can happen only through action by those whose interests lie in not allowing it to happen. It took five decades for Guam’s political power brokers to construct and consolidate our corrupt and discriminatory excuse for a government and they like things just the way they are.
That’s why political status plebiscites were scheduled — in law — at least four times between 1998 and 2005 and cancelled each time by same Guam Legislature that scheduled them.
That’s why plebiscite-enabling legislation is written in such a way as to insure that any serious attempt to hold a political status vote will flag voting and civil rights violations that the federal government can’t ignore or condone.
That’s why the Guam Draft Commonwealth Act sank without a ripple: dead on arrival before the Congressional Committee on Resources rife with racially discriminatory voter criteria and political advantages not available to state governments and residents. The “Chamorro only” vote, mutual consent and immigration control were among Guam’s non-negotiable demands. Predictably, we came away from that all-or-nothing confrontation with nothing.
It would be prudent to avoid further embarrassing political incidents and accidents, so I’ll alert the Interior secretary to the potential for political fallout if the federal government undertakes to fund and support a racially discriminatory voter education process. My letter will appear here so that it’s a matter of record when the constitutionality issue inevitably arises.
It’s obvious that most folks aren’t interested in change. The Decolonization Registry contained, as of March 11 this year, only 938 signatures accumulated over 13 years. It needs about 29,000 more to reach the “70 percent of eligible voters” required by law which, based on past performance, should happen sometime around 2410 A.D.
The U.S. Supreme Court has spoken clearly on ancestral voter qualification, and that whole “I can vote but you can’t because you have the wrong ancestors” attitude always struck me as rather stupid. Guam apparently has the only “Jim Crow” law in the nation. Maybe it’s attributable to some kind of tribal identity crisis.
The potentially embarrassing problem could of course be eliminated by changing the law — as publicly advocated in a 180-degree about-face by perennial gubernatorial aspirant Carl Gutierrez — to enfranchise Filipinos and Chinese and Japanese and Koreans and Indians and Hawaiians and white folks and black folks and others of our multi-ethnic resident U.S. citizen population who don’t make the grade as “Native Inhabitants of Guam.”
Self-determination could be an issue in the 2010 elections, and Gutierrez’s born-again position on that could help him to get elected.
DAVE DAVIS
Yigo, Guam
