Others have chastised him for wasting time and money with the complaint.
The U.S. Department of Justice refused to pursue it when he urged them to back in 2009. He has now gotten a non-profit organization, the so-called Center for Individual Rights, to back him in a lawsuit. The CIR is really just an anti-Obama conservative organization.
Mr. Davis and I disagree but we do so respectfully. He contends that this is a racially exclusive vote and it violates the 15th Amendment.
Mr. Davis and his “Big Guns” from Washington, D.C. are pretty confident about this lawsuit because of the Rice vs. Cayetano case from 2000. The Rice case involved a statewide election for trustees of a state agency. What they fail to recognize is that Rice vs. Cayetano had patently different facts from the Guam plebiscite. Oh wait, my mistake, Rice vs. Cayetano did have very similar facts to the Guam plebiscite, but it was another Rice vs. Cayetano case in 1996. That 1996 Rice case involved, guess what, a native Hawaiian plebiscite. It didn’t make it past the Federal District Court of Hawaii. The court analyzed the Native Hawaiian plebiscite under the 14th and 15th Amendments and found that due to special circumstances and the special nature of the vote, and relying on Supreme Court precedents, it did not offend the U.S. Constitution or the Voting Rights Act.
Of course Guam has its own unique circumstances and the 1996 Rice case only went to the Federal District Court. I have also stated based on the nature of this vote and Guam’s unincorporated territory status the federal judiciary does not have jurisdiction. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
PETER J. SANTOS
Ghazni, Afghanistan
