THIS year marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-CNMI Covenant and the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. It is appropriate that these anniversaries coincide, because the Covenant, correctly understood and applied, would represent America’s ultimate triumph over the colonial system that made the Declaration necessary.
Prior to the Declaration, Britain claimed absolute authority over its colonies. Its Declaratory Act of 1766 provided that the colonies were “subordinate unto and dependent upon” the king and Parliament, who had “full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America…in all cases whatsoever.”
The American colonists rejected this claim outright — but not because they were separatists or revolutionaries. On the contrary, they were (at first) loyal to the king, and saw themselves as part of the British Empire. But they believed it was their right, by nature and as British subjects, to be bound only by laws enacted by their own representatives. That meant laws enacted by their colonial assemblies, not by Parliament, where they were not represented.
But their arguments fell on deaf ears, and Parliament passed more and more intrusive laws purporting to govern the colonies. When the king sided with Parliament to enforce those laws, the colonists resolved to revolt. Their Declaration gives, as one of the main reasons for doing so, these “acts of pretended legislation,” including the act declaring Parliament and the king “invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.”
But, as noted, independence had been only the colonists’ “Plan B.” “Plan A” was to remain fellow citizens with the British, but to govern themselves separately through their own local representatives. They sought independence only when this right was refused to them.
Even after independence was achieved, other imperial powers continued to claim absolute authority over their colonies (including, of course, the Spanish colony here in the Marianas). Ironically, even the U.S. did so, in Guam and elsewhere. But finally, after decades of revolution and repression, and two world wars fueled by imperial ambition, all nations finally accepted, in the U.N. Charter, the “obligation to develop self-government” in all territories they administered “whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government.”
Such a “full measure of self-government” is what the American colonists believed that they were entitled to. That was their “Plan A.” That is what the U.N. Charter entitled the Northern Marianas people to develop. And that is what the Covenant, read in good faith in its historical context, establishes in the CNMI.
It establishes a new kind of country, a new kind of America, long ago denied to the Americans themselves. As such, it represents the final act of the American Revolution, and its logical culmination — not just a colony escaping the clutches of empire, but that former colony, now grown to an imperial power itself, renouncing imperial rule, and offering instead the full and separate self-rule within the sovereign fold that it long ago rightly demanded for itself.
Now that would be something to celebrate — if it were actually happening.
Unfortunately, it is not. Instead, the present-day U.S., forgetting its roots, often acts much like the imperial Britain of old. That is, it acts as if the CNMI were “subordinate unto and dependent upon” the will of Congress, and as if the U.S. government has the “full power and authority” to bind the CNMI and its people “in all cases whatsoever.”
The federal courts have been of little help in preventing this. They have agreed, repeatedly, that “the Covenant does limit Congress’s legislative power.” But somehow, they have never managed to find that any act of Congress, however intrusive or obnoxious, has exceeded those limits. They have thus enabled misguided federal arrogance, and encouraged more of it, much as the king enabled the similar arrogance of that long-ago Parliament.
The result has been repeated “acts of pretended legislation” against the express will of the CNMI people and their representatives, on matters as expansive as immigration control and as localized as cockfighting, and all points in-between, such as wage rates, voting rights, gun control, and now, apparently, undersea mining.
This anniversary year of the adoption of both the Covenant and the Declaration affords an ideal opportunity to recognize the principle that unites them — that all people, everywhere, can validly be bound only by laws that they themselves have freely made, and can just as freely unmake, through representatives answerable only to them — and act to reverse any backsliding into the kind of colonial rule that is a betrayal of both of these historic events.
That is all the more true because this is also an election year. Given the timidity of the courts, it appears ever clearer that a political solution is necessary. We should therefore ask all candidates for Commonwealth public office — especially all candidates for Governor, Attorney General, and Delegate to Congress: What will you do to help make the great final act of the American Revolution a practical reality here in the Commonwealth?
JOSEPH E. HOREY
As Matuis, Saipan
