Senate Democrats are charging taxpayers for a trip to Hawaii. The entire press staff of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee is in Maui, even though a field hearing there won’t happen until next Wednesday.

The committee’s oversight field hearing, scheduled for next Wednesday at 9 a.m. at the Maui Beach Hotel, will focus on “Strengthening Self-Sufficiency: Overcoming Barriers to Economic Development in Native Communities.”

Rick Manning from Americans for Limited Government, which first discovered the hearing, told TheDC it’s unbelievable that Hill staffers talking about fiscal responsibility would waste money on a trip to Maui.

“It’s outrageous that Senate Democrats have so little respect for the American taxpayer that in the same month they buried our credit rating, they’re heading to Hawaii to celebrate,” Manning said.

A committee staffer told TheDC that the reason the hearing will be in Maui is “mostly because it’s his [committee chairman Sen. Daniel Akaka’s] home state.” It’s unclear if the field hearing will focus on any issues relating at all to Hawaii, or if the reasoning for scheduling the trip there is only because Akaka will already be in Hawaii during the congressional recess.

The staffer said Akaka is the only senator who will attend.

The Democratic committee staffers used taxpayer funding to travel to Hawaii a full week before their committee’s hearing date. When TheDC called the committee’s Washington, D.C., office Thursday afternoon, a different staffer who answered the phone said all the committee’s communications staffers are already in Maui.

It’s unclear if other committee employees, in addition to communications staff, are also in Maui.

It’s standard practice for taxpayers to cover travel expenses for congressional committee staffers, but there’s no way to know at this point how much the trip will cost, unless staffers offer up the information.

Committee staff declined to answer specific questions about why the field hearing was scheduled in Maui, nor would they say how many of their colleagues were there, on their way there, or scheduled to travel there.

They deferred all questions to the committee’s press staff, which is already, in its entirety, in Maui.

No one among the press staff in Maui has returned the TheDC’s phone calls for comment.

If segregation exists there is only one person I can think of who could captivate an audience and bring down a house with his opinion based speeches on the subject; Clay Aiken.  After finding discrimination and segregation where none exists within the Wake County School Board, I’d like to direct Clay Aiken’s new found activism toward Hawaii where Democrats, led by Senator Akaka voted to divide the state into two parts based on ethnicity.

Perhaps Clay Aiken can use his voice and microphone to rant bring attention to an actual case of legislative imposed segregation.

The U.S. House last week passed legislation that would in effect divide Hawaii into two states, one for ethnic Hawaiians and the other for everyone else.

In an opinion piece in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Gail Heriot and Peter Kirsanow — members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights — said the bill “might turn out to be this Congress’ single most calamitous decision.”

The Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act would allow most of the nation’s approximately 400,000 ethnic Hawaiians to organize themselves as one large Indian tribe. The tribe would have the “inherent powers and privileges of self government,” including the ability to levy taxes and exercise eminent domain.

“Hawaii will, in effect, be two states, not one,” the authors wrote.

The legislation is popularly known as “the Akaka bill,” after Hawaii’s Democratic Sen. Daniel Akaka. Ten years ago, he sought to exploit a 1974 Supreme Court decision that racial discrimination on the basis of membership in “quasi-sovereign tribal entities” is constitutional. That decision allowed hiring preferences to be given to Indians within the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Akaka hoped that transforming ethnic Hawaiians from a race into a tribe would protect special benefits for those Hawaiians.

______________