Posted on: Sunday, June 26, 2005

JERRY BURRIS

By Jerry Burris
Advertiser Editorial Editor

News last week that a former Ku Klux Klan member has been convicted and sentenced for orchestrating the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964 brought back a flood of memories, not all of them pleasant.

One of the memories of that era deals with something called "states' rights." In the heat of the civil rights era, states' rights took on a distinctly negative reputation.

It was the battle cry of states, mostly southern, which wanted to handle issues of race and segregation as they chose, with no interference from Uncle Sam.

Quickly, states' rights became a code word for insular, resistant bigotry.

The irony here is that states' rights is also a perfectly neutral term to describe the eternal tension between the individual states and the federal government. States' rights makes perfectly good sense when it is your state being forced to swallow some unwanted federal mandate.

Interestingly, Hawai'i has always been a fairly strong states' rights state. It is the natural stance of a small place with relatively little clout in Washington.

The late John A. Burns used to chuckle at the irony that multi-ethnic, progressive Hawai'i often found itself aligning with deep-South states' rights advocates.

His point was that Hawai'i, unlike, say, California, does not have the numerical clout in Congress to protect itself. It must assert its right to manage its own affairs.

And over the years, Hawai'i has often taken legal sides with those who argue for states' rights over federal law in cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. This has, on occasion, put us in league with groups we would otherwise rather ignore.

The debate over states' rights vs. the power of the federal government has taken on new urgency in recent years on a number of fronts.

Issues ranging from assisted suicide, gay marriage and medical marijuana are battlegrounds for state and federal authorities. Medical marijuana is a particularly vivid example, with the federal government saying one thing and many states, including Hawai'i, saying another.

An emerging arena for the states' rights fight will be the federal No Child Left Behind law.

When it was first passed in 2001 it enjoyed broad and bipartisan support. But as the realities of the law emerged, individual states and school districts began to wonder whether the federal government had overreached. The costs of compliance were too high and the standards to rigid, they argued.

The law specifically says the federal government may not exert direct control over local education agencies or local curriculum decisions. This would appear to protect states' rights in education, but in practice, it hasn't worked out that way.

Recent signals out of Washington from newly appointed Education Secretary Margaret Spellings suggest a new level of flexibility and a willingness to accept changes proposed by the states.

This is important, because education is too vital an issue to become a casualty of an unneeded battle over states' rights.

Jerry Burris is The Advertiser's editorial page editor.