Hawaii Supreme Ct Lashes Out At SCOTUS in CRT-Infused Rant, Citing KBJ Dissent
“The Roberts Court sees only white.”
The Hawaii Supreme Court (HSC), in an opinion written by Associate Justice Todd W. Eddins, just issued a ruling in a criminal case that is breathtaking not for the actual ruling, but for a multi-page attack on the U.S. Supreme Court that had nothing to do with the issue in the criminal case. It was just an opportunity to unload a pile of CRT-infused venom, hinting at future defiance of SCOTUS.
And not surprisingly, the HSC cited to a vituperative dissent by Ketanji Brown Jackson in the recent SCOTUS Louisiana redistricting case. I discuss KBJ’s dissents in “KBJ has become the equivalent of a hand grenade that Joe Biden threw into the Supreme Court”
I’ve asserted that one of the reasons KBJ writes her dissents – often alone without Sotomayor or Kagan joining – is that she is creating a body of “KBJ law” that other judges can cite to defy SCOTUS. As I said after the SCOTUS affirmative action ruling, if you want to see how Critical Race Theory eventually will enter the law, read KBJ’s dissent in that case.
You think I’m exaggerating about the HSC opinion? Nope, I’ve understated how insane it was.
The case itself and merits ruling was unremarkable. The issue was whether to reopen a criminal conviction when the underlying science (hair fiber analysis) behind the conviction had fallen into disrepute. I don’t practice criminal law so I have no real opinion on the court’s ruling that the case could be reopened – doesn’t seem outlandish to me.
But that’s were the HSC reasonableness stopped. Starting at page 72, after the court addressed the actual issue before it, the HSC went on an 8-page rant (pages 72-90), including the following excerpts (emphasis added):
We interpret the Hawaii Hawaii Hawaii Constitution on its own terms. The United State Supreme Court’s construction of the federal Due Process Clause does not define the protections of our state’s due process clause….
The Court that now defines federal due process does not honor the work of 1954. It revives the work of 1857. The work of 1896….
Today’s hubristic originalists use the same method to control modern life….
The Court overrides what Congress passed. It overrides what the people chose. All to serve its own ends.
What this Court has done to constitutional rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law explains why Hawaii’s Constitution takes no instruction from it….
We take no guidance on the meaning of due process from a court that gutted due process protections in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., 597 U.S. 215 (2022)….
The Supreme Court’s imperious ideology does not stop at due process. The same jurisprudence has cratered democracy itself. Start with the Voting Rights Act.
The Roberts Court did what Congress never would. It rewrote the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a cornerstone of American civil rights, democratically enacted and repeatedly reauthorized…. Pretend law for a real statute.
The Court then ditched its own thirty-two day default for releasing decisions and hustled out its judgment mid-primary, a favor granted over objection only twice in twenty-five years. Callais v. Louisiana, 608 U.S. __ , 146 S. Ct. 1111, 1113 (May 4, 2026) (Jackson, J., dissenting).
The Roberts Court sees only white. It refuses to acknowledge who the Equal Protection Clause was written to protect. The freed people, their descendants, and all others denied equal citizenship. U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1. It turns its back on what is in plain sight. The Fourteenth Amendment is not colorblind. It never was.
The Court calls the Constitution colorblind while engineering the dilution of Black votes, the unraveling of hard-fought civil rights remedies, and the erasure of Black history. That is not blindness. That is white sight, by design….
A Constitution interpreted this way is not colorblind. It is whatever the Court needs it to be. A way to advance its partisan project…. [Derides additional SCOTUS rulings.]
Rulings run in one direction, time after time. Weakening protections for those with less power. Fortifying those with more. The pattern speaks for itself. A court that systematically dismantles democratic safeguards, steamrolls constitutional liberties, and tramples human dignity does not chart the course for the Hawaii Hawaii Constitution.
Our constitutional system was designed for times like these.
Federalism is not a formality. It is the architecture. The framers built dual sovereignty into the structure of American government as an independent check against concentrated federal power. A Supreme Court driven by agenda and intent on swiping power that belongs to the people is exactly what that check was built for.
When six justices walk away from those they are supposed to protect, state constitutions hold the line. That is not defiance. That is the design….
That’s not all life tenure and zero accountability have produced lately. But it’s enough.
Carrie Severino at National Review notes the absurdity of this “screed,” the history of HSC defiance, and suggests it may be AI drafted:
One would think that Hawaii’s continual pattern of rebuke by the Supreme Court would chasten the state’s high court a bit. Just last month, the Court struck down Hawaii’s so-called “vampire rule” in Wolford v. Lopez, holding 6–3 that the state’s law—which made it a crime to carry a firearm onto private property open to the public absent the owner’s express, affirmative consent—violates the Second Amendment. Justice Alito’s opinion for the Court made clear that “the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States” and “cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii . . . any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald).”
Hawaii teed that memorable line up for Justice Alito. Two years ago, in State v. Wilson, the Hawaii Supreme Court—in an opinion by the same justice who authored the diatribe discussed below—announced that “[t]he spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons,” and that Hawaii would read the Second Amendment “differently than the current United States Supreme Court.” When Wilson reached Washington, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Alito, issued a statement respecting the denial of certiorari noting that the Hawaii Supreme Court had simply “ignored” Bruen.
But instead of finally taking the hint after Wolford, Hawaii’s high court has gone on the offensive….
Pages 72 through 80 are worth reading in full, if only to marvel at the scope and arrogance of the digression, spanning voting rights, campaign finance, abortion, religious liberty, the Second Amendment, the major questions doctrine, Chevron deference, the spending power, the removal power, and birthright citizenship….
One final aside, given recent scrutiny of lawyers’ usage of AI tools in court filings. Curiously, the Hawaii high court’s opinion is littered with negative parallelisms, a common hallmark of AI-generated text. Just a few examples:
- “The harm happens at conviction, not discovery.”
- “This was not class association. It was source attribution.”
- “That is not what a neutral expert does. That’s what an advocate does.”
- “What matters is whether the trial was fair. Not whether the prosecutor knew it wasn’t.”
- “The constitutional injury is not prosecutorial bad faith. It’s the use of false evidence to convict.”
- “Good faith describes the lawyers. It does not describe the defendant’s plight.”
- “The Fourteenth Amendment is not colorblind. It never was.”
- “That is not blindness. That is white sight, by design.”
- “A Constitution interpreted this way is not colorblind. It is whatever the Court needs it to be.”
- “Federalism is not a formality. It is the architecture.”
- “The focus is not on what remains in the State’s case. It is on what the false evidence may have done to the verdict.”
- “That’s not a defect. That’s the protection at work.”
- “Materiality is not automatic reversal. . . . The standard is no rubber stamp.”
…The opinion by Justice Todd W. Eddins is devoid of judicial restraint and decorum. The fact that other justices would join in such an unhinged screed is a disgrace to the court and the Hawaii bar.
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) July 18, 2026
2/ The Hawai’i Supreme Court’s diatribe, in fact, reads like one of KBJ’s solo dissents: emotionally partisan, lacking professionalism, and openly dismissive of the Constitution.https://t.co/1X7GwXXufp pic.twitter.com/EGMb8Gwvyp
— RNLA ⚖️ (@TheRepLawyer) July 18, 2026
======================
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
The intent of KBJ’s dissents is to provide justification for a future “stacked” SCOTUS to overturn controversial decisions of the Roberts Court.
Kavanaugh got Moore v US wrong via misunderstanding the concept of pass through entities.
that being said, KBJ wrote a concurring opinion in Moore v US and got the facts wrong and the holdings wrong in every single prior SC case on federal taxation that she cited.
KBJ has her own Truth.
“Rulings run in one direction, time after time.”
The judges on this court are too young to remember the Warren Court and beyond when rulings went left time after time. Those judges drew their inspiration from West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937) (famous switch in time to save nine) when tossing the restraints of the plain language of the Constitution was tossed aside. It wasn’t until the appearance of Scalia and then Thomas, who began a modest revival of original text.
The “switch in time to save nine” is a myth. Roberts cast his vote in Parrish on December 19, 1936, well before FDR announced his court-packing scheme, on February 5, 1937, and therefore could not have been affected by it. Even in Tipaldo he might well have voted to overturn Adkins had the appellant challenged it.
I’ve read a few of Jackson’s dissents. I’m not a lawyer but it seems to me that she’s not capable of answering the question at hand. She’s more interested in how the case can advance her toxic woke ideology. In that vein, if you’re citing her as proof of your own point, seek a refund from your law school.
I’m sorry. I visited Hawaii a couple of years ago and was sorely unimpressed.
It reminded me of Florida but with feral chickens everywhere.
If Hawaii wants to create its own federal laws, I suggest that they secede from the Union.
I’m pretty sure they won’t be missed.
Maybe we can trade it to Denmark for Greenland. As a bonus we can throw in Puerto Rico.
Pearl Harbor remains ours though.
N O Hawaii is ours. We paid in blood
If we hadn’t claimed it they would all be speaking Japanese
When I went there in 1980 and the Japanese had mucho $$$, before their collapse, they inhabited 50% of Hawaii despite the bombings 40 years prior
That being said, Japan would have claimed it so it is what it is, Hawaiians would never be free and I dare say the japs would have killed most of them
What do you have against Denmark?
And Hickham.
There is a very active and growing movement for Hawaiian sovereignty.
Some of the leaders and the initial proponents are native Hawaiian or at least have some Hawaiian ancestry.
A large and growing part of this movement are wealthy retirees from the west coast. It appears that many of these affluent leftists are retired west coast state government employees with generous pensions.
In the unlikely case that Hawaii was ever to become a sovereign nation these leftists would probably lose their voting and property rights in a few years.
Good. That’s called the school of hard knocks. Probably the only way other Leftists might get the message.
“What!? You helped indigenous people throw off the yoke of colonialism and capitalism and they ruined you for it?”
Are they mostly haoles? Cause in my experience being a leftist is almost mandatory to be successful in Alohaland.
I left Oahu almost 20 years ago. Back then the sovereignty movement was more an annoyance than anything else. Interesting that it’s gaining traction.
Navy Mustang, the original proponents were native Hawaiian. The pro sovereignty bumper stickers and license plates are mostly on luxury vehicles driven by wealthy liberal whites.
If there ever was a referendum, I doubt the huge portion of the population with Japanese, Chinese and Filipino ancestry would support it. The support would be from a segment of the native Hawaiian community and wealthy white liberals.
Piggy eyed Eddins would look very natural at a luau with an apple in his mouth.
In the unlikely case that Hawaii was ever to become a sovereign nation these leftists would probably lose their voting and property rights in a few years.
In. few years? I would imagine that if Hawaii was ever to become a sovereign nation those leftists would immediately lose their voting and property rights. The native Hawaiians wouldn’t be giving them a chance to fight it. It would be a done deal.
Look to what has happened and continues to worsen in South Africa. I do not, for a moment, forgive the horrors of apartheid, but they are actively demonstrating how terrible the result is when everything “western” is thrown out the window.
How would the native Hawaiians do that, without first being a majority?
The same way other minority “communities” win elections–by gaining the vote from all of the white-haired old people who can’t think clearly anymore but have tons of “empathy”. See “Suicidal Empathy” by Gad Saad. The Road to Hell is still paved with good intentions. That is not to denigrate good intentions, but simply to point out that good intentions can have disastrous results when not combined with an intelligent and critical mind, which these old ladies lack.
To be fair, there are feral chickens in Key West and invasive igunanas all over South Florida. But the Hawaii judiciary is a chicken shit show.
So is Todd Eddins officially announcing Hawaii’s intention to either enter an insurrection, or even to secede? Or is he just saying Hawaii isn’t going to obey the SCOTUS rulings anymore?
Can the Supreme Court jail someone for contempt?
As I’ve asked before, “Can SCOTUS recommend a district judge to Congress for impeachment?” They should give it a try. This guy seems to be a generous target.
Judges keep their positions under condition of “good behavior.” What worse “bad behavior” can a judge exhibit than an avowed willingness to not abide by the law?
“Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”
Unfortunately, this guy is on the Hawaii supreme court, and Congress has no power.
Ah. Thank you. I missed that.
If someone disobeys a ruling, certainly. But no one here has done that.
No court can jail someone for speaking contemptuously of it. That’s protected by the first amendment.
Neither. He doesn’t deny that Hawaii has to obey SCOTUS’s rulings. He has never defied a SCOTUS ruling, or tried to. But he doesn’t have to like it. The rant is pure dicta, just complaining about how his duty forces him to do the wrong thing, and how he won’t go an inch beyond that duty.
Hawaii’s Supreme Court says racism is ok if the “right” people are discriminated against and the lack of racism is racism. You can’t make this shit up.
That is not surprising in Hawaii.
This is true.
Eddins doesn’t look very Polynesian to me. He’s just another white colonialist imposing his socialist insanity on the native population,
KBJ is a disgrace to her race and to Harvard and proof of what you get when you allow DEI.
The Hawaii Supreme Court has stated that the “Aloha Spirit” of the State’s constitution supersedes the US Constitution. This was particularly stated about gun rights… or lack of them. Been that way for decades… With about 10% of the population being gay and the majority by ancestry being Asian… it is more East than West. I remember reading the pre-1964 newspaper rental section…. Chinese Only, Japanese Only.
No, it never stated that. I know it was reported that way on many right-wing sites, unfortunately including this one, but it was always an OUTRIGHT LIE. Those who reported it failed in their duty to read the freaking decision before reporting on it. Not one word in that decision said or implied that the state constitution could override the federal, or that the Spirit of Aloha could be used to interpret federal law.
Revoke their statehood. Along with California, New York, and Illinois.
New York is a founding state. If any States’ statehood cannot be revoked, it would be those of the original thirteen States. They gained statehood by ratifying the Constitution. Every other State was admitted by consent of the established States.
Yeah, I know, someone will come along and say “No State’s statehood in the Union can be revoked.” But how do you know if you haven’t tried? “New” States were admitted via acts of Congress. Congressional acts can be repealed, yes? And the argument against the idea presumes the State being ejected doesn’t want to go. Almost certainly there are States that would jump at the chance of being ejected from the Union.
I suspect that one way or another there will be a split. The current path is untenable. Can’t coexist in a Republic with folks who view the very founding of the Republic as evil much less the 250 years of the Republic since then.
I agree with you. I’ve been saying that for at least 35 years. SCOTUS says States can’t seceded. I think that’s BS. If a State or States seceded and did nothing but that (i.e., no attacks on federal insular possessions), who would prevent them from such a fait accompli? It’s also likely that a split could be mutually agreeable. Red States leaving would do so to retain their political autonomy. Blue States left behind would get the same benefit.
For DaveGInOly. We must remember that about 41% of Californians voted Republican in 2024. I would argue for letting California go only after the state was split into at least two states, with most of the inland portion of the state becoming a new state in the Union. We might have to specify that at least one coastal area remain part of that new state in the Union. It might mean relocation for a fairly large number of people, but that can be worked out peacefully–a lot more peacefully than the relocation of millions of Germans and Poles when the Soviet Union seized a great deal of territory in Eastern Poland after World War II. The same applies in Oregon, where much of the eastern state is looking at the idea of joining a greater Idaho. I don’t know about Washington state. One proviso would be that those new independent states allow no stationing of any foreign military forces in their territory.
The Court overrides what Congress passed. It overrides what the people chose.
Ummm, yeah. That’s what the Constitution is for. That’s kinda the definition. There’s even, in said document a way for the people and what Congress passes to override it: the amendment process.
It’s why some of us keep screeching about “republic not a democracy” – the Constitution makes that difference.
And that makes the entire Hawaiian court illegitimate, IMO. They’ve said “We don’t care what the Constitution says; we only care what our ideology says and it should override the previous arrangement because we’ve taken power.” And it really speaks to that dusty ol’ “guarantee clause.”
So far, nobody has managed to successfully request enforcement of that dusty old clause. But SCOTUS has said that there is nothing in the Constitution without meaning or purpose. How can that be if the dusty clause appears to be inoperative? Is it broken? Does it need new batteries?
SCOTUS said back in the 1840s that the republican guarantee clause is up to the political branches to enforce, not the judicial branch.
The “guarantee a republican form of government” provision was cited to justify use of federal troops during school desegregation in Little Rock, AR in 1957
No, it wasn’t. Eisenhower’s order was based on the Insurrection Act. It did not mention the republican guarantee clause at all.
A timely comment re arguing with liberals, from X.
https://x.com/liam_out_loud/status/2078590227841536272?s=20
It sounds as if the Hawaii court is in open rebellion. We might want to do something about that.
No, it isn’t. It’s obeying SCOTUS; it just doesn’t like it. Nothing says it has to like it.
We actually should thank the Hawaii court for doing this. It will now be cited in every subsequent challenge to a decision of that court that conflicts with the Constitution or federal statutes / regulations. And per this monumentally stupid opinion, the Hawaii court fully intends to issue more such opinions.
As a matter of comity, SCOTUS generally gives lower courts (including state supreme courts) the benefit of the doubt. After a screed like this, I doubt SCOTUS would do so on subsequent cert petitions appealing decisions of the Hawaiian Supreme Court. I will not be shocked to see a number of summary reversals (i.e., no merits briefing or oral argument needed, cert granted and judgment reversed on the cert papers).
Jack Lord must be rolling in his grave.
This isn’t a reasoned and factually/legally-grounded judicial opinion — it’s a spiteful, embittered, infantile, intemperate and dishonest political rant that serves to underscore its author’s manifest temperamental, intellectual and jurisprudential unfitness to sit on the federal bench.
The Dhimmi-crat activist “judge” who penned this filth should resign from the bench and either run for political office, or join a Dhimmi-crat non-profit where he can vent his personal and subjective political venom.
“Negative parallelisms” (its not X; its Y) are common in AI because they are common in writing generally. as the linked article notes, Shakespeare was fond of them too.
AI (large language models) don’t “think”. They are simply billion-parameter correlation machines. If its common in the data, it will be common in the output. (also, see what I did there?)
Also: the real “proof” of AI content is not use of common (even overused) phrase construction or punctuation (like the EM dash). Commonly used phrases and punctuation will show up commonly in AI output
The real hallmark of AI generated content is made-up quotes and citations. All too common. and look-another negative parallelism! lol.
This shows up even in the most trivial cases. Just yesterday I asked Meta AI for the nearest park; first it gave me some large and significant parks that were a long long way away. Then it pretended that they were within easy walking distance (they weren’t). Then when I specified that I just wanted a bit of greenery with benches, that I could walk to, so it went and hallucinated a series of such parklets, none of which existed, and which no actual human looking at a map would even think existed.
That must be some pretty strong “Aloha Spirit” this lunatic is inhaling. What an unhinged, infantile rant by Eddins and the HSC. This ill-conceived, unforced error will not age well. It will be a stain he takes with him to his grave. Aloha!
At a minimum, I think that this vile, Dhimmi-crat activist “judge” has been smoking copious quantities of that Aloha grass.
Unhinged rant is one way to see this opinion. Unhinged from reality is the better way to see this opinion. We live in a time where leftists are desperate to tear down the Constitution and all it set up. Legislative, Executive and Judiciary. Although the Federal Government can’t interfere with Hawaii’s Supreme Court, they can certainly establish their supremacy over the State of Hawaii. Start with an investigation of the Lahina fire and its aftermath. Very similar to the Palisades fire and its current aftermath.
Negroes can jump higher, run faster, and whine louder that any other race of mankind.
In what universe is Todd Eddins a negro?
What a loser.
Had Biden won, his next Supreme Court nominee would have been Snoop Dog.
Snoop would probably be supportive of individual liberties v an all powerful state seeking to restrict liberty.
“The Court overrides what Congress passed,” Eddins continued.
***** “It overrides what the people chose. ****
All to serve its own ends. What this Court has done to constitutional rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law explains why Hawaiʻi’s Constitution takes no instruction from it.”
——————-
Ok hawaii idiot, the people chose Trump. We wanted real law and order not crt bullschiff.
So maybe you should move to north korea where your views are more in line with the power structure.
The particular facts of hair fiber analysis are some of the worst junk science to ever exist, and a perfect example of how government workers decreed ‘facts’ to exist that didn’t stand up to even basic scrutiny. From the very start of the so-called ‘science’, it was rife with problems. The only thing that it could actually scientifically provide was evidence that it was consistent with hair from the suspect, NOT that it could ONLY have come from the suspect. Yet for decades prosecutors acted like hair analysis proved conclusively that it was possible to identify a single person, and ONLY a single person.
When actually forced to do blind tests between people of similar hair color and length, the ‘scientific’ hair analysis was proved to be no more accurate than blind guessing. DNA testing proved what an absolute joke the hair analysis ‘science’ was, and since then, its been relegated to the same tier of criminal science as so-called lie detectors.
Cut through all the vituperative rhetoric in the opinion, and you’ll find one statement that actually stands up and was urged by Justice Brennan in a Harvard Law Review article about 50 years ago during the early days of the Rehnquist Court, which is that state supreme courts have the authority to interpret words in their own constitutions to mean things that are different from what those same words mean in the US Constitution (for example, due process or equal protection), as long as in so doing the state court limits state prerogatives or individual prerogatives without trampling on rights that are guaranteed under the federal Constitution or federal law. For example, a state supreme court is entitled to rule that under the state constitution’s guarantee of due process you cannot be arrested for a crime if you are under 30 years old, and as nutty as that will not be reviewed by the US Supreme Court.
But, unfortunately, that sentence, it is overwhelmed by the absurd and angry rhetoric.
History is also funny. In 1959, it was politically important for both Alaska and Hawaii to be admitted to the union because the general feeling was that Alaska was solidly Democratic and so it had to be balanced by the solidly Republican Hawaii.
This part is of course completely unremarkable and uncontroversial. It’s not part of the rant, it’s just a preface to it.
This is completely off the rails. No state constitution takes instruction from SCOTUS, regardless of how reasonable any given SCOTUS may be. The state and US constitutions are different documents, adopted at different times and in different circumstances, and thus an opinion about one can’t guide us in interpreting the other.
The amendment was written to protect the freed slaves; their plight was the immediate problem that needed to be solved. So if whom it was originally written for mattered, then it would only protect them and not their descendants, and certainly not other people who are not descended from slaves, such as African immigrants, or Native Hawaiians. The HSC wouldn’t like that. But that’s not how it works. While freed slaves were the immediate issue, the amendment was deliberately written to protect everyone equally, exactly as the SCOTUS majority insists.
Federalism is not a formality. It is the architecture. The framers built dual sovereignty into the structure of American government as an independent check against concentrated federal power This is certainly true, and the current SCOTUS majority would be the last people to dispute it.
As the linked article acknowledges, Shakespeare used it regularly. So did the Bible. “Not on bread alone does a man live, but on everything that comes out of God’s mouth does a man live.” “Not the horse’s strength does He want; not a man’s thights does He desire; God desires those who revere Him, those who look forward to His kindness.” “Not by valor, not by strength, but by My spirit.”
By the way, the infamous “Spirit of Aloha” decision was not about the second amendment, which the court begrudgingly acknowledged must be interpreted the way SCOTUS says it should be. It was about the parallel provision in the HI state constitution, which although worded exactly the same way as the 2A, must be interpreted differently. The court was completely correct about that. The HI provision was adopted in a very different context from the original, and therefore means something very different. But as it acknowledged, the federal provision is the supreme law of the land and prevails over the state provision when they conflict.
Oops. I messed up one blockquote. This paragraph should look like this:
This is certainly true, and the current SCOTUS majority would be the last people to dispute it.