Governor Lemanu’s unabashed hat-in-hand tour across D.C. made me think of a parable of two brothers who went to see their father on his deathbed.
The first brother knelt alongside his father, held his hand and said, “Father, you are both wise and wealthy. I ask nothing of you other than hope I have earned your love, though you’ve given it freely. You never expected us to be perfect; only that we try our very best. I’ve paid my debts, earned my place in this world and set my children up for success. I pray I have honored your legacy and made you proud."
The second brother comes in after the first had left the room, towers over his father lying in bed and says, “Father, calamity has overcome my household for reasons outside of my control. Your expectations of me as a man have been overwhelming my entire life, and they have only served to bring me down. I have never had my brother’s luck! The only thing I ask of you now is for my fair share of your inheritance so that my children will not know poverty.”
If you think the ASG is the first brother in this story, you’d be terribly wrong. And if you think the father in this story is the federal government, you’re even more so.
Monday, October 30, 2023
O Fea Le Alofa
I was very excited when Governor Lemanu called for a constitutional convention last year because of one issue and one issue only – reapportionment. This was to be the measure of our leaders’ oft-declared commitment to our culture; one supposedly based on love and respect for one another.
In an article by the New York Times back in 2010, they write “that some of the United States Constitution’s most sacred concepts like the notion of one person, one vote do not apply in American Samoa”. That concept is the spirit behind the time-honored mantra of days past, “no taxation without representation”.
But that is exactly the problem we have with our House of Representatives as it is not based on current population figures. How can any tax or spending legislation in the territory really be considered just by our people when they don't have equal representation in the lower chamber?
In the House, the voters of Tuala-uta have less representation in the Fono than any other district. And they're not the only ones.
While the Constitutional Committee recommended that no county lose a seat during the House or Senate reapportionment process, Convention delegates still had the power to address the imbalance in House and Senate representation through reapportionment rather than by simply adding more seats as the committee had recommended.
Delegates, in turn, declared that the committee should have come up with a formula for reapportionment prior to the convention. Perhaps that may have facilitated the discussion but I have my doubts. For one, some delegates seemed prepared right out of the gate to set the negotiating bar at zero when it came to the question of adding more seats for now more populous Itu’au and Tuala-uta districts.
It was a negotiating tactic anyone with two eyes and a brain saw coming a mile away.
Their argument was that a lot of representatives and senators from other counties reside in those two districts so the nstituents of Itu’au and Tuala-uta are represented in the legislature by them as well. That actually makes for the worst of both worlds.
In American Samoa, we have legislators who reside in districts they don’t owe their loyalties to, while supposedly representing the interests and concerns of the very districts they were elected from but don’t even reside in. There is a reason why there’s a residency requirement for both the voter and legislator everywhere else in the democratic world.
Let me put our reapportionment dilemma in another way: If we take all of the district/ county names out of the equation for just a minute, marrying up the number of representatives with the demographics of our current population would be nothing more than a routine paper drill. That’s just a matter of fact.
Feudalism, protecting one’s turf, even expanding it... that’s what’s getting in the way of fixing the imbalance of representation in the Fono. What I saw in full display from the beginning to the end of this whole conventional affair was fear, not love or respect. Fear of losing power, fear of losing prestige, fear of offending those with both.
But where I have found true love and respect of, by and for our people was from the average voter.
During the referendum, they once again demonstrated that they neither trust our leaders with more power or independence from federal oversight... nor are they willing to arbitrarily add more seats to the legislature for reasons too expensive to count.
In an article by the New York Times back in 2010, they write “that some of the United States Constitution’s most sacred concepts like the notion of one person, one vote do not apply in American Samoa”. That concept is the spirit behind the time-honored mantra of days past, “no taxation without representation”.
But that is exactly the problem we have with our House of Representatives as it is not based on current population figures. How can any tax or spending legislation in the territory really be considered just by our people when they don't have equal representation in the lower chamber?
In the House, the voters of Tuala-uta have less representation in the Fono than any other district. And they're not the only ones.
While the Constitutional Committee recommended that no county lose a seat during the House or Senate reapportionment process, Convention delegates still had the power to address the imbalance in House and Senate representation through reapportionment rather than by simply adding more seats as the committee had recommended.
Delegates, in turn, declared that the committee should have come up with a formula for reapportionment prior to the convention. Perhaps that may have facilitated the discussion but I have my doubts. For one, some delegates seemed prepared right out of the gate to set the negotiating bar at zero when it came to the question of adding more seats for now more populous Itu’au and Tuala-uta districts.
It was a negotiating tactic anyone with two eyes and a brain saw coming a mile away.
Their argument was that a lot of representatives and senators from other counties reside in those two districts so the nstituents of Itu’au and Tuala-uta are represented in the legislature by them as well. That actually makes for the worst of both worlds.
In American Samoa, we have legislators who reside in districts they don’t owe their loyalties to, while supposedly representing the interests and concerns of the very districts they were elected from but don’t even reside in. There is a reason why there’s a residency requirement for both the voter and legislator everywhere else in the democratic world.
Let me put our reapportionment dilemma in another way: If we take all of the district/ county names out of the equation for just a minute, marrying up the number of representatives with the demographics of our current population would be nothing more than a routine paper drill. That’s just a matter of fact.
Feudalism, protecting one’s turf, even expanding it... that’s what’s getting in the way of fixing the imbalance of representation in the Fono. What I saw in full display from the beginning to the end of this whole conventional affair was fear, not love or respect. Fear of losing power, fear of losing prestige, fear of offending those with both.
But where I have found true love and respect of, by and for our people was from the average voter.
During the referendum, they once again demonstrated that they neither trust our leaders with more power or independence from federal oversight... nor are they willing to arbitrarily add more seats to the legislature for reasons too expensive to count.
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