"Aloha," I learned from watching Brady Bunch reruns, can mean either "hello" or "goodbye." According to one Hawaiian court, "aloha" means "goodbye to your constitutional rights" as soon as you set foot in the 808 State.
"The spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons during day-to-day activities" is the kind of thing you might expect a well-meaning but ignorant-as-toast Hawaiian 10th-grader to write in defense of unconstitutional gun restrictions. It is my overly amused duty to tell you today that those are not the words of a well-meaning but ignorant-as-toast 10th-grader — those words are an exact quote from a decision written by the State Supreme Court of Hawaii.
At least the 10th-grader has youth and inexperience to excuse being silly enough to cite "the spirit of Aloha" in a legal decision.
The case was complicated, as these things usually are, involving a man who insisted the Bruen decision gave him the right to carry without a CCW. The complication is that Hawaii is a "may-issue" state, not a "shall-issue" state, and the state may decide to issue a carry permit after Hell freezes over a second time. But probably not even then.
The State Supreme Court reversed the dismissal of charges against the plaintiff because the Aloha fairies told them they could.
Granted, I'm no constitutional scholar, but it's my understanding that when the United States Supreme Court makes a ruling, it applies to the jurisdictions of all the lower courts. That's how the whole Supreme/Lower relationship works, as you can easily tell from the words "supreme" and "lower," which, unlike "aloha," each has only one meaning attached.
What courts can do is hear a case that involves some wiggle room within or in between Supreme Court rulings. That's one way the Left is able to use lawfare to keep going after gun rights in new and imaginative ways and why the Supreme Court has to keep slapping down ridiculous new rulings from left-leaning lower courts.
Thursday's example was a big tell, as my home state of Colorado was reduced to arguing in front of SCOTUS that the state could remove a candidate from the ballot just days before the election because of something they might have said that one time. "I mean, Your Honors, the court never ruled that we can't..." isn't quite what Colorado's hapless attorneys argued, but that sums up the spirit of it.
But that's not what Hawaii's State Supreme Court did. Here's the gist of their decision:
Article I, section 17 of the Hawaii Constitution mirrors the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. We read those words differently than the current United States Supreme Court. We hold that in Hawaii there is no state constitutional right to carry a firearm in public.
So much wrong here.
The lesser wrong — but it's still a biggie — is the inference of permanence. "We hold in Hawaii..." that the "current United States Supreme Court" is wrong. SCOTUS justices come and go, but the legally binding spirit of Aloha is forever.
The bigger wrong is the presumption that a lesser court can tell a superior court that its writ doesn't apply to them. It's a five-year-old stomping his foot and insisting, "You're not the boss of me!"
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