{"id":998,"date":"2026-07-21T13:38:44","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T13:38:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/propertytransitionmedia.com\/?p=998"},"modified":"2026-07-21T13:38:44","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T13:38:44","slug":"hawaiis-supreme-court-declares-war-on-scotus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/propertytransitionmedia.com\/?p=998","title":{"rendered":"Hawaii’s Supreme Court Declares War On SCOTUS"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In June, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the U.S. Supreme Court, reversed a decision by the Hawaii Supreme Court, explaining that the Constitution \u201c\u201d That was a repudiation of the Hawaii Supreme Court\u2019s earlier ruling that in Hawaii, \u201c\u201d The Hawaii Supreme Court relied on the \u201cAloha Spirit\u201d to end-run around the Second Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected that. And now, the Hawaii Supreme Court has struck back with an opinion in that attempts to repudiate the current Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

Read more Lazy Senate Republicans Attack J.D. Vance To Distract From Their Own Failure<\/a><\/p>\n

There is a version of Granillo v. State<\/em> that would have made for an unremarkable opinion. On July 15, the Hawaii Supreme Court granted a new trial to a man convicted in 1990 on the strength of FBI hair-and-fiber testimony that modern science has since discredited. Looking at that record and concluding a conviction built on now-discredited testimony cannot stand is normal. Reasonable people can debate the doctrinal test the court adopted, and they often do.<\/p>\n

But a doctrinal opinion is not the opinion the Hawaii justices wrote. Around 73 pages into the 91-page opinion, having resolved the case before them, the majority sets the record aside and launches into a deep criticism of the U.S. Supreme Court. When the opinion\u2019s subject changes to the U.S. Supreme Court, the register changes with it \u2014 from judicial reasoning to political invective. As a frequent state supreme court practitioner, I have never seen an opinion that so aggressively targets the Supreme Court. Highlighting that problem is vital because other courts are watching and may take this as permission to do the same.<\/p>\n

The majority writes that \u201cwe take no guidance on the meaning of due process from a court that gutted due process protections in Dobbs<\/em>\u201d \u2014 saying that this criminal procedure case will not rely on U.S. Supreme Court precedent because of a decision about abortion. And unfortunately, the opinion gets even further afield in its attack on binding precedents from there.<\/p>\n

Accusations of Racism<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The Hawaii Supreme Court declares that \u201cthe Court that now defines federal due process does not honor the work of 1954. It revives the work of 1857. The work of 1896\u201d \u2014 invoking the discredited cases Dred Scott<\/em> and Plessy<\/em> v. Ferguson<\/em> to imply the Supreme Court is not only racist, it is as racist as the worst jurists before the Civil War. The Hawaii Supreme Court thus accuses our nation\u2019s highest court of continuing the constitutional project of racist slaveholders.<\/p>\n

Then, the Hawaii court goes from implicit accusations of racism to explicit. It accuses the Roberts Court as \u201cseeing only white.\u201d Rejecting colorblindness, the Hawaii Supreme Court says that the Supreme Court\u2019s approach \u201cis not blindness. .\u00a0.\u00a0. [It] is white sight, by design.\u201d While literally nonsensical, the opinion is trying to accuse the Supreme Court of favoring white citizens over black ones.<\/p>\n

Activism Not Reasoning<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Adopting the pose of an activist on X or a spoken-word poet, the Hawaii Supreme Court opinion contains lots of short sentences on misconstrued precedents it disagrees with. \u201cDraining due process. Rolling back voting rights. Flooding elections with money .\u00a0.\u00a0. Crowning a president\u201d \u2014 and dismisses Supreme Court jurisprudence as \u201cwhite noise.\u201d White noise both for its racial connotation and because it is in the background and should be ignored. One need not agree with every decision the Supreme Court has issued to recognize that this sounds more like an activist\u2019s press release than a judicial opinion.<\/p>\n

Read more \u2018Worse Than A Democrat\u2019: Lisa Murkowski Can\u2019t Bring Herself To SAVE America<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, the Supreme Court is not beyond criticism. But judicial criticism should be respectful, reasoned, specific, and tethered to law. Nothing in those eight pages meets that standard. Instead, the opinion almost reads like an AI-generated grab bag of cases that liberal jurists dislike and accuses the Supreme Court of nefarious intent in issuing them. A greatest hits of the last 20 years of centrist and center-right Supreme Court jurisprudence.<\/p>\n

Take Dobbs<\/em>, the majority\u2019s lead exhibit. Whatever one thinks of the result, the decision rested on a real and long-running argument that the Constitution\u2019s text says nothing about abortion and that the question therefore belongs to the people and their elected representatives. That is a position held by serious jurists across the ideological spectrum, including many who favor abortion rights as a matter of policy.<\/p>\n

To describe it as \u201cgutting\u201d due process is abandoning debate and slipping into ad hominem. The same is true of the majority\u2019s short swipes at Shelby County<\/em> (removing outdated race requirements for election law changes), (supporting Second Amendment rights), (removing courts from politicized gerrymandering cases), Citizens United<\/em> (protecting First Amendment rights), and (ensuring democratic accountability for bureaucratic law changes). Each represents a contested but recognizably legal judgment about text, structure, and the proper role of courts.<\/p>\n

Politicized Judging<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The Hawaii justices\u2019 opinion is unfortunately more ironic than a reasoned critique. Their central complaint is that the Supreme Court has become political \u2014 that it decides cases to \u201cserve its own ends\u201d and advance a \u201cpartisan project.\u201d Yet its eight-page aside about the Supreme Court shows its own willingness to editorialize from the bench about matters not before it. A urged restraint, noting that the court could resolve the claim without reaching so far. The majority pressed on anyway. A court worried about the appearance of politicized judging would not have reached so far with so little justification. Even leading legal experts like Sen. Eric Schmitt, former Missouri attorney general, have called this opinion out as \u201cjudicial insurrection.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of that is to deny that state constitutions can, and sometimes do, provide protections the federal Constitution does not. Hawaii is free to read Article I, Section 5 of its constitution to establish broader protections than the federal due process clause. Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit wrote an entire book exploring that phenomenon across the country.<\/p>\n

But Supreme Court justices decide the hardest questions in American law, often under withering pressure, and they do it in signed opinions that explain their reasoning and invite disagreement. The better answer to a decision one dislikes has always been the same: a sharper argument, a closer reading, a more faithful account of text and history. Hawaii\u2019s justices could have done that. Instead, they offered an insult. Troublingly, this opinion also seems like a premonition of more insults and attacks on the Supreme Court from within the judiciary.<\/p>\n

Read more Republicans Will Do Anything To Illegals Except Deport Them<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In its Granillo v. State opinion, the Hawaii Supreme Court aggressively targets the Supreme Court. Other courts may follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[126],"tags":[204,2223,3065,519,3066,135],"class_list":["post-998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-law","tag-constitution","tag-hawaii","tag-hawaii-supreme-court","tag-samuel-alito","tag-second-amendent","tag-supreme-court"],"yoast_head":"\nHawaii’s Supreme Court Declares War On SCOTUS - Property Transition Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/propertytransitionmedia.com\/?p=998\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hawaii’s Supreme Court Declares War On SCOTUS - Property Transition Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In its Granillo v. 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