WASHINGTON — A House panel has postponed a key vote originally scheduled for tomorrow on legislation known as the Akaka bill, which would create a process for Native Hawaiian self-governance.

The House Natural Resources Committee is expected to reschedule a vote on the bill, written by Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, for sometime in the next week or two.
“We’re all just trying to make sure everyone is coordinated and on the same page before we go forward,” said Jesse Broder Van Dyke, an Akaka spokesman.
If passed, the legislation could reshape the political landscape in Hawaii. It would give Native Hawaiians virtually the same rights conferred on Native Americans and Alaskans, and greater control over their highly valuable ancestral lands.
The vote postponement follows some written criticisms of the bill by prominent members of the Native Hawaiian legal community.
In a four-page analysis of the legislation sent to the Natural Resources Committee, the Native Hawaiian Bar Association voiced concern that some provisions would grant the federal government too much immunity against potential claims by Native Hawaiians, especially for land.
“The bill’s provisions on claims and federal sovereign immunity appear to be overly broad and may prohibit lawsuits by individual Native Hawaiians,” the bar association wrote. “They create an extraordinarily unusual circumstance in which Native Hawaiians are barred from bringing an action.”
At stake ultimately — in addition to the political future of the Native Hawaiians — is control over some 1.8 million acres of land that many Native Hawaiians believe was taken illegally in the United States’ annexation of Hawaii in 1898.
Approval of the Akaka bill in the Natural Resources Committee would send the bill to the full House for a vote. The Senate has not acted on the bill yet.
Its first test in the Senate would be before the Indian Affairs Committee, where Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, is a senior member.
Akaka is hoping the committee will take it up before Congress begins its August recess.
Originally proposed in 2000, the Akaka bill has been passed repeatedly in the House but has hit walls in the Senate, where single lawmakers can hold bills at will.
The legislation came closest to passing in 2007, when it cleared the full House, but it was never brought to the Senate floor for a full vote.
The Akaka bill’s mostly Republican opponents, who have quashed the legislation in the past, contend it is race-based.
But they now face an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress and a Hawaii-raised president who has vowed to sign the bill if it reaches his desk.