The Washington Post today devotes a long and astonishingly one-sided news story to the efforts of Native Hawaiians to turn themselves into a federally recognized Indian tribe, without saying one word about the conservative objections to this. The basic problem is that there is a big difference, as a matter of law and policy, between the federal government acknowledging a preexisting political entity, versus creating a brand-new such entity on the basis of race or ethnicity. As a legal matter, the Supreme Court has warned about the potential problems here with the equal-protection guarantee of the Constitution (see its 2000 ruling in Rice v. Cayetano). And as a policy matter, this is more balkanization and identity politics, just what the United States does not need.