Bill Native Hawaiians' growing frustration over Hawaiian homelands and the 100th anniversary of the overthrow pushed the Hawaiian sovereignty movement to the forefront of politics in Hawaii. In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed United States Public Law 103-150, known as the "Apology Bill", for U.S. involvement in the 1893 overthrow. The bill makes a commitment to reconciliation. U.S. census information shows approximately 401,162 Native Hawaiians living in the U.S. in 2000. Sixty percent live in the continental U.S. and forty percent in Hawaii. Between 1990 and 2000, people identifying as Native Hawaiian had grown by 90,000, while those identifying as pure Hawaiian had declined to under 10,000. In 2009, Senator Daniel Akaka sponsored The Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2009 (S1011/HR2314), a bill to create the legal framework to establish a Hawaiian government. President Barack Obama supported the bill. The bill is considered a reconciliation process, but it has not had that effect, instead being the subject of much controversy and political fighting in many arenas. American opponents argue that Congress is disregarding U.S. citizens for special interests and sovereignty activists believe this will further erode their rights, as the 1921 blood quantum rule of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act did. In 2011, a governor-appointed committee began to gather and verify Native Hawaiians' names for the purpose of voting on a Native Hawaiian nation. In June 2014, the US Department of the Interior announced plans to hold hearings to establish the possibility of federal recognition of Native Hawaiians as an Indian tribe. This is technically incorrect, as Native Hawaiians are not indigenous peoples of continental America but Malayo-Polynesians more closely related to Māori people, Tahitians, and other Pacific Islanders, and by extension to Malay people, Indonesians, Filipinos, and aboriginal Taiwanese. Opposition There has also been opposition to the concept of ancestry-based sovereignty, which critics maintain is tantamount to racial exclusion. In 1996, in Rice v. Cayetano, one Big Island rancher sued to win the right to vote in OHA elections, asserting that every Hawaiian citizen regardless of racial background should be able to vote for state offices, and that limiting the vote to Native Hawaiians is racist. In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor, and OHA elections are now open to all registered voters. In its decision, the court wrote: "the ancestral inquiry mandated by the State is forbidden by the Fifteenth Amendment for the further