Hawaii lawmakers respond after Sessions disses state as ‘an island in the Pacific’

Eighteen years after Hawaii residents voted for statehood and 19 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was admitted as the 50th state in the union in 1959.

It turns out, Attorney General Jeff Sessions isn’t a huge fan of the state. In a recent radio interview, he dissed Hawaii as “an island in the Pacific” while criticizing a federal judge’s decision to place a hold on President Donald Trump’s revised second travel ban.

CNN first reported the comment Thursday.

“We’ve got cases moving in the very, very liberal Ninth Circuit, who, they've been hostile to the order,” Sessions said earlier this week on “The Mark Levin Show.” “We won a case in Virginia recently that was a nicely-written order that just demolished, I thought, all the arguments that some of the other people have been making. We are confident that the President will prevail on appeal and particularly in the Supreme Court, if not the Ninth Circuit. So this is a huge matter. I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the President of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and Constitutional power.”

Such a dismissal of the state comes at a time when Hawaii is worried about a threat from North Korea. Hawaii state lawmakers have asked the Department of Defense for help with nuclear war plans, according to The Atlantic and other news outlets.

Hawaii’s two Democratic senators pounced on the comments, issuing statements on Twitter denouncing Sessions.

Other social media users commented using the #IslandinthePacific hashtag.

This story was originally published April 20, 2017 at 6:25 PM with the headline "Hawaii lawmakers respond after Sessions disses state as ‘an island in the Pacific’."