How Congress annexed Hawaii without a treaty
In 1897, a treaty to annex Hawaii ran into a constitutional obstacle: treaties require approval by two-thirds of the senators present, and opponents had enough support to block it. The proposed treaty therefore stalled in the Senate. Annexation advocates then pursued a different route: a joint resolution, a measure passed by both chambers of Congress and signed by the president.
The resolution’s legal shortcut
A joint resolution ordinarily works like a bill. It needs a majority vote in the House and Senate, not the supermajority required for a treaty. Congress passed the Newlands Resolution in 1898, and President William McKinley signed it. The United States then took possession of Hawaii.
That route was controversial because the Constitution explicitly describes how treaties are approved but does not spell out a process for acquiring territory by joint resolution. Supporters argued Congress could use its ordinary legislative power; critics disputed that a resolution could substitute for a treaty. The resolution nonetheless became the instrument of annexation.
What the vote did—and did not do
The change in procedure mattered politically: it let annexation proceed despite the lack of two-thirds Senate support for the treaty. But it did not mean Hawaiians had voted to join the United States. The Kingdom of Hawaii had been overthrown in 1893, and the resolution followed years of dispute over the islands’ political future.
Annexation made Hawaii a U.S. territory, not a state. Its statehood came much later, in 1959. The lasting significance of the 1898 decision is that Congress used a majority-vote measure to achieve an outcome that treaty opponents had been able to block.
