We have previously discussed (here and here and here and here) the push for reparations in California that has been touted by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats for years. After the Democrats campaigned on the issue in past elections, I wrote a column about how this bill had come due after years of delay for study and recommendations. The legislature, however, just stamped the bill “return to sender” and shelved the two reparations bills with the reported support of Newsom. The reaction is not surprising that there has been a bait-and-switch by Democrats on the issue.
Last week, the California legislature did approve proposals allowing for the return of land or compensation to families whose property was unjustly seized by the government, and issuing a formal apology for laws and practices that have harmed Black people. However, the two bills to establish a fund for reparation payments – Senate Bills 1403 and 1331 – were tabled.
State Sen. Steven Bradford blamed Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom for the result, stating that the governor made clear that he would veto them.
Newsom signed a $297.9 billion budget in June that included up to $12 million for reparations legislation. However, that is a drop in the bucket given the billions demanded and it is not clear how the money will be spent.
Adding to the anger is the fact that the legislature approved a bill to allow undocumented persons to receive no-interest loans of up to $150,000 to cover down payments on new homes.
It is now unclear what will happen next, though sponsors are saying that they will continue to push for legislation green lighting reparation payments.
Some congressional Democrats have pushed for similar federal reparations and passed a bill out of the House Judiciary Committee in 2021 that failed to receive a floor vote. BET founder Robert Johnson has called for $14 trillion in federal reparations.
As discussed earlier, there are a host of legal and practical questions over the reparation payments that will have to be resolved. Even with passage, the bills would likely face constitutional challenges.
Chicken plucked.
Yowser.
Hmmm, it seems to me that reparations can be given in several ways. First, if you give out ONE large sum of money, how long do you think that pot of money will last? Will there be taxes on that ‘gift’? What will be the cry when the money is all gone? We WANT MORE MONEY. This mantra will be repeated many times, me thinks. SECOND, offer a Income Tax holiday for ‘x’ number of years or decades. But shouldn’t there be work in exchange for the money?
I’m sure there are several more ideas worthy of consideration that other people can suggest.
I get where you are going Delmar but heck no. Why should any person get out of paying income tax due to their race? No, no way, not at all!
Exactly the way they sold Joe Biden in 2020. A giant lie with a bait and switch end.
What did people expect, and when will people learn the dems lie to get what they want? This has happened so repeatedly it beggars belief at this point. It’s no wonder the DNC is so continually active fleecing new generations, sooner or later, everyone wakes up, and under their leadership, too often it’s waking up in a dumpster fire these days. This news is not at all surprising.
Further, indentured servitude was a thing. The Irish were very often victims of it. Part of my lineage is Irish. *Extends hand, waits, and waits, and waits, and waits. . . *
No one in my lineage owned slaves (no, that was for the ignorant and entitled elite. Does anyone sense a pattern?); it was abhorrent to my forebears, even long ago. Anyone involved in this nonsense can get bent.
I’ve asked about indentured servitude, though the ancestress to whom it applied was Scots. No-one seems to have an answer, or to care about it. After all, we’re white! We don’t count, nor our historical hardships and injustices, any more than the white kid who works part time to help his single mom while living in a small trailer while getting excellent grades has any “hardship” clout next to the son of a multi-millionaire black railroad executive who learned about racism in college.
PS – my family didn’t own slaves, either – even the Southern ones.
@Ellie
Thanks for your comment. 😊
Just as with the horror that was slavery, it was just ‘a thing’ back then. People of all stripes fell prey to it. Anyone that thinks that slaves were exclusively brought over on a boat from Africa by evil white dudes that wished they could just drink their blood nightly and steal their women are sorely beyond parody; not to diminish that, but come on – slavery is slavery. and this is 2024. Mental slavery being the most egregious of all, and that is what we are seeing with younger people and the modern democratic party in general. It really is a spider’s web, and I’d rather just sweep the cobwebs off than capitulate to the fact that there are spiders, because, yes, there are spiders. I am truly sorry for anyone that has thus tethered themselves to the past instead of looking forward. Modern leftism, which looks a whole lot like Cold War era communism, is not the way for human beings.
And sure. ‘Progressives’ represent a step forward. Spare me. 🙄 These kids are so confused they can barely tie their shoes, and that is verifiable. There is an imminent rude awakening when they are older, and the rest of us are going to have to just marginalize them (parenting that should have happened when they were still children), and let them age out, bearing in mind some of these people have managed to make it to their 40s without a single real experience. There will not be a time when we are not carrying them in one form or another, and yes, it is going to be a burden. On everyone. But the few have always carried the many, that has never been truer than today, and it has exactly zero to do with wealth or privilege. It is the opposite, in fact, at least historically. Aristocratic clowns have always been clowns, they aren’t actually that difficult to defeat, if one is allowed to talk.
I dare a laptop millennial living in brownstone to tell me they’ve ever suffered anything worse than a stubbed toe in real life (‘words as violence’ don’t count. Find your spines, you twits, even if your spines are noodles), and then they need to provide the evidence. These idiot children can go *bleep* themselves.
Jonathan: CA Senator Steven Bradford introduced his two reparation bills after 4 years of study. That was a time when CA had a large budget surplus. Now CA has a deficit. Although the state Senate has approved both bills polls show most Californians oppose reparations at this time. There is a sense in among voters in CA that reparations should be addressed by the federal government since it is a nationwide issue not just one confined to CA. If the Dems win in November and take back control of the House and hold on to the Senate, I would expect a nationwide reparations bill to pass and be signed by Pres. Harris.
What is remarkable is that the son of a “liberal” family in Chicago would turn his back on that long history and oppose reparations for the descendants of enslaved people. The bill is long overdue because American Americans were deprived of the accumulation of wealth through post-Civil War laws and policies that made them second class citizens.
You suffer from the “RFK Jr. syndrome” in which the son of a renowned “liberal” family turned his back on that tradition and went to the dark side of pandering to the racist instincts of many in this country who still think the descendants of slavery are not owed anything!
“I would expect a nationwide reparations bill to pass and be signed by Pres. Harris.”
Under what, you fvcking spastic? Reconciliation again? I think the dems learned their lesson on that one. If you think there will ever be 60 votes in the senate, you’re even more deluded than i thought.
Pass that shit, and the dems will lose power in 2026/2028 and for a long time.
Please tell your buddies on the Harris campaign to start talking that one up now, McIncrier
@Dennis
Blah, blah, blah, *bloviate*, blah, blah, blah. Why are the people that pay you wasting their money on you? Or in alternate scenario, how is it humanly possible to be so bored and spiteful? The rest of us, much as we love this site, are getting on with our day. You will still be here at midnight. If you aren’t being paid, you are demanding far too little whatever passes for a life for you. Either way, you are changing minds in the digit of zero.
This is truth: nobody, and I mean nobody, who is already committed to voting against Kamala is changing their minds. That is just not going to happen. Bloviate and burn dollars all you like.
Sorry. Lunch break, wrong gravitar. Same sentiment.
James,
Not sure if my sister, a long time Democrat, is going to vote for Harris or not. For someone so educated, my sister is very uninformed.
Otherwise, I think most people know who they are going to vote for already.
In my case it is not so much voting for a person, but voting against the Democrat’s far leftist agenda and all they stand for.
Looking at the GOP policies, I agree with a lot of them. Do I think they are all achievable? Nope. But that is a heck of a lot better than what the Democrats are proposing.
Anything the leftists undertake to do is not to resolve a problem or issue, it is to create the appearance of such as a cover for the actual impetus which is always worse than the perceived problem or issue was to begin with, if not as so often the case, entirely made up out of thin air.
@Anonymous
Leftists do not solve problems. They manufacture problems for them to solve because they cannot be put into power any other way. They are the kids that didn’t get picked for the team. Even if our world were a perfect utopia, these overgrown children would still be trying to elevate themselves over everyone else. It appears to be congenital. That’s why beat the monarchy’s a**es to a pulp to begin with centuries ago. This is not a secret. That young people (and sadly, to me that is anyone under 35, the old rules do not apply) today appear to be totally clueless about this says a lot about a great many things.
I always enjoy reading your commentary because you make great points about important issues. Your writing is always compelling and logical. But this article is not up to your usual standards. It needs an editor. There are misspellings and the prose is difficult to follow. That said, thanks for what you do.
This has been a continuous issue with these essays. I generally agree with the professor’s point of view but his credibility would be improved by better editing and proofreading.
Reparations — making people, whose ancestor’s weren’t even in the country during the slave era, pay their hard-earned money to people who never experienced actual slavery — is an idea so absurd, that only a Democratic party desperately competing for the Black vote would propose it, and then keep the victims of its scam on the hook for many voting years, until reality hit and the grift was exposed. Reparations and DEI will be confined to the dustbin of history, along with their delusional creators.
So when are the Italians going to be held responsible for the Roman Empire?
Yet another dumb idea that at least they had the brains to realize they had no way of paying for it, or how to implement it. Just another dumb Democrat idea to buy votes.
Turley steps up to Spike the football on the fact enslavement of, and systematic theft from, an entire race of people still has legal and legislative cover.
Lawn boi just walking around saying stupid shit and putting his deranged, turd brained thoughts down on paper. Have another sip, drunktard.
An entire race. Thats a lot of people.
Spastic idiot.
Spastic Idiot:
Love your name.
Of course your behavior warrants a nickname more like “Clueless Magat Troll”….
But I guess Spastic Idiot it is then.
Love that you cant comprehend what you read.
Thanks for verifying that you are a spastic idiot.
“an entire race of people”
Thats more than 10 billion people since 1776.
(you are) a spastic idiot.
Reparations are simply a handout to buy votes. The only people due reparations were those slaves who were freed by the Civil War during which white and black union soldiers died at a approx number of 400,000-600,000 (Estimates vary with an increase having been calculated more recently). The consequences to the South were even more horrific with 250,000-300,000 dead out of a white population of just over 5 million (very few black men fought for the south, other than as slave labor). The Union had a white population of just over 22 million with several thousand slaves. The South also suffered almost total devastation of its infrastructure and economy, with no Marshal Plan (except for carpetbaggers and scalawags who stole even more). By 1870 all southern states were readmitted to the union but troops remained in the south until 1877.
The south remained in abject poverty for 80 years or until world war 2 when all weather training and shipbuilding was needed. So great was the poverty in the south with virtually no industry or defense plants, that southerners from the old confederacy played an outsized part of actual fighting units especially in WW2. Percentage wise these old confederate states had much higher participation in the military than the Midwest, Northeast and West Coast where defense industry jobs provided deferments. The stats are there if you care to look.
The gist is the United States paid an extraordinary cost in all areas of the country to end slavery. Reparations has come and gone. It is there to just perpetuate victimhood and excuse poor decisions and goals . Reparations were paid for in blood, the most important currency of all. The fact is that if you want to achieve you can. That rests with each individual. You look to the past for lessons learned so you won’t repeat the mistakes. You look to the future so you can apply what you have learned.
My advice Look to the future. And don’t vote Democratic. They are still scalawags in the universal sense of the term.
Excellent.
GEB,
Well said.
Here’s a thought..let the demoncrats pay the reparations! They are the ones who objected to abolishing slavery and desegregation, were the KKK and Jim Crow!! This ‘reparations’ joke is just another vote buying scam of the radical dems! They never had any intention of following through. When will these dem voters wake up already!!?? Between Welfare and all the other Handout Programs, they have had their reparations and more repaid! Enough is enough! Besides how many whites died during the Civil War to free the slaves?? What thanks do we get??!!?? Now, we are called “racists and white supremacists”!! So much for gratitude! Ungrateful ignoramuses!
succinct and compelling!
I thought Affirmative Action and racial set asides for the past half-century were reparations! If not, then what was that all about? We were sold on the idea that AA and racial preferences in SBA loans, government contracting, government jobs, and educational institutions were necessary to make-up for slavery. Now we’re being told that everyone who was passed over for a university admission, a job or a promotion sacrificed for nothing; that the real reparations will be billions in cash taken from our tax dollars, spurring even higher inflation, to pass out to people whose ancestors have been free for 160 years? I would hope that this issue makes its way to the Supreme Court, and that body rules it unconstitutional. This nonsense needs to be put to rest!
I sort of feel sorry for all of those naive blacks who have been convinced that they deserve this new wealth redistribution plan. Democrat voters I am sure they are… and economically ignorant also.
It’s a mad house! A MAD HOUSE!!
anyone supporting reparations from within government should be arrested…it is 100% criminal. 100% paying restitution for people long dead is absurd and ILLEGAL!
BTW I want all the trillions WASTED on inner cities PAID BACK!
John can you please write more about how DEI and hate crime laws are unconstitutional? A hate Crime is designed to protect select minorities by PUNISHING majority members MORE?
if a black man is killed by a white he is punished more than a black man killing a white or even a black? Pretty sure if you MURDER a person…you HATE THEM…regardless of COLOR.
Every SINGLE Hate Crime LAW is ILLEGAL!
I, too, have been waiting for a test case on the unconstitutional nature of hate crimes – it was so obvious from the get go that this would, eventually, not pass constitutional muster. I think it needed true constitutionalists on the SCOTUS before such a challenge was made.
Now you know why the Founders restricted the vote to male, European, 21, with 50 lbs. Sterling or 50 acres, and why they restricted immigration to “…free white person(s)….”
$150,000 unsecured 0% interest loans as a down payment to illegal border crossers? WTF
The prospect of “reparations”, a/k/a free money, is the most cynical, damaging and successful electoral strategem the Democrats have ever devised. It is like putting rotting fruit in the vicinity of flies, but preventing the flies from accessing the fruit. So cruel, yet so effective. But one thing we know is that the people who warn of “bad consequences” to Harris because of the failure of this legislatiion will still vote for her.
Ignoring the overall stupidity of this, How would “reparations” even apply to California ?
California was a Provence of Mexico until 1850. It was admitted to the union as a free state.
I doubt prior to the civil war it had any consequential black population – much less a slave population.
What would it be that CA owes reparations to anyone for?
Don’t get “all logical” on us now! As one demented dumb a$$ would slur, “Come on, man. You know….. the Thing”.
Reparations have already been made- the dead from the Civil War, the only time in history that men of one race fought each other over the issues of freeing the men of a completely separate race. 650,000 dead men paid the price on that question. Next up would be affirmative action and Johnson’s “war on poverty” programs which destroyed the underpinnings of the existing black middle class and nuclear black families- how many billions were wasted there? How many businesses and families destroyed in order to provide for a permanent underclass of Democrat voters?
Enough with this nonsense.
The despot and tyrant, Lincoln, would have had you shot if you failed to serve in his army, the army that started the war by occupying the territory of a sovereign foreign nation.
What is 50 plus years of Affirmative Action ? It is an attempt to rectify the consequences of discrimination.
When is this over and when will we return to an equal opportunity system for all ?
Anon: I think we’re on the road to that time when AA is finished. The disillusionment with DEI and the fact that it is being quietly dropped suggests we are coming around to our senses. Blacks want equality, not superiority and things are well on track for this. Free stuff is a dangerous and addicting behavior – for both the dealer and the addict. Something is inherently wrong with the idea that tax payers who never owned slaves must pay reparations to people who never were slaves. The logic of that shows the futility of this failed and worthless stratagem.
Where the —- is that in the Constitution? Nowhere.
The entire communist American welfare state is unconstitutional including, but not limited to, admissions affirmative action, grade-inflation affirmative action, employment affirmative action, quotas, welfare, food stamps, minimum wage, rent control, social services, forced busing, public housing, utility subsidies, WIC, SNAP, TANF, HAMP, HARP, TARP, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Environmental Protection Agency, Agriculture, Education, Labor, Energy, Obamacare, Social Security, Social Security Disability, Social Security Supplemental Income, Medicare, Medicaid, “Fair Housing” laws, “Non-Discrimination” laws, etc.
Article 1, Section 8, provides Congress the power to tax for ONLY debt, defense, and “…general (all, the whole) Welfare…,” omitting and, thereby, excluding any power to tax for individual Welfare, specific Welfare, particular Welfare, favor or charity. The same article enumerates and provides Congress the power to regulate ONLY the Value of money, Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian Tribes, and land and naval Forces.
Additionally, the 5th Amendment right to private property was initially qualified by the Framers and is, therefore, absolute, allowing no further qualification, and allowing ONLY the owner the power to “claim and exercise” dominion over private property.
Government exists, under the Constitution and Bill of Rights, to provide maximal freedom to individuals while government is severely limited and restricted to merely facilitating that maximal freedom of individuals through the provision of security and infrastructure only.