Reparations Now!

If you thought genital mutilation of minors was the Democratic Party’s least popular policy position, think again. The time has come for reparations!

For years now, the Democratic Party has kept its African-American base agitated and loyal with promises of reparations–i.e., vast amounts of cold cash. Countless committees have been appointed at the state, county and local levels for the purpose of studying reparations and making recommendations. I think Congress has gotten into the act, as well. The problem is you can only study for so long. Now the bills are coming due. The Democrats have to either come through, or admit to their most loyal voters that it was all a fraud.

We have written about the ridiculous proposals that California and the City of San Francisco have come up with. As serious legislation, they are not worth discussing. As political management problems for California’s Democratic Party monopoly, they are entertaining.

And how about the Biden administration? Biden appointed a single U.S. representative to the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent–permanent, meaning the grift will never end. That representative is a Howard law professor named Justin Hansford. Last week Hansford, whose views were well known to the Biden administration, gave a speech at the U.N. calling on that body to order the United States to pay trillions in reparations to African-Americans:

But so far we have left it to the scholars of the past, the lawyers of the past, the white scholars, white lawyers, to determine the bounds of our legal imagination, to determine the narrow structures that we will use to determine what justice looks like for our own people.

So I come to you today with a novel proposal, that we begin to think our own thoughts, propose our own vision of justice, and implement that justice, as part of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent.

Of course, the United Nations’ “Permanent Forum” can’t implement anything. Jonathan Turley adds:

Now Professor Hansford is calling on the United Nations to order such payments by the United States. It is an interesting pitch to countries that were directly involved in the slave trade or enslaved other people in their own histories. Reparations would appear to apply to many of the same countries and might be looked at with some skepticism and concern in their own capitals.

The United Nations has no power to order the United States to do anything, and the U.S. has far better moral standing than the utterly corrupt U.N. One wonders, though: why does the Biden administration want to stir this particular pot?

More:

Recently, Democrats [in Congress] introduced a bill demanding $14 trillion in reparations.

$14 trillion? If my math is right, that works out to a little more than $269,000 for the average white family of four, or closer to $500,000 for the average income taxpaying family. No problem! Just put it on the taxpayers’ tab.

Of course, slavery reparations are an unjust absurdity. No one in America has ever been a slave, not in this country anyway, and no one in America has ever owned a slave. So the demand for reparations is grand larceny, pure and simple. But there is one obvious problem: no one who is not slated to cash a multimillion dollar check will vote for something so unfair and so idiotic.

As to the unfairness, Hans Bader provides chapter and verse. He adds (see original for links):

Left-wing politicians tend to support reparations. “During the 2020 presidential primaries, nearly all the Democratic candidates were favorably inclined,” notes the National Review. In 2019, Joe Biden said he was in favor of paying reparations to American Indians, not just blacks, if studies find that to be workable.

If reparations are awarded to black people, other groups will line up to demand reparations, too. For example, reparations may also end up being paid to sexual minorities, as left-leaning governments have already done in foreign countries.

I love how Joe Biden deferred to “studies”! Hey, the studies have been done. The dollars have been calculated, by one absurd means or another. The Biden administration has appointed a pro-reparations radical to the United Nations “Permanent Forum.” Fine. You want reparations? Let’s vote on it.