House Democrats Vote Today on Slavery Reparations

T he House Judiciary Committee will vote today on a slavery-reparations bill sponsored by Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee. This is a terrible idea in a great many ways.

One of the worst places to be in politics is offering insubstantial but divisive symbolic gestures to your base on cultural issues. Because they are insubstantial and symbolic, they will never be satisfying to your supporters. Because they are visible and divisive, they will be enraging and galvanizing to your enemies. Republicans have long mastered this self-defeating approach.

Democrats usually prefer to seek real cultural power, buried in the fine print and the labyrinths of the bureaucracy, while putting a more moderate public face on what they are really up to. But they are not immune to the tendency. As Charlie Cooke has noted, some of Joe Biden’s steps on guns and Court-packing fall in this category: Democrats publicly signal their cultural extremism without actually pocketing any results. Now, they are at it again on reparations.

H.R. 40 — so designated to invoke the “40 acres and a mule” promised and never delivered to freed slaves after the Civil War — declares that it is intended to “establish a commission to study and develop Reparation proposals for African Americans,” principally from slavery, but also for “de jure and de facto discrimination against freed slaves and their descendants from the end of the Civil War to the present, including economic, political, educational, and social discrimination.”

Notably, the bill goes on from there in the places it intends to hunt for compensation:

• “The manner in which textual and digital instructional resources and technologies are being used to deny the inhumanity of slavery and the crime against humanity of people of African descent in the United States.”
• “Direct benefits to societal institutions, public and private, including higher education, corporations, religious and associational.”

I am not sure how exactly one goes about extracting compensation from the taxpayers for harm done by “digital instructional resources” that are deemed insufficient, but this is what Congress under Democratic control looks like. The bill has 175 sponsors, double what it had two years ago, and is expected to pass the committee and the House. President Biden supports it. Only the specter of the legislative filibuster relieves Senate Democrats from having to vote on this lunacy.

H.R. 40 is not just a gathering of a handful of academics. It carries a $12 million budget to be spread around to commission members, friendly “experts and consultants,” and “contracts with departments, agencies, and instrumentalities of the Federal Government, State agencies, and private firms, institutions, and agencies, for the conduct of research or surveys, the preparation of reports and other activities.” This follows the classic Democratic pattern of using all congressional legislation and appropriation as an opportunity to divert taxpayer funding to left-wing activists.

Reparations bills are gaining ground among far-left states and cities. Last month, the Evanston, Ill., city council became the first jurisdiction in the nation to pass a “reparations” bill, albeit one targeted specifically to residents and descendants of residents of the city victimized by housing discrimination in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 — a much more recent, targeted, and traceable form of compensation for past harm. Last September, California governor Gavin Newsom signed a broader bill on the H.R. 40 model requiring a state study of reparations with no particular remedy attached. California is an odd target for reparations for slavery: The state’s admission to the Union as a free state almost sundered the nation in 1850, and while it pandered to the state’s minority of pro-slavery Southerners by allowing slaveholders to bring slaves into the state temporarily without freeing them, there was never more than a tiny number of slaves sojourning in California. The state produced the first national anti-slavery presidential nominee, John C. Frémont, and it voted for Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

There are many problems with reparations, both as theory and in practice. If they are intended as a remedy for slavery, half a century after the death of the last known American slave, they are not just too late to benefit anyone directly affected; they must extract payment from a great many people who are not only innocent of slavery, but are not descended from anyone who was guilty. Payment for reparations would require taxing all of the following:

• The descendants of Union soldiers and abolitionists who gave their lives fighting slavery.
• Black Americans (including Barack Obama) who were not descended from slaves.
• Descendants of people enslaved in other nations, ranging from Brazil to Nazi Germany.
• Immigrants, and their descendants, from places ranging from Mexico to Vietnam.

Given that reparations could conceivably run into the trillions of dollars, this would be not only unaffordably expensive, unfair to innocent Americans, and hard to administer reliably, but also massively unpopular and socially divisive.

Proponents of reparations sometimes seek to lump together the harms from slavery with the harms from Jim Crow and other forms of racial discrimination — which would mean that black Americans who were not descended from slaves could potentially be recipients of reparations for discrimination while paying reparations for slavery. But this opens a second can of worms. The black-American experience of slavery is genuinely unique. The experience of discrimination is not. Native Americans were subjected to all manner of atrocities. Japanese and German Americans were rounded up in camps. The Chinese were systematically excluded, and subjected to explicit forms of legal discrimination. Jews were discriminated against, and occasionally lynched. The Irish and Italians have their own stories of discrimination. Some of these (though not all) are plainly less egregious than the legacy of America’s treatment of the descendants of slaves, but the distinctions between different types of discrimination are less obvious and would set off a mad scramble for position in the hierarchy of oppression. What about gays? What about gender discrimination? Reparations for the descendants of women would be a broad category indeed.

To discuss the practical obstacles to reparations that would be fair and sensible is maybe beside the point, because nobody involved in this process foresees anything fair, sensible, or practical having to be done. But the House of Representatives is not a faculty lounge. If Congress acts, purely for show, as if it is actually serious about lawmaking on a topic, it has nobody to blame but itself if the voters take the Congress at its word.