"A cry for an acknowledgement": House Dems urge reparations bill

It faces an uphill climb in Congress, where prominent Republicans oppose the measure and none have joined the 175 Democrats who signed on as co-sponsors. Representative Jim Jordan, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee that is scheduled to vote on the measure on Wednesday, intends to oppose it, an aide said. The measure would establish a commission to draft reparation proposals. It would be modeled on a commission Congress approved in the 1980s to document the World War Two forced removal and incarceration of thousands of Japanese-Americans. "This is not a cry for a handout. It is a cry for an acknowledgement that there has never been a response to the unpaid labor that helped build this nation," Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee said at a Monday news conference.