If there’s one thing California is good at, it’s spending money, and whoa dog, are they lookin’ to outdo themselves this time! Another of Governor Newsome’s terrific initiatives – a “reparations” committee he formed…

…The work of the Reparations Task Force, which was created by legislation Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in 2020 — and the potential payouts –represent the largest reparations effort in recent history.

“We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” Jovan Scott Lewis, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is one of the nine members, told the Times.

The task force hopes to shrink the wealth gap between white and black Californians.

– has about finished their deliberations and issued a preliminary opinion. There is definitely some shrinkage happening, but that noise you hear is…

CHA-CHING

Gavin Newsom's reparations committee will recommend handing out $223,200 per person to all descendants of slaves in California for 'housing discrimination' at a cost of $559BN – in nation's biggest restitution effort ever https://t.co/ZLWszp8isX via @MailOnline

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) December 2, 2022

The Daily Mail article breaks down the basic premise of the reparation proposal, including the fact that their suggestion isn’t a “final” recommendation. They have until spring to lay that bombshell on the general public.

A reparations committee in California has suggested that descendants of slaves in the state could be compensated $223,200 each for ‘housing discrimination’.

…A focus of the California task force has been ‘housing discrimination’ – it has been estimated that it would cost around $569billion to compensate the 2.5 million Black Californians for setbacks between 1933 and 1977, according to the New York Times.

That is more than California’s $512.8billion expenditure in 2021 – which included funding for schools, hospitals, universities, highways, policing and corrections.

However, discussions are still underway, and the panel is continuing to consider how payments should be made – some suggested tuition and housing grants while others proposed cash.

The task force has also identified four other causes for reparations: Mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of Black businesses and health care.

It has until June 2023 to submit its final recommendations to the Legislature.

Their estimations came after the task force hosted meetings across the state to meet with members of Black communities to better understand the economic impact of slavery.

For starters, parsing that last sentence, I am baffled what modern day Black Americans would be able to tell anyone about the “economic impact of slavery” 157 years after the fact, especially while living in a state that was only permitted to come into the union in 1850 as a “free” state – slavery was verboten. Surely is is all subjective conjecture.

Besides the obvious blockbuster aspect of the concept, the numbers are simply staggering and would flat-out bankrupt the state. The math is right there in the quoted section – this abomination would cost about $569B for a state whose entire budget is $512B. I can do that math. There are also so many troubling things wrong morally and constitutionally, I don’t know even where to begin.

We are going to hear a lot of thoughts like these even discussing the possibility, and these folks have the right to throw the flag..

I refuse to be held responsible for something my great great great great great great great grandparents weren’t even involved with. https://t.co/vXV9JFnTZO

— Kevin Dalton (@KevinForBOS) December 2, 2022

I simply don't see how a single one of us should be held financially liable for wrongs done to people before we were even born. Especially paying reparations to those who were not born themselves when such injustices occurred. Make it make sense!!!

— Kathy – Just a Patriotic American (@Kathy_Arizona) December 2, 2022

Nothing like a pandering Democrat to get everyone hating on each other even more than they’ve already managed to. And just like Joe Biden’s college giveaway, but on a far more visceral scale – once you scrape your jaw off the floor, you have to ask, “How is this even legal?!” According to constitutional lawyer Hans Bader at Liberty Unyielding, it’s doesn’t begin to pass constitutional muster under case law.

…And this $559 billion is just the beginning: “The task force has also identified four other causes for reparations: Mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of Black businesses and health care.”

The $559 billion is “to compensate the 2.5 million Black Californians” for housing discrimination “between 1933 and 1977.”

But that period ended over 40 years ago. It is unconstitutional to give people money based on their race for what happened a long time ago. Giving people money based on their race generally violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause, even when the recipients are a minority group. Courts have struck down affirmative action programs that were designed to remedy discrimination that occurred over 20 years before the affirmative-action plan, because that’s too long ago. For example, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an affirmative-action plan for black people where the discrimination occurred more than 17 years before the plan, in Hammon v. Barry (1987). The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an affirmative-action plan for women where the discrimination occurred 14 years before the plan, in Brunet v. City of Columbus (1993).

The Supreme Court has said that race-based remedies are only allowed when they target the present effects of the government’s own widespread discrimination in the relatively recent past. The government cannot provide race-based “remedies that are ageless in their reach into the past,” according to Supreme Court’s decision in Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989)…

Mr. Bader also points out that their claims of past racial discrimination in housing (per the NYPost)…

…A history of housing discrimination against black Californians makes up a significant portion of the compensation the panel recommends. Several black communities were bought out or seized through eminent domain to be bulldozed for infrastructure projects, according to the panel’s findings.

…don’t begin to hold up under scrutiny when compared to other marginalized communities who were also routinely discriminated against and in CA specifically.

…Past housing discrimination does not explain present-day racial disparities in wealth or income. Asians once experienced far worse housing discrimination than blacks in California, yet they have much higher incomes and more assets. As the New York Post notes, “several historically marginalized groups out-perform whites today. Take Japanese Americans, for example: For nearly four decades in the 20th century (1913 – 1952), this group was legally prevented from owning land and property in over a dozen American states. Moreover, 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II,” which forced many interned Japanese people to sell their businesses at fire-sale prices, ruining them. “But by 1959, the income disparity between Japanese Americans and white Americans nearly vanished. Today, Japanese Americans outperform whites by large margins in income statistics, education outcomes, test scores, and incarceration rates.”

Mr. Bader did offer a cautionary note though – that case law can be reinterpreted, and to be very aware that Biden is filling the lower-tier judgeships with progressives who may willing to reinterpret rulings they judge as being too conservative or are feeling creative…or both.

The outraged hue and cry has to be pretty rock solid and thunderous at the moment because the chair of the reparations committee is already distancing herself publicly from the figures that were released.

When media gets it wrong @NYTimes the Chair of CA #AB3121 Reparations Commission sets the record straight.

Facts matter.#LineageReparations https://t.co/1wRXR8oNjZ

— FridayJones (@IAMFridayJones) December 2, 2022

I love it – “Economists” gave us those figures. We hired these guys, and released their figures in our report but that doesn’t mean they’re, like, our figures. Slick.

So. This now dangles in the wind for people to chew over, scream at their neighbors, refight the Civil War and type mean tweets. It remains to be seen what comes of the final version. Does it include such exorbitant payments? Do they expand it further to their laundry list of the four other sins that require pecuniary compensation for ages-old ills no one alive has suffered or committed?

And who is forced to pay, if anyone must? There’s going to be no shortage of hands out.

Or does NOTHING come of it, being the shameless, pandering gambit it is?

Thorny questions that, quite frankly, should never have been on the table to begin with.

We’ve already fought that war and been through the hellfire afterwards.