by Eric Lendrum
Vice President Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in the 2024 election, has voiced her support for legislation that would create a commission to determine how to hand out reparations to black Americans.
As the Washington Free Beacon reports, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparations Proposal for African-Americans Act was introduced in April 2019 and co-sponsored by Harris, who at the time was still a senator from California. The bill would establish a 13-member commission to “study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans.”
The legislation and its goals are similar to a law that was already passed in Harris’ home state of California. Assembly Bill 3121 was passed by the overwhelmingly Democrat-controlled legislature and signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.), establishing the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans.
The task force concluded its studies last year and submitted its official recommendations to Governor Newsom, determining that payments of $1.2 million should be made to each black person in the state of California. The task force also recommended changing and repealing numerous existing laws, particularly with regards to the criminal code, in order to make punishments for various crimes much more relaxed than they already are in the notoriously soft-on-crime state.
One of the proposals submitted by the California task force was to decriminalize the act of public urination; another proposal suggested that anyone who has been arrested for public indecency should be allowed to sue the state for damages. The task force further recommended that fathers who refuse to pay child support should see their debts eliminated, and that police be forbidden from pulling over cars for various traffic violations such as expired registration, broken tail lights, or darkened windows.
Harris herself voiced support for the idea of reparations in several interviews in 2019. In March of that year, she told NPR that she supported reparations as a concept that went beyond mere payments, saying “I think reparations—yeah. I think that the word, the term ‘reparations,’ it means different things to different people.”
In April of 2019, during a CNN town hall, when asked about direct cash payments to black Americans, Harris said “I support that we study that. We should study it and see.”
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Eric Lendrum reports for American Greatness.
Photo “Kamala Harris” by Kamala Harris.
