They want reparations, and they’ve come to collect

www.americanthinker.com

There was a revealing moment in the late stages of California’s recent primary election campaign. Billionaire Tom Steyer, the erstwhile candidate for governor, was cornered outside his SUV in a Los Angeles parking lot by a group of activists, demanding to know where he stood on direct payments to descendants of enslaved Americans. It looked like an ambush, and Steyer didn’t see it coming, but it wasn’t. It was an attempted debt collection.

The confrontation illustrated something larger than the politics of reparations. It exposed what happens when elected officials engage in political malpractice, encouraging expectations they have neither the ability nor the intention to satisfy.

During his 2020 presidential campaign, Steyer made reparations his calling card with black voters. He spent $20 million on television and radio ads in South Carolina, portraying himself as the only major candidate to champion reparations, leading to strong polling among black voters. When the campaign ended, he kept the promise alive, endorsing federal legislation to study reparations and pledging to work toward its passage. Soon he was running for governor of California, courting the same constituency, and the people he spent millions cultivating had a simple question: When do we get paid?

Steyer is not alone in having to answer. His parking lot encounter exposed one of the most egregious acts of political malpractice in California history.

In 2020, California convened a first-in-the-nation Reparations Task Force. It ran for three years, issued more than 100 recommendations, and produced payment estimates reaching $1.2 million per eligible individual. At public hearings, activists dismissed that as insufficient — $5 million was the floor, they said, citing San Francisco’s separate proposal. Economists put the aggregate cost at over $800 billion, roughly three times California’s entire annual budget. Allowing those expectations to propagate without correction is a detachment from fiscal reality, not a policy disagreement.

Gavin Newsom owns the largest share of the blame. He commissioned the Task Force, accepted its report, then spent two years vetoing the bills that would have made it real. He signed the symbolic measures — the apology, the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery, the ancestry research funding — and killed everything with a price tag. College admissions preferences? Vetoed. Eminent domain restitution? Vetoed. Housing loan set-asides? Vetoed. The target constituency got a certificate of regret and a new agency with no mandate to pay anyone. The calculation was straightforward: Keep the issue alive, keep the constituency mobilized, and let the courts absorb the blame.

The Legislative Black Caucus shares the blame. The “Road to Repair” package gave every participant political cover without the burden of results. Most state legislators played along, voting repeatedly for reparations legislation, despite the widely expressed concern that the program was fiscally impossible, constitutionally indefensible, and going nowhere. Their constituents might reasonably ask what problems, exactly, they were solving.

The constitutional obstacles were never seriously engaged — and here the malpractice becomes something closer to deliberate deception. Descendants of enslaved people were not themselves enslaved. Federal standing doctrine requires a concrete, particularized injury traceable to a specific defendant — a requirement difficult to satisfy where the claim is asserted by descendants rather than individuals who themselves experienced the underlying legal injury. The Task Force’s methodology — payments calibrated to years of California residency rather than any documented individualized harm — is an ethnicity-based transfer payment with a residency multiplier, not a legal remedy.

The causation problem is fundamental: California was admitted as a free state and was not the legal successor to slaveholding governments whose institutions generated the original injury.

Then there’s the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, the Supreme Court’s strict scrutiny doctrine reinforced in SFFA v. Harvard (2023), and California’s own Proposition 209. The proposal faced multiple constitutional obstacles that were widely discussed by legal scholars. Legislators advancing it could not reasonably have been unaware of those concerns.

The reparations push was not a good-faith policy effort that fell short. It was constituency exploitation masquerading as justice — designed to keep black voters loyal to a party that had ceased to deliver anything tangible in exchange for that loyalty. It may prove the most counterproductive political calculation in a generation of bad ones.

Black voters, particularly men, were already drifting toward Republicans before this cycle — not in numbers that flipped elections, but enough to alarm Democrat strategists. For many, the episode may reinforce a growing perception that Democrat politicians readily make promises they have little intention — or ability — to fulfill. That will drive a disappointed constituency across the aisle, handing Republicans a rare opening to make an affirmative case rather than simply an opposition one.

The activists surrounding Steyer’s vehicle weren’t wrong to hold him accountable. They had been promised something by people running for office, and nothing arrived. The reparations push hasn’t collapsed under the weight of its contradictions. It has served its political purpose and been discarded. The constituency it was designed to manage is only now figuring that out. For Sacramento’s Democrat supermajority, keeping a constituency hopeful — even without results — appears to have been success enough.

Image: Tom Steyer. Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.