HOUSE PANEL TO VOTE ON REPARATIONS STUDY BILL

Committee would look at effects of slavery and racism

The debate over whether to pay reparations to the descendants of enslaved people will take a step forward today when a House committee votes on legislation to create a commission to study the issue, which has been fiercely debated over the past year on the campaign trail and in several communities across the country.

The bill was first proposed in 1989 by former Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., but has never received a committee vote as it drew little interest from congressional leaders. But advocates of reparations pushed it to the forefront last year as racial justice protests were held across the country following more police killings of Black Americans, including George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The bill continues to face a steep climb to making it into law or to even receiving a vote from the full House, but supporters of the proposal are cheering on today’s vote as an important milestone in their push to deal with the human and economic wounds the institution of slavery has left on the country to this day.

“I think that there is a sentiment not of blaming our fellow Americans, but our fellow Americans being sympathetic and empathetic that reparations, restoration, repair will help all of us and that the present-day incidents that are occurring evidences that something needs to be done,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, DTexas, who sponsored the bill and has introduced it in each Congress since Conyers resigned in 2017. “No such bill has ever come this far during Congressional history of the United States.”

The bill would establish a 13-person commission that would study the effects of slavery and racial discrimination in the United States from before the country’s founding to today. The commission would then submit to Congress its findings and “appropriate remedies” on how best to compensate Black Americans.

What form reparations should take remains under debate among supporters, with some groups pushing for direct monetary payments to descendants of enslaved people while others argue that there are morerealistic proposals that could be put into law. Jackson Lee says the commission would gather recommendations from scholars before offering Congress a slew of proposals about how to end existing economic, health and educational disparities.

“No one should be frightened with the truth, solutions or suggestions, which can be systemic,” she said.

Committee Republicans are expected to vote against the bill today, with members of the party in both chambers arguing that reparations would force citizens who have no history of enslavers in their family or who had family members who fought to abolish slavery to have their tax dollars used to pay for the misdeeds of others.

“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, RKy., said in 2019. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We elected an African American president.”

Supporters of the bill also face the challenge of getting party leaders and members wary of the proposal on board. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus met with President Joe Biden at the White House on Tuesday, and reparations was a topic of discussion, according to a list of meeting topics obtained by The Washington Post. White House press secretary Jen Psaki has said Biden supports Lee’s bill, but it’s unclear how much the White House will push to have it considered beyond the committee.