Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) thinks the time is right for her proposal, H.R. 40, that would establish a commission to study whether black Americans should receive reparations for slavery.
Jackson Lee told reporters during a Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) meeting the next day that House Democratic leaders have promised her the bill will be marked up and brought to the House floor for a vote this year.
Jackson Lee claims the tragic May 25 death of George Floyd while being arrested by the Minneapolis police and the Black Lives Matter-led protests and violence in cities across the country are prompting increased support for her proposal among congressional Democrats.
“She’s hoping to tap that energy to bring her bill to the floor for a historic vote before year’s end,” according to The Hill.
But there’s little evidence of a recent upswing of support for the reparations proposal in Congress.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, endorsed the proposal earlier this year, and it received a flurry of interest in April, when Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) introduced a companion bill in the upper chamber.
Jackson Lee introduced her proposal in 2019, but the bill has for the most part languished since then. There are 135 House co-sponsors, all of whom are Democrats.
The proposal’s only legislative action was a hearing in July 2019 by the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. That hearing was the only congressional proceeding ever convened during the 18 years that some version of the proposal has been introduced in Congress.
Another measure of the slight interest in the reparations proposal is seen in the lack of congressional media activity since Floyd’s death.
Only 49 congressional tweets posted during the same period mentioned “reparations,” according to Legistorm. Of those, 44 were tweets by congressional staff members, only five were by members of Congress.
Republican strategist Brian Darling views congressional commissions as a means of evading concrete actions.
“Congress should never set up commissions to study issues,” Darling told The Epoch Times. “It is an easy way to set up a scenario where you load up a commission with people who will come up with a pre-determined outcome, thereby providing momentum for an idea.”
Darling added that “commissions are an abrogation of the core purpose of Congress, because that is why Congress has committees to study issues themselves.”
Democratic campaign strategists interviewed by The Epoch Times, however, don’t see a problem with the commission approach.
“Then we might be able to have a more useful debate about how to respond to the terrible legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, beyond the all-too-typical Us vs. Them,” he said.
Jimmy Williams, former senior economic adviser to Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), told The Epoch Times that “first and foremost, Congress should apologize for slavery. Setting up a commission to make recommendations is a perfectly fine idea if it’s purpose is to make concrete proposals and persuade Americans to support it, who, as of 2019, were 60/40 against the idea.”