WATCH: California GOP Legislator Uses Logic to Destroy Democrat During Debate on Reparations Bill

Sometimes, something comes in over the transom that makes you feel good for the rest of the day. When an item surfaces that involves a California Republican state legislator reducing a Democrat state legislator to tears, over reparations, using logic, that's just too much fun:

A California Democrat held back tears earlier this month when a Republican lawmaker said it would be unfair to make Asians and Latinos pay slavery reparations to African-Americans.
The exchange happened on June 11 during a meeting of the California Assembly Committee on Judiciary. The lawmakers were discussing SB 1331, a bill that would establish the "Fund for Reparations and Reparative Justice" in the state treasury — the culmination of a monthslong initiative by California Democrats to develop a reparation proposal for descendants of American slaves.
"I’m concerned about the proposal to help facilitate distribution of reparations," Assemblywoman Kate Sanchez, a Republican from Santa Margarita, said during the hearing.

Of course, the fundamental flaw in the whole "reparations" horse squeeze is this: It would require the payment of money to people who have never been slaves, to be paid by people who have never owned slaves. If the advocates for this terrible idea could produce one person who has been held in slavery and who is alive today, they would be welcome to go after any still-living person who held them as a slave.

But all those people are dead and have been dead for over a hundred years. There is no political original sin. We are not responsible for the acts of our ancestors. The very idea is idiotic. But Assemblywoman Sanchez breaks down the fundamental illogic into smaller, bite-sized portions, and reduces Democrat Ash Kalra to tears - as I said, with logic:

Sanchez cited economists who analyzed the proposal from California's reparations task force and found it could cost $800 billion.
"That's two and a half times the size of our entire state budget," she said. "To pay for that, you'd need a major tax hike unlike anything this state has ever seen before. I recognize and acknowledge the painful part of our history. The pains of the past should not be paid by the people of today."
The Republican lawmaker, who is Hispanic, noted that the majority of California's population, 55%, is Latino or Asian, including many first- or second-generation immigrants "who had nothing to do with slavery, discrimination, Jim Crow laws."
"It is fundamentally unfair to force these people to pay for this," she said.

Here, watch:

Dem lawmaker in tears after Republican says its unfair for Asians, Latinos to pay reparations https://t.co/oQRq23Z5Rj
— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 21, 2024

Now that, right there, is a classic piece of political taking-down.

Reparations Are a Drag on Reality

Of course, arguing around the periphery of this stupidity, while entertaining, is just part and parcel of the greater issue, which is how "progressives" see things. Reparations are another manifestation of the usual leftist argument of “I want the government to take money away from group A and give it to group B,” which progressives always come running back to. Well, presumably, in this case, white people are group A, and black people are group B. (Hispanics are somewhere in between, from listening to Kate Sanchez.) OK, let’s examine that for a moment.

Taking myself as an example: Most of my family has been in North America since well before the Revolution, scattered from Nova Scotia to the Dakotas. But one branch, my paternal grandmother’s family, came to the United States from Germany in 1851 and settled in New York, later in Ohio – none of them ever owned a slave. So, would my portion of this so-called debt be reduced by a fourth?

Take as another example someone who (let’s say it quietly) shares the exact ancestry of a certain former president, whose father was a Kenyan student and whose mother was a white American woman. Would he be due any payment under this scheme? No one in his ancestry, anywhere, was ever affected by the pre-Civil War Peculiar Institution. But were we to assume he is somehow partially entitled, should his white half pay his black half?

The cold fact is that the very idea of reparations is so stupid as to beggar description. I simply cannot conjure enough adjectives to describe the idiocy of this idea adequately, but allow one metaphor; the idea of reparations for a practice that ended a century-and-a-half ago is to make the case that, for example, a white coal miner in Appalachia owes some monetary debt to an Ive League-educated attorney who happens to be black.

Not only is it lunacy, it’s the worst sort of political pandering. And now Democrats are lining up to endorse it.

Lord, what fools these mortals be.