A so-called legal scholar at one of Virginia‘s most prestigious universities said last week that it’s time for America to reverse one of Abraham Lincoln‘s crowning legacies in the name of “reparations.”
Brandon Hasbrouck, an associate professor at Washington and Lee University’s law school, wrote in The Nation that it was time to eliminate the concept of “one person, one vote,” as reported by TrendingPolitics.
Rather Hasbrouck said whites—and most other non-blacks (excluding American Indians)—must now become second-class citizens, regardless of their “privilege” or ancestry.
“Because white votes currently count more than [b]lack ones, double-counting [b]lack votes would restore electoral balance,” Hasbrouck claimed. “Vote reparations would be a giant step toward remedying our nation’s long history of denying and devaluing [b]lack votes.”
He called for a system similar to the three-fifths compromise, in which the framers of the Constitution agreed for purposes of taxation to count enslaved blacks as 60% of white citizens.
The policy also gave white, male land-owners in slave-holding states more seats in the US House of Representatives—until it was repealed in 1868 by the 14th Amendment, which established “equal protection” for all US citizens, regardless of race.
However, Hasbrouck claimed, without evidence, that white votes presently were worth more than black votes, rehashing debunked claims used in support of abolishing the Electoral College that the current representational democracy diminishes vote in more populous areas where many minorities tend to reside.
The opposite argument, of course, has been made that a popular-vote method would simply allow radicals states like California and New York to disregard immigration laws and election laws—as many blue states have done already—and implement their own arbitrary systems to secure a permanent majority.
Hasbrouck acknowledged that this is precisely the point, since the current system is inherently unfair to those in the minority who sometimes don’t get to have their way, regardless of how clamorous and corrupt they are.
“Vote reparations would empower us to replace oppressive institutions with life-affirming structures of economic, social, and political equality,” he wrote. “And if our elected representatives did not prioritize this transformational work, we could vote them out.”
In the spirit of other recent social-justice overreaches, Hasbrouck said that a previously proposed plan to count black votes as five-thirds of their white counterparts didn’t go far enough.
He said other historical injustices, such as poll taxes, literacy tests and gerrymandering, warranted that a more be tacked on for the trouble.
“Tying a remedy to the three-fifths compromise implies that clause was the heart of the problem,” Hasbrouck claimed.
“It wasn’t and isn’t,” he continued. “Counting [b]lack votes twice keeps the point clear and provides redress for myriad forms of disenfranchisement deployed against [b]lack voters.”
While not dismissing the idea of financial reparations, Hasbrouck acknowledged that there were practical considerations for not instituting them. Notably, the government would be borrowing against future generations to compensate present-day citizens for grievances their ancestors experienced more than a century ago.
For Hasbrouck, however, the real problem was that the amount of money involved would not come close to what he felt he was entitled to.
“One of the largest objections to monetary reparations is the impracticality of implementing them on a scale that would meaningfully address the injustices,” he wrote. “Vote reparations, in contrast, would be a simple, low-cost way to begin to make amends.”
In an ironic twist, Hasbrouck himself, while trying to dismantle the 14th Amendment championed by abolitionist Republicans, is teaching at the school where Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee lived out his post-bellum years in quiet dignity while serving as president—and where the remains of Lee and his family now lie in repose.
Hasbrouck was one of several radical professors at the school—which also bears the name of slaveholder George Washington, an early financial patron—who pushed for a faculty vote on removing Lee’s name during race-riots in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
Lee’s statues and other prominent Confederate memorials have since been removed from many cities, including Virginia, his home state, where a Democrat takeover of the legislature allowed racist Gov. Ralph Northam to pass new laws permitting the removal.
Trump warned that radical efforts to tear down Confederate monuments and “cancel” controversial historic figures would not be the end of activists’ demands.
True to his prediction, social-justice warriors have now targeted the very figures, including Lincoln, who were once celebrated for advancing the cause of social justice.
While the 14th Amendment—one of a trio of reforms passed in the wake of the Civil War—has long been considered the cornerstone of 20th-century civil-rights advancements, the calls by Hasbrouck and other radicals to go full-circle back toward inequality are likely to be amplified if Democrat Joe Biden takes power in January.
Biden likely benefited from substantial vote fraud in the blue districts of key battlegrounds states. Among other things, corrupt voting officials were caught on tape counting suspicious ballots and rerunning ballots several times through voting machines.
Nonetheless, Hasbrouck claimed their margin of victory should have been much higher.
“Joe Biden won the Electoral College because black voters in Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia turned out in significant numbers,” he dubiously claimed.
“But even with overwhelming [b]lack support—94 percent of Detroit voted for Biden!—the outcomes in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were worryingly close,” he added.
