As they say.... oops.
Democrat politicians have been buying votes for the last two decades with two policies:
- Sanctuary cities. That is, come here, legal or not, access services which cost taxpayers money, and its fine. Whether that's education, medical care, housing, whatever.
- Reparations. The premise that black people today are owed something due to the legacy of slavery.
I've dealt with the absurdity of the latter several times in my column and see no particular reason to go back through all of it here. It is simply sufficient to note that when it comes to both over-allocation of resources (e.g. dollars-per-pupil on education) and per-capita spend on welfare black people have gotten more and paid less for the last 50+ years to the tune of trillions of dollars. Anyone who wishes to argue for such has to deduct all of that out first and its entirely possible you might find that if you do black people owe everyone else, not the other way around.
The sanctuary city nonsense, however, was especially rich.
The mayors who did this had no expectation of any material percentage of the 20+ million illegal immigrants in the United States would show up to try to claim their alleged "sanctuary." Most of these "migrants" are from warm climates in Central and South America and have no desire to deal with 0F overnight winters, never mind this white stuff called "snow." But as more and more cities simply ran out of resource in the south and started busing these people northbound the claim they were "sanctuaries" with no boundaries was put to the test.
In Chicago, for example, the migrants with kids are not being required to document -- or take -- any of the childhood vaccines that everyone else is expected and in fact required to in order to enroll in school. Leave aside Covid -- we're talking measles here. Undocumented means just that and it includes medical status. Never mind that almost none are fluent in English, so now all of them require ESL education and hiring teachers who are fluent in their native languages in order to begin or they learn nothing. At the same time they're being put up in posh hotels paid for by the state or city while actual Americans, often people of color, are left to their own devices.
NYC has turned several $500/nt hotels into "sanctuaries" -- with zero enforcement of law. The result is that they have immediately degenerated into drug, booze and orgy-filled hellholes that nobody in their right mind would stay in if there was any room for them to do so -- but there isn't. Oh, and the city is paying the same $500/nt. From where are they getting the money? It'll be interesting to see how this works out given that this is basically screwing American citizens in NYC out of $15,000/month each that could otherwise be spent on them rather than the "migrant" lodging bill!
All of this spending, of course, screws the lowest income people hardest because the additional demand on goods and services is what drives inflation, so prices for rent, groceries and similar go up and screw the American citizens, again often black Americans, even more.
Reality is that none of these left-leaning Democrats actually thought they'd have to cash the checks they were writing with their mouths. They were buying votes not with actual policy but with mere words that they never thought would be redeemed!
Now, unfortunately, the demands to "make good" are coming from all sides. What can reasonably be expected in response? "Bite me" isn't likely to go over very well but it will be quite interesting, specifically in the context of "reparations", which were unserious at all levels never mind unconstitutional as not even Treason can work corruption of blood nor may attainder extend beyond the lifetime of the offending party.
You'd have to amend the Constitution to change this and every left-leaning politician who ran this garbage knows it. No attempt to invoke "reparations" would survive a challenge otherwise; that is, they knew damn well they were making a promise that could not be kept as it is directly unconstitutional to assess anyone -- whether directly or otherwise -- for a crime beyond the offender's death including the only crime explicitly noted on the Constitution itself. Treason, by the way, is a specific exemption, valid only during the offender's lifetime, to what is otherwise an absolute in the Constitution.
You see Article 1 Section 9 explicitly forbids a federal Bill of Attainder in all other circumstances which is what reparations are; they are a declaration that a person or group of people is guilty of some offense and thereby punishing them since the funds for any such payments would have come from somewhere. Section 10 forbids the same act by a state.
In other words this always was a dead letter promise and everyone who made it knew it.
Now let's see all those so-called "officials" deal with that fact and the backlash when every black American realizes that they were not only lied to but that the politicians who did so knew they were lying, knew what they were claiming and "studying" was per-se unconstitutional and would not survive ten seconds in a courtroom and made the promise to buy black votes anyway.
Oops.