Law Prof Advocates For Black Americans' Votes To “Count Twice”

Authored by Jon
Street via Campus Reform,

Washington and Lee University assistant law professor�Brandon Hasbrouck says
Black Americans and Native Americans should be able to vote
twice as a cheaper form of reparations.

Claiming that “Black votes in this country are worth
less than White votes,” Hasbrouck wrote
in an op-ed for The Nation, “Joe Biden won the Electoral
College because Black voters in Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and
Philadelphia turned out in significant numbers. But even with
overwhelming Black support – a 94 percent of Detroit voted for
Biden! – the outcomes in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and
Pennsylvania were worryingly close.”

Hasbrouck said these “reparations” should extend to Native
Americans as well.

“Slavery is rightly called America’s original sin, but
so too was the United States’ genocidal seizure of land from its
original inhabitants. Various legal forms of disenfranchisement
have applied to them,” he said.

The appropriate response to the “core problem” of “structurally
racist political institutions” like the electoral college, he said,
is to “implement vote reparations by double-counting
ballots cast by all Black residents.”

Washington and Lee University promoted Hasbrouck’s op-ed on
its official website.

“One of the largest objections to monetary reparations is the
impracticality of implementing them on a scale that would
meaningfully address the injustices. Vote reparations, in contrast,
would be a simple, low-cost way to begin to make amends,’ Hasbrouck
wrote.

“Because White votes currently count more than Black
ones, double-counting Black votes would restore electoral balance.
Vote reparations would be a giant step toward remedying our
nation’s long history of denying and devaluing Black
votes,” he continued.

“To address systemic racism, we must transform how we
choose our government. Even if vote reparations aren’t
instituted, Black voters will keep tirelessly dragging our
states toward a more perfect union. But just imagine our country if
our votes counted twice,’ he concluded.

This is not the first time that Hasbrouck has proposed such a
radical idea.

In October, he penned
an op-ed for the Richmond Times-Dispatch advocating to “pack
the court” with “color-conscious justices.”

“To date, commentators have focused their arguments on
retaliatory politics rather than redressing the court’s chronic
anti-Blackness,” he wrote. “We cannot pretend that court-packing
alone will lead to a healthy justice system that values Black
lives.”

Claiming that “even supposedly progressive justices,
including the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Stephen
Breyer, “frequently have failed on issues of racial
justice,” Hasbrouck wrote that “courts must account for
the differences in the experience of Black and White Americans with
police, prosecutors and juries if we mean to even approach the
promise — as yet unkept — of equal justice under law.”

“If we ever are to realize the goals of Reconstruction and its
constitutional reforms, we must have a Supreme Court
prepared to advance color-conscious constitutionalism,” he
continued.

“A ‘liberal’ court would be worth very little if it also
did not believe that Black lives matter. I advocate
packing the court with color-conscious justices not as a means of
settling a political score from Merrick Garland’s appointment,
but to bring long overdue justice to America.”

As Campus Reform previously reported, Hasbrouck was among the
faculty members at Washington and Lee University who called for the school to
drop former Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from its name.

Cornell University law professor William Jacobson responded to
Hasbrouck’s proposal, telling Campus Reform, “the proposal to count
Black votes twice is preposterous on its face, but reveals a more
pernicious leftist pathology. The proposal mixes a variety of
leftist narratives of the United States as irredeemably racist,
including the disputed claim that the electoral college was devised
to help slave states, and in a non-sequitur, proposes racial bias
as the solution.”

“The concept of using racial discrimination as a
solution to past discrimination is at the core of the ‘anti-racist’
activism. But racial discrimination never is right, and never makes
society better,” Jacobson added.