A federal judge has ruled a top ethics watchdog can sue an Illinois city over its plan to offer reparations payments to black residents for civil rights violations committed decades ago.
The non-profit public interest law firm Judicial Watch announced in a statement that “an Illinois federal court has allowed its class action civil rights lawsuit against the City of Evanston, Illinois’ reparations program to move forward.”
“Evanston’s reparations program provides $25,000 cash payments to blacks only,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The Constitution forbids race-based government programs like this. We welcome the court’s decision to allow this historic lawsuit to move forward against this woke, racist program.”
Judicial Watch reports it “filed the class action civil rights lawsuit in May 2024, challenging Evanston’s use of race as an eligibility requirement for its ‘Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program,’ which makes $25,000 direct cash payments to black residents and descendants of black residents who lived in Evanston between the years 1919 and 1969.”
Judicial Watch argues that “the program’s race-based eligibility program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. So far, 137 people have received reparations payments totaling $3.47 million.”
Judicial Watch reports “U.S. District Judge John F. Kress rejected the city’s attempt to dismiss the case, finding that the plaintiffs have sufficient standing to pursue their constitutional claims and that requiring the plaintiffs, who are white, to first file for a program they were ineligible for due to their race was a futile gesture.”
Judicial Watch argued to the court:
[T]he program’s use of a race-based eligibility requirement is presumptively unconstitutional, and remedying societal discrimination is not a compelling government interest. Nor has remedying discrimination from as many as 105 years ago or remedying intergenerational discrimination ever been recognized as a compelling government interest. Among the program’s other fatal flaws is that it uses race as a proxy for discrimination without requiring proof of discrimination.
Judicial Watch is being assisted in the lawsuit by Christine Svenson of Chalmers, Adams, Backer & Kaufman, LLC.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Paying taxpayer money to people who, in most cases, weren’t even born when this alleged discrimination was happening is reverse discrimination against all who are not on the list of those who are planned to get that money.
Discrimination in ‘any direction’ is abhorrent.