June 19, 2009
Sorry, but I’m not sorry.

Posted at 12:42 pm, in: Senate
Tags: Barack Obama, Stephen I. Cohen, Tom Harkin

Because the Senate apparently had nothing better to do and didn’t feel like wasting trillions more of our money, they passed a pointless resolution yesterday apologizing for slavery:

The Senate unanimously passed a resolution yesterday apologizing for slavery, making way for a joint congressional resolution and the latest attempt by the federal government to take responsibility for 2 1/2 centuries of slavery.

“You wonder why we didn’t do it 100 years ago,” Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), lead sponsor of the resolution, said after the unanimous-consent vote. “It is important to have a collective response to a collective injustice.”

The Senate’s apology follows a similar apology passed last year by the House. One key difference is that the Senate version explicitly deals with the long-simmering issue of whether slavery descendants are entitled to reparations, saying that the resolution cannot be used in support of claims for restitution. The House is expected to revisit the issue next week to conform its resolution to the Senate version.

Harkin, who called the Senate’s vote an “important and significant milestone,” said he wanted the resolution passed yesterday to closely coincide with Juneteenth, a holiday first celebrated by former slaves to mark their emancipation.

This recent willingness to deal with the nation’s difficult racial history has come about in part because of President Obama’s election, said Rep. Stephen I. Cohen (D-Tenn.), who began pushing for an apology more than a decade ago when he was a state senator and pronounced himself “pleased” with the Senate vote.

Still, Cohen said, “there are going to be African Americans who think that [the apology] is not reparations, and it’s not action, and there are going to be Caucasians who say, ‘Get over it.’ . . . I look at it as something that makes people think.”

All this makes me think is that the Senate is full of a bunch of idiots. Did we really need a resolution apologizing for slavery? Do these people have nothing better to do with their time? I hope they are only apologizing for themselves. No one I have ever met in my life owned a slave. I have nothing to be sorry for. Slavery was wrong, but I’m not the one that committed that wrong so this apology better not be on my behalf.

(H/T: Memeorandum)