(DAILY CALLER) “The reason for that is a legal question,” Johnson continued after the chairman gaveled for silence. “See, the legal question is: the federal government can’t constitutionally provide compensation today to a specific racial group because other members of that group, maybe several generations ago, were discriminated against and treated inhumanely.”

The House Republican Study Committee chairman further explained that the United States Supreme Court would likely consider the proposal to be an unconstitutional racial preference.

“The holding of the 1995 case Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. is that racial set asides and other entitlements are only constitutionally permissible to remedy the present effects of the government’s own widespread in recent discrimination,” Johnson explained. “The federal government is not allowed to provide race-based remedies that are ‘ageless in their region of the past and timeless in their ability to effect the future.’”

“Barack Obama opposed reparations when he ran for president in 2008,” he said. “Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders did as well eight years later.”