Congress can enact reparations under Thirteenth Amendment powers, not the Fourteenth

Evidence

There is no doubt in my mind that the Supreme Court today would find reparations unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment and would consider such a program as governmental antiwhite discrimination. Existing Supreme Court precedent will continue to be a bar to upholding any legislation authorizing reparations as constitutional, but there is another path forward. I believe that Congress could implement reparations under its powers granted by the Thirteenth Amendment. On that basis Congress could enact reparations, designed to take black Americans “from under the yoke of bondage…to reap the fruit of [their] own labor,” in the twenty-first century, and it would be upheld as constitutional. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 576

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is the key constitutional hook for the whole book’s remedy design — worth probing whether Thirteenth Amendment jurisprudence can actually bear the weight.
• XREF: Connects to the architecture claim (chapter 3) that the saturated-system harm is the legal crux; also to Brown’s genre shift from diagnosis to remedy. — connects to: Thirteenth Amendment radically shifted freedpeople’s welfare to federal control — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 252