The administration dismissed prior compensation as sufficient even though the record proved it inadequate

Evidence

One week before the House vote, the Reagan administration released a “Statement of Administration Policy” that declared unequivocally that his “administration opposes H.R. 442, and the President’s senior advisers will recommend that the President veto the bill, should it be presented to him.” Several reasons were given; chief among them was the belief that the 1948 Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act was in reality a “comprehensive and reasonable program of restitution for injuries brought upon persons of Japanese ancestry who were interned.” The administration also objected to the projected cost “in excess of $1 billion.” It concluded that no “further payments…[were] warranted.” And yet the commission’s report documented how inadequate the payments under the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act had been. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 219

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the administration’s ‘already compensated’ claim survive documentary contradiction, and does the same pattern recur in current reparations objections?
• XREF: The ‘you were already compensated, so no further payments warranted’ move echoes the objection Brown answers in the reparations-as-accounting argument pattern.

Related

• Reagan opposed redress over cost and prior-payment adequacy arguments (similarity 0.90)