Sen. Cory Booker at a Senate Judiciary hearing, March 2018 (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

They speak as if slavery ended last week, and colored-only water fountains still trickle just outside white-only waiting rooms.

Democrats gathered on Capitol Hill on Wednesday and unleashed a cancer upon America. If allowed to grow, slavery reparations will devour this country by embittering whites and others who never owned slaves. This malignancy will enfeeble blacks by convincing them that Abraham Lincoln never lived, the Confederacy never died, and they are doomed in a land that hates their guts.


“We as a nation have not yet truly acknowledged and grappled with racism and white supremacy that has [sic] tainted this country’s Founding and continues [sic] to persist in those deep racial disparities and inequalities today,” Senator Cory Booker (D., N.J.) told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties as it weighed a measure to establish a reparations commission.

Booker, who is black, lamented “this history that has not been addressed, the silence that persists” and the “enduring injustices in our nation.” He said that in his community, “you see how deeply unfair this nation is still to so many people.”

Somehow, despite America’s alleged bone-deep bigotry, Booker grew up as the son of two IBM executives in Harrington Park, N.J., a suburb that was 81.6 percent white and 0.6 percent black in 2000. He graduated from Stanford University, studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and earned his final coat of polish at Yale Law School. He now is a senator from a 68 percent white state.


So, might there be limits to America’s anti-black animus? Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Texas) seems dubious.


“Slavery has never received an apology,” she said at Wednesday’s hearing. “The role of the federal government in supporting the institution of slavery and subsequent discrimination directed against blacks is an injustice that must be formally acknowledged and addressed.” She also denounced “the continuing de jure and de facto impact of slavery today.”

Such impact never stopped Jackson Lee, who is black, from graduating Yale and UVA Law School.

“I’m sorry that this is something our government was responsible for,” Representative Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.), who is white, said at the hearing. “Everyone alive is responsible to do something now.”


Huh?

Our government, the United States government, vanquished the Confederacy and, with it, slavery. The U.S. government’s Republican-led Radical Reconstruction policy educated, integrated, enfranchised, and empowered former slaves, some of whom were elected to Congress. Alas, resurgent Democrats torpedoed that initiative in 1877.

The U.S. government integrated the Armed Forces in 1948. The U.S. Supreme Court judged school segregation unconstitutional in 1954. The U.S. government adopted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which killed Jim Crow statutes across the South. The U.S. government’s Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed black access to ballot boxes in the South and beyond. The U.S. government’s Great Society, War on Poverty, racial-preference programs, school-desegregation decisions, education subsidies, public housing, food stamps, and much more were designed largely to help millions of blacks overcome more than a century of Democrat-enforced discrimination and destitution after slavery ended.


And the U.S. government was led for eight years by Barack Obama, a black man, whom the American people — including 43 percent of whites in 2008 and 39 percent in 2012 — sent to the White House.


The U.S. government and the American people took these and other measures to advance blacks. Regardless, Democrats speak as if slavery ended last week, and colored-only water fountains still trickle just outside white-only waiting rooms — from sea to shining sea.

Democrats cannot inspire people with a vision of united Americans sharing an even greater nation. Instead, they launch carcinogenic schemes in hopes of riding waves of intense racial strife. If they can demoralize and enrage blacks just enough, Democrats reckon, blacks will engulf the polls and buoy this sick party’s chances in November 2020. If this electoral math requires America to be inundated with tumors, Democrats could not care less.

The chemotherapy for this cancer is for citizens to vote against every Democrat on every ballot until this malignant party is flushed once and for all from the American body politic.

Michael Malarkey contributed research to this opinion piece.