Gavin Newsom vetoed five reparations bills and thought he killed the issue in California.
Sacramento Democrats just found a way to drag corporations in without his signature.
What Sacramento Democrats just cooked up could send corporate executives to prison over business dealings from 160 years ago.
California Reparations Bill Forces Major Corporations to Disclose Slavery Ties Under Oath
Democrat Assemblyman Isaac Bryan calls it the Truth in Disclosure Act. Everyone else should call it what it is – a reparations bill dressed up as a paperwork requirement.
Assembly Bill 2599 would force any company doing business in California with more than $100 million in annual worldwide revenue to dig through its own archives and swear under oath whether it ever profited from chattel slavery.
Banks, insurers, railroads, shipping companies, tobacco firms, and sugar producers doing business in California all fall under the bill — and Bryan wants a sworn affidavit from every one of them.
Lie on that affidavit, or get it wrong, and executives face perjury charges – not a fine, but prison.
The bill cleared the Senate Appropriations Committee's suspense file on Aug. 13 and now heads to the full Senate floor. If Newsom signs it, California becomes the first state in the country to force private corporations to swear under oath about transactions predating the Civil War.
Bryan says the goal is simple. "The Truth in Disclosure Act requires any company doing business in California with annual worldwide gross receipts of over $100 million to verify and search their records for any transactions related to wealth gained during chattel slavery and report that wealth to the state to be held in a digital archive," he said.
If AB 2599 passes, the California Civil Rights Department has until Jan. 3, 2028 to stand up a public digital platform where those disclosures live forever.
Gavin Newsom Vetoed Reparations Five Times and California Democrats Found a Way Around Him
Bryan's bill has a problem even Newsom's own bureaucrats can't ignore. The Department of Finance opposed AB 2599 outright, and not over ideology. Over basic competence.
Deputy Director Christian Beltran told lawmakers at an Aug. 3 hearing that the bill never identifies which state agency is supposed to run the program. The Department of Justice pegged startup costs at $130,000 for one position in the first year, climbing to $231,000 a year after that – money California doesn't have while running multibillion-dollar deficits.
Democrats pushed the bill through the suspense file anyway.
This is the same governor who has vetoed direct cash reparations five separate times. Newsom rejected proposals worth as much as $360,000 per eligible resident, with the state's own task force estimating the total cost near $640 billion. He killed land restitution, blocked a Freedmen Affairs Agency, and capped his pen every time a bill arrived with a real price tag.
AB 2599 doesn't ask the state to write checks. It asks corporations to build the paper trail Democrats will use to demand checks later.
Civil rights attorney Lisa Holder, a former member of California's Reparations Task Force, admitted as much. She has described the broader push as a long game requiring sustained legislative work across many fronts — not a single decisive vote.
Translation: they're not getting cash reparations through Newsom, so they're laying track piece by piece until a friendlier governor walks through the door.
That governor may already be waiting. Democrats are eyeing a current gubernatorial frontrunner Xavier Becerra as the reset button on reparations once Newsom leaves office.
California Reparations Task Force Strategy Exposed as Democrats Build Infrastructure for Cash Payments
Most of the corporations AB 2599 would force into sworn testimony weren't founded until decades after the Civil War ended. Slavery in the United States ended in 1865. California entered the Union in 1850 as a free state.
Bryan's bill demands companies chase "predecessor entities" and "related entities" back through mergers, acquisitions and corporate reorganizations spanning a century and a half – then swear to what they find, under penalty of perjury, with no defined agency even overseeing the process.
Assemblymember Tina McKinnor is already teeing up the next piece. Her separate bill would exempt any future reparations payments from California state income tax, an odd bit of forward planning for a policy area where Democrats insist "no consensus" exists on actual payouts.
McKinnor told Fox News Digital that Newsom "has shown great leadership by creating a number of laws that benefit the descendants of formerly enslaved people," and said she's hopeful he signs it.
Bryan is vice chair of the California Legislative Black Caucus, which built its "Road to Repair" package from that same 2023 task force report – nearly 500 pages recommending everything from college admissions preferences to direct cash payments as high as $1.2 million per eligible resident.
Newsom signed the cheap parts. He vetoed the parts that would have cost real money.
AB 2599 is what's left when a state legislature wants reparations bad enough to build the infrastructure for it without ever asking their own governor to sign the bill that pays for it.
The bill now sits on the Senate floor, one vote away from Newsom's desk.
Sources:
- Jeff Charles, "California Democrats Want to Force Companies Into Their Reparations Agenda," Townhall, August 20, 2026.
- Fox News, "California lawmakers want corporations to disclose ties to slavery despite uncertain future for reparations," August 2026.
- Ward Clark, "California's Having the Reparations Discussion Again, and It's As Dumb As Ever," RedState, August 19, 2026.
- Fox News, "No clear champion of cash payment reparations among Democrats in California gubernatorial race," February 5, 2026.
