Gavin Newsom must veto bogus corporate ‘slavery’ bill

California entered the Union as a free state in 1850. Yet California legislators have sent a bill to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk requiring all large corporations in California to disclose any past ties to slavery.

Slavery officially ended in the United States in December 1965 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. You might think that elected officials in California would know that. 

Then again, the Constitution has never been particularly important to the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party. And California has never worried about adding costs to business, or driving them out of the state.

The bill, AB 2599, passed both houses of the Legislature, on party lines. It would force all corporations doing business in California with annual worldwide gross receipts of $100 million or more to complete affidavits — subject to penalties for lying under oath — disclosing whether they or predecessor entities engaged in slavery-era transactions from which they profited. 

The filings would be posted to a publicly searchable state database. Companies would have to search through their records and disclose any slavery-related activity.

The bill is structured in such a way that the companies could easily be sued by big law firms —  Democrats’ major donors — to extract monies for noncompliance.

There are a few amazing aspects of this legislation, other than the obvious one that California never legalized slavery within its borders.  

The first is the audacity of the California Legislature to dictate to any company formed anywhere outside the state that it must comply with another administrative rule that will cost time and money simply for the right to do business in California.  

The second fascinating aspect is that a 34-year-old state assemblyman, Isaac Bryan of Los Angeles, who has been in office for three years and has hardly held a job outside of politics, believes he can author a law to tell American companies with worldwide operations how to run their businesses. 

It is bad enough that long-time US senators are arrogant enough to believe they know enough to tell these businesses what to do, but an obscure legislator from California — really?

Did Bryan ever wonder how many companies might actually be affected by this law? There are an estimated 21,000-plus businesses that do over $100 million in annual revenue in the United States. Now they all must check whether they do business in California. How many will even be aware of this meddling law?

Another question is how many large companies today were in existence in 1865 when slavery ended.  The number is not definitive, but is estimated, surprisingly, at between 150 and 250 companies. It is not clear how many of these companies still have records that survive from 1865, or even from before 1900. 

The answer to that question is most likely zero. Why would they keep records going back that long? And if they did, can you imagine what condition the records would be in, and how long it might take for the companies to review them?

And if these companies had acquired acquired other companies at any point, how would they know exactly what their activities were 170 years ago? How many corporate officers would be willing to sign a sworn statement under the penalty of perjury about the activities of their company, or other companies, 170 years ago?  

AB 2599 is clearly a virtue-signaling money grab. Newsom should veto this disaster, for the sake of the residents of California, before more businesses refuse to do business in the state. 

Instead of wasting time on frivolous and harmful laws like these, our elected officials should focus on more relevant problems. Or maybe they should just stop trying to fix anything at all, because they are likely to do more harm than good.

Bruce Bialosky, a former presidential appointee, is a certified public accountant specializing in taxes.

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