Politics & Power Quote by Xavier Becerra

Eighteen years is a long time to still be using the language of homework. Xavier Becerra’s line carries the quiet indictment that American redress has often been designed to feel complete before it is complete. By anchoring his claim to a specific benchmark - “18 years after the passage of the Civil Liberties Act” - he frames the law not as a triumphant endpoint but as a timestamp that exposes delay. The clock becomes evidence.

The phrasing “unfinished work” is doing strategic double duty. It’s an appeal to civic pride (we finish what we start) while also avoiding outright accusation. That’s classic political rhetoric when the target is not a single villain but a durable pattern: bureaucratic inertia, underfunded remedies, and the temptation to treat an apology as a substitute for repair. “Completely rectify and close” stacks two verbs that don’t naturally coexist. Rectify is material; close is narrative. He’s arguing that you don’t get the comfort of closure until you’ve done the tangible labor of rectification.

“Regrettable chapter” is a familiar American euphemism: painful history turned into something safely bookish, neatly bounded. Becerra uses it, but the sentence resists the euphemism by refusing to let the chapter end. The subtext is that the nation wants the moral prestige of acknowledgment without paying the full cost of accountability.

In context, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 addressed the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, pairing apology with reparations. Becerra’s intent is to reopen a ledger many would prefer to archive, insisting that redress is not a one-time ceremony but a standard the country has to keep meeting.