On Monday, one of the Obama administration’s foremost racial arsonists was given his comeuppance by a federal judge. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, who is on the American left’s short list for replacing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, was informed by Judge Richard J. Leon that his effort to find housing discrimination where none existed amounted to “wishful thinking on steroids.” Perez sought to apply the policy of “disparate impact” to housing. Judicial Watch explains this contemptible concept. “Under the theory of ‘disparate impact,’ a defendant can be held liable for discrimination for a race-neutral policy that statistically disadvantages a specific minority group even if that negative ‘impact’ was neither foreseen nor intended,” they write. “In such cases, defendants can be forced to pay for harm caused not by their own actions, but by economic and statistical realities, even if beyond their control.” (italics original) Leon wasn’t buying it. He characterized the attempt to legitimize disparate impact as a vehicle to expand the possibility of filing discrimination cases as “hutzpah (sic) (bordering on desperation).” “This is yet another example of an administrative agency trying desperately to write into law that which Congress never intended to sanction,” he wrote, adding that the arguments made by Obama administration attorneys were “nothing less than an artful misinterpretation” of the law. The law to which Leon referred is the Fair Housing Act, administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In February 2013, HUD made disparate impact a policy tool, one the administration employed to build discriminatory cases against mortgage lending institutions that garnered them hundreds of millions of dollars.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 12:40:21 +0000