Obama Lawlessness Spreads to Supreme Court

 

IBDEditorials.com

Racial Politics: Obama race-mongers first mugged mortgage bankers, then went gunning for car lenders. Now they're trying to block the Supreme Court from taking away their main weapon: disparate impact.

For the second time in 12 months, the administration has sabotaged a Supreme Court case challenging its disparate-impact discrimination claims, which rely on statistics rather than actual acts of racism to "prove" discrimination in housing and lending.

Its diversity police have been using the dubious civil rights theory as a cudgel to shake down lenders for billions in race-bias settlements.

Late last year, the Justice Department settled a case in Minnesota that threatened disparate impact rather than let the high court decide the issue. Attorney General Eric Holder sent aides to St. Paul to pressure the petitioner there to drop the case.

When another Supreme Court housing case earlier this year challenged disparate impact, the administration went into overdrive to derail it as well.

It issued a regulation through HUD formalizing the use of disparate impact to enforce fair housing and lending, though there's no such provision in either the Fair Housing Act or Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

HUD Deputy Assistant Sara Pratt admitted: "We were afraid we might lose disparate impact in the Supreme Court because there was no regulation."

Then Holder sent the solicitor general to convince justices not to take the case.

Last month the petitioner, Mount Holly, N.J., strangely lost interest in pursuing the case, just like St. Paul.

The town cut a last-minute deal with tenants who'd lost subsidized housing in a town redevelopment project. (The plaintiffs had sued for replacement housing, arguing a "disparate impact" on minorities.)

Mount Holly withdrew its petition just three weeks before justices were set this month to hear oral arguments in the landmark case. According to the American Banker, HUD may have had a hand in the deal.

Pratt's old shop, the nonprofit National Fair Housing Alliance, was instrumental in helping quash the case.

NFHA helped bankroll a developer who'll build new townhouses for the plaintiffs. That arrangement led to the settlement, ending hopes that disparate impact's constitutionality would finally be tested.

Pratt worked for years as a top NFHA official — and she's still working with the radical lobby group. In fact, she recently helped NFHA sue Wells Fargo for alleged lending bias, even signing the settlement document.

The American Banker questioned the conflict of interest, noting federal rules bar her from engaging in "work involving parties for which she'd previously served as an employee or consultant."

Congress should probe Pratt's role in the deal. As the FHA's chief enforcer, she's now free to use disparate impact as a weapon of mass destruction against banks.

Clearly, the executive branch is rigging antidiscrimination law and undermining the judicial branch's authority, corrupting our system of checks and balances.

It's up to the legislative branch, with help from voters next year, to rein in this rogue regime.