The Supreme Court's Disparate-Impact Decision Is a Disaster | National Review Online
The Supreme Court’s breathtaking upholding of the constitutionality of Obamacare’s exchanges wasn’t the only case they got badly wrong Thursday.
In both cases, ordinary Americans may be hurt in ways they don’t yet realize.
In its second case yesterday, the Supreme Court had to
decide the scope of the Fair Housing Act, a law passed in 1968 that makes it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of race and other factors in connection with the sale or lease of housing.
The question before the court was:
Can you be found guilty of racial discrimination if you never engaged in policies that had any intent to discriminate?
Roger Clegg of the free-market Center for Equal Opportunity lays out just such a scenario: “Suppose, for example, that the owner of an apartment complex decides that she does not want to rent units to individuals who have been convicted of drug offenses.
She makes that decision without regard to race, her policy on its face does not treat people differently because of race, and indeed she enforces it in an evenhanded way, so that it applies equally to all applicants, without regard to race.
Should she be liable for racial discrimination under the Fair Housing Act if it turns out that the policy in her neck of the woods has a disproportionate effect on this or that racial or ethnic group?”
In Texas Department of Housing v. The Inclusive Communities Project, the anti-segregation group ICP sued the Texas housing authority. ICP claimed that
federal tax credits to developers who build low-income housing projects were disproportionately allocating too many of the tax credits to properties in minority areas and too few in suburban areas.
But the housing authority responded that the purpose of federal tax credits is to help underprivileged residents of rundown areas in an effort to improve their blighted status.
Such credits have a far less positive effect in more well-off neighborhoods.
No evidence was presented that Texas officials were trying to discriminate.
Liberal civil-rights groups say that any disproportionate effect of a policy on minorities represents a “disparate impact,” and that lawsuits based on this are essential in order to fight subtle forms of discrimination.
...Since then, disparate impact has been expanded in unimaginable ways, including
Obama-administration agency action making it extremely difficult for employers to screen out job applicants based on their criminal record.
In addition, in those increasingly rare situations in which the employer does decline to hire an applicant because of his criminal record, the latest guidance from the Obama Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to employers in this regard all but forces the employer to inform the job applicant that this has happened.
This dramatically increases the chances employers will be hit with a discrimination lawsuit.
Martin Luther King Jr. famously looked forward to the day when his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
As Gail Heriot of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission points out,
“The content of one’s character, at least as revealed by one’s criminal record, cannot be taken into account without risking litigation.”
This turns the original goals of King’s movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 upside down. Indeed, the result is similar to how the court had to turn logic and language upside down in order to reach its bizarre upholding of the Obamacare exchanges.
I fear the Rule of Law took a double blow yesterday.
Read it all and consider another country.
"The liberal mainstream media has been trying to hide this for years, but race-baiter-in-chief President Barack Hussein Obama’s own family used to own slaves.
"Rev. Al Sharpton quickly joined critics of the Confederate flag flying outside the South Carolina Statehouse, but the civil rights leader is going one step further "
"The NRA also suspected that Democrats were pursuing this bill in a bid to “create firearm registries” and “suppress firearm ownership.”
"President Barack Obama is out of control. Now he thinks he can issue a gag order for all Americans — that means you and me — to prevent us from discussing firearms online.
"Scalia writes of the majority’s opinion: “Today’s interpretation is not merely unnatural; it is unheard of.”
"TheBlaze’s national security adviser Buck Sexton on Thursday revealed the fascinating history behind the word “assassin,” which he said “has its roots in Islamic terror.”
But he added that soldiers should "become more informed and appreciative of the traditions and history of the people in this region of the world...
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