More Justice Department Chicanery: Thomas Perez and ‘Disparate Impact’

[Draggingtree]

PJ Media: More Justice Department Chicanery: Thomas Perez and ‘Disparate Impact’

The cabinet nominee fought to keep the Supreme Court from reviewing his preferred extortion technique.

 

by Hans von Spakovsky

June 1, 2013 - 12:00 am

 

One of the administration’s favorite legal theories, “disparate impact,” may get taken up again by the Supreme Court. Will the administration try to engineer some kind of payoff to take the issue away from the Court — again?

 

In June 2012, the town of Mount Holly, N.J., petitioned the Supreme Court to review the legitimacy of racial discrimination claims premised solely on a disparate impact theory under the Fair Housing Act. Under this theory, a policy — such as requiring high credit scores for loans — can be completely neutral, but if it yields a disparate impact on a particular racial or gender group, an institution using that policy can be held liable for discrimination. In other words, an entity can be found to have discriminated even if it didn’t actually intend to discriminate.

 

Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general for Civil Rights at the Justice Department and President Obama’s nominee to be Labor secretary, has used disparate impact to extort huge settlements from the financial industry under the Fair Housing Act (FHA).

 

Here, Mount Holly is alleged to have discriminated simply because it wanted to redevelop and rebuild a rundown housing development in a high-crime area where almost half the residents are black. Thus,