Ben Carson will Reinterpret Obama’s Housing Discrimination Rule

Comments by Smith Young.

Yes, and Ben Carson should reinterpret the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule as he said he would do on July 19, 2017 after meeting with a group of Republican members of Congress led by Utah Sen. Mike Lee called on Carson to rescind the rule.  After its introduction July 2015 the rule has since been institutionalized and there’s only so much anyone can do unless Congress either reinterprets or de-funds it.  The problem is that the Obama administration and HUD defined the rule inhouse with HUD eyes only and have since fine tuned it, albeit with the required 30 day comment periods, to be a manipulative form of pure socialism.   The ACLU who has opposed Sec. Carson from the beginning has no bounds for using segregation to accomplish their goals when the free market and local governments get in their way.  The ACLU calls it their fair housing mission, in part described as follows.

One major recent achievement is the “affirmatively further fair housing” (AFFH) rule. Under the rule, communities receiving HUD funding must examine local patterns of housing segregation and inequities and then create plans to effectively address them. By doing so, AFFH attempts to fulfill the goals of the Fair Housing Act, which banned overt housing discrimination in 1968 but has not yet succeeded in dismantling segregation and inequality in many cities and localities.

AFFH is more than a national zoning board with HUDs regional control.  It was never the intent of Congress for the 1968 Fair Housing Act, nor the intent of the Supreme Court’s 2015 Disparate Impact ruling to interfere in any way with our free market system nor the authority of local government.  We all know the Obama administration position on the free market and the authority of local government providing us the best example of the fox guarding the hen house where he has demonstrated in many ways that he never meant what he said he vowed to uphold the constitution.

There are a couple articles about Sec. Carson reinterpreting the AFFH rule, but they may be jumping the gun to say that he’s keeping odious Obama policies at HUD?.  Another article in the Washington Examiner reports

“I probably am not going to mess with something the Supreme Court has weighed in on,” Carson said. “In terms of interpreting what it means — that’s where the concentration is going to be.”

However, Carson didn’t say how he might be able to “reinterpret” the rule more favorably.
…
Some local governments have said that the exercise places too much of a burden on their resources.  Carson agreed Wednesday and said the number of hours required to develop the plan is “craziness.”

You might think that due to the arbitrary and capricious way the AFFH rule was created and imposed that it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen, however under the doctrine of Chevron deference the courts are supposed to defer to regulatory agencies when the language from Congress isn’t clear.  In the event of a lawsuit HUD would naturally bank on Chevron to sustain its naked power grab.

There’s much that Ben Carson can do and for now it’s encouraging that he’s going to act and reinterpret AFFH.