Obama’s Next Transformation: And How to Stop It

Obama’s Next Transformation: And How to Stop It

Obama’s Next Transformation: And How to Stop It 

 

by Stanley Kurtz June 9, 2015 2:00 PM 

 

Safely past the hurdles of re-election and the mid-terms, President Obama has plenty of time and scope left to continue his transformative ways. Obama’s sweeping new rule, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH), is up next. AFFH would override local zoning authority and expand federal control over where and how Americans live. Because of its sweeping impact and the fact that potential Clinton Vice-Presidential running mate, HUD Secretary Julian Castro, will be in charge of implementation, this issue has the potential to shift the terrain of the presidential race as well. There is a way to stop AFFH, however, and you can help. Late this evening the House is expected to vote on an amendment by Congressman Paul Gosar that would block any funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development to enforce AFFH. Now is the time to contact your congressman and urge a yes vote on the Gosar amendment. The AFFH rule represents a stunning repudiation of America’s system of local self-government. This is as radical—and as politically explosive—a change as anything President Obama has attempted. That’s exactly why he never talks about it, and why he’s delayed it past every election, setting deadline after failed deadline for the final rule’s release. A preliminary version of AFFH has been public for years, yet Obama never mentions it in speeches, press conferences, or the State of the Union address. The mainstream press essentially ignores AFFH. Republican representatives in particular need to understand that once the final AFFH rule is promulgated, this issue is going to be widely discussed and debated. Constituents will hold them responsible for failing to stop AFFH when they had a chance. No Republican presidential candidate will back AFFH, but Hillary Clinton will surely endorse it. I think she’d have done this in any case, but now that her re-election strategy has moved so openly to the left, her support of AFFH is assured. Her most widely talked about potential running mate, HUD Secretary Julian Castro, will be in charge of implementing this rule, should the Gosar amendment fail. That, too, makes AFFH certain to loom large in the presidential campaign. Contrary to its title, AFFH isn’t about blocking housing discrimination. That is already illegal, and former HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan acknowledged that AFFH is not about stopping housing discrimination, but instead about changing the way Americans live. AFFH will force every municipality that takes federal housing money to take a detailed survey of where its citizens live, by income, race, ethnicity, etc. If the mixture is not to the federal government’s liking, changes would have to be made at local expense. In effect, this would strip local governments of their zoning power. Furthermore, by redefining “fair housing” to mean housing near transportation hubs and dense downtown districts where many jobs are available, AFFH can be used to change the way Americans live, urbanizing suburbs and Manhattanizing cities. The rule can also be used to press suburbs into regional housing consortia designed to strip local governments of their independence. To read more about the transformative ambition behind the AFFH rule and the Obama administration’s policies on urban and suburban development, see my book on the subject, as well as my treatment of how the Obama administration’s policies are already playing out in the San Francisco Bay and Minneapolis-St. Paul areas. The real goal of AFFH is to push the whole country in the direction of what’s already happening in San Francisco and the Twin Cities. Remember, the Gosar amendment is scheduled for a vote this evening. — Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He can be reached at comments.kurtz@nationalreview.com. View Comments Is More Democracy Dumb? And Is That Even the Right Question? Share article on Facebook share Tweet article tweet Plus one article on Google Plus +1 Print Article Email article Adjust font size AA by Daniel Foster June 9, 2015 5:28 PM I was pleasantly surprised at the number of responses to my little 200-word post on why universal voter registration is such a bad idea. So I wanted to respond to some of my interlocutors, though I admit the fact I now have a day job prevents me from doing so with greater care (if not at greater length). First, let’s dispatch with the obvious. The Jonathan Chait Award for Willful Misreading goes to Jonathan Chait. He has me advocating some “additional registration requirement” (emphasis added), which is his way of saying the status quo. He then deploys his usual bag of selective elision and bad-faith to make me look like a monster who thinks “voting should be restricted to a better class of people.” His shtick does suggest that I should have been clearer on one point: I hypothesize that those who can’t bothered to register are usually “civic idiots.” I don’t necessarily think they are idiots full stop. I know quite a few people personally — I’m thinking of a banker or two, a scientist, a computer geek — who are quite intelligent, but utterly uninterested in civic discourse. But onto a “better class” of interlocutors. Jamelle Bouie is initially sympathetic with my point, but concludes from America’s gradual expansion of the franchise that initially “uninformed” voters become better informed over time, as they acclimate to life in the electorate. That would be a heartening argument if true, but it relies on an illicit conceptual shift. Remember, we’re not talking about expanding the franchise. We already have near-universal franchise. We’re talking about expanding participation among the enfranchised. And it’s not clear to me that folks who can’t be bothered to spend one lunch break at the town hall are incentivized to learn about politics in the same way that the Selma marchers were. Even then, the argument also depends on buying Bouie’s premise that the American electorate as a whole has not become less informed over time. But I’m highly skeptical that that’s true, either. When the franchise was limited to landed white males, American democracy had two distinct advantages: One, government was a much simpler affair, and so the realm of facts one had to command to count as “informed,” under some reasonable definition, was much smaller. Two, the voting base shared educations, incomes, cultural assumptions, and political norms not only with each other but, definitionally, with their candidates for office. We know that part of the problem with the present question is that what counts as “informed” is itself essentially contested. But just as homogeneous populations have a much easier time agreeing on policy than heterogeneous ones, it stands to reason that homogeneous voting populations will be better informed, almost by default, since they will share a conception of what’s important to know. (And no, I don’t want to go back to the days when only landed white men could vote — I’m a renter.)

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/419534/more-democracy-dumb-and-even-right-question-daniel-foster