The GOP Wants to Use This Bizarre Case to Scuttle Obama's Most Progressive Cabinet Nominee

from Mother Jones:



Republicans are expected to fiercely oppose President Barack Obama's nomination of Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights and one of the more prominent progressives in his administration, to head the Labor Department. Already, Perez's GOP foes have accused him of corruption concerning a deal he helped forge in the Justice Department. This agreement prevented an unusual Minnesota housing discrimination case from going to the Supreme Court, and the full backstory—which Perez's critics haven't acknowledged—is a bizarre tale of legal complexities in which landlords tried to use a major civil rights law to protect themselves from city regulations meant to improve living conditions for low-income residents.

It all began in the early 2000s, when the city of St. Paul—after finding that many homes in low-income neighborhoods lacked heat or locks on the doors—kicked off an aggressive campaign of housing code enforcement. A group of landlords retaliated, brandishing an unexpected weapon: the 1968 Fair Housing Act. This law bars practices that adversely affect minorities, whether those practices were designed to discriminate or not—a legal standard known as disparate impact. The landlords alleged that the city's actions would force them out of business and harm their minority tenants whose access to affordable housing would be affected. The landlords were essentially arguing that by aggressively enforcing basic housing standards St. Paul was discriminating against low-income minorities, hoping to replace them with wealthier homeowners.

Much of the evidence in the case did not cast the landlords in the most sympathetic light. A police report described one landlord, Frank Steinhauser, threatening to evict one of his tenants, a mother of two children, for taking him to court because the residence he rented her had rotten floors, no heat, and so many rats she had unsuccessfully tried using duct tape to seal off the rat holes in the walls. (At one point, one tenant in the building found a rat in the bed where her two-year-old child slept.) According to this police report, Steinhauser told the woman (whose name was redacted), "Why are you doing this you black bitch? Why do you have the state on my ass? Bitch you're gonna to lose in fucking court. You're going to be out on the street." Several years later, in 2008, Steinhauser was one of the landlords suing St. Paul for enforcing the housing code and supposedly discriminating against their tenants on the basis of race. After St. Paul lost in federal court, the city appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. (There was originally more than one lawsuit over the same issue; they were ultimately linked together.) ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/thomas-perez-grassley-st-paul-darrell-issa-quid-pro-quo