“Fair Housing Act”: The Next Assault On Civil Rights
Last Thursday the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in the case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project. The case concerns the “disparate impact” rule, a legal guideline embedded in the 1968 Fair Housing Act that says discrimination doesn’t have to be intentional to be discrimination. This rule has been at the bedrock of fair-housing enforcement for more than four decades.
Another way to understand disparate impact is this: It’s a way to confront the realities of racial inequality without trying to prove the motivations of an institution, organization, or landlord. In housing especially, it’s rare to get someone as explicit about his discrimination as Donald Sterling. More often, you must look for patterns of unequal results or unfair treatment that stem from “objective” or “neutral” criteria.
In United States v. Wells Fargo, for example, the Department of Justice sued the mortgage lender over its role in the subprime market. According to the suit, Wells Fargo brokers raised interest rates and fees for more than 30,000 minority customers, and encouraged black and Hispanic homeowners to take subprime loans even if they qualified for traditional financing. We don’t know if malice drove this policy, but under disparate impact guidelines, it doesn’t matter: The government can show concrete harm and act accordingly.
This is an expansive power, but given our history, also a necessary one. We built our housing markets on a structure of discrimination, from bias in lending and state-sanctioned segregation to exclusionary zoning and active attacks on minority homeownership. To fix this, you can’t just ban discrimination, you need a countervailing force; otherwise, inequality would reproduce itself.
Beyond this, there’s the simple fact that racial bias is still alive in vast areas of American life, and it’s a fool’s errand to root out racists—most people who discriminate are too smart to broadcast their prejudice. Disparate impact—backed by both courts and the present administration—is a vital tool in fighting these battles.
But it’s also controversial, with opponents who see it as subversive to equal protection. “Instead of promoting equal protection under the law,” wrote Ammon Simon for National Review in 2012, disparate impact “grasps at ‘ensuring equal results,’ treating people like depersonalized ‘components of a racial, religious, sexual or national class.’ ” Likewise, in his concurrence in Ricci v. DeStefano—an affirmative action case—Justice Antonin Scalia swings at the doctrine, calling disparate impact provisions in employment practices a “racial thumb on the scales” that forces discriminatory “racial decisionmaking.”
Scalia and the conservative bloc of the Supreme Court are hostile to almost all race-conscious policies—from affirmative action (which Justice Clarence Thomas once compared to segregation) to important parts of the Voting Rights Act—and want to end disparate impact as a federal tool. Last year they almost had a chance; a group of New Jersey residents challenged disparate impact in Mount Holly v. Mount Holly Gardens Citizens in Action, Inc., a fight over a neighborhood revitalization plan that plaintiffs claimed would dislocate and disproportionately harm minority residents. But the case was settled before it could reach the high court.
With the latest case, a settlement is unlikely. The court will hear disparate impact, and most likely—following Chief Justice John Roberts’ infamous declaration that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”—end it.
It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of such a decision. In the last decade, with Roberts at the forefront, the Supreme Court has chipped away at the major provisions and policies of the civil rights era. With Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 in 2007, the Roberts court struck down voluntary integration efforts in Seattle; with Shelby County v. Holder, it struck down the preclearance formula for the Voting Rights Act, gutting the law and opening the door to voter suppression; and with Schuette v. BAMN, it gave Michigan voters free rein to block affirmative action through constitutional amendment. At the moment, it’s poised to uphold strict voter identification laws and—if the opportunity presents itself—strike at the core provisions of the VRA.
There’s a reason Justice Sonia Sotomayor swiped at Roberts in her now-famous Schuette dissent—the chief justice has launched an astounding assault on civil rights law that promises huge consequences for efforts against racial inequality. And indeed, Roberts is joined by a whole host of right-wing legislators and conservative intellectuals—perched at think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the misnamed Center for Equal Opportunity—all united in a “colorblind” vision of American life that doesn’t see a public role for fighting racial inequality, and often holds it as overstated or attributable to “culture,” not the accumulated effects of past discrimination.
What’s interesting is the degree to which this isn’t new. In fact, it sits parallel to our past, where large gains for minorities—and blacks in particular—sit flush with setbacks and challenges.
We don’t think of it this way in the popular imagination, but the United States had two periods of “Reconstruction.” The first came after emancipation, when freed slaves worked in alliance with sympathetic whites to rebuild the South and forge a new path after the Civil War. But weakened by President Andrew Johnson, it never came to fruition. Instead, it was destroyed by ex-Confederates who terrorized the South with violence and drove blacks out of political life. With the Democratic Party as their vehicle, these “Redeemers” would set the stage for Jim Crow, convict leasing, and the march of horrors that marked black life for the next century.
The Second Reconstruction was the civil rights movement, and—as historian Eric Foner writes in his magisterial book on the first Reconstruction, it marks a time when “the nation again attempted to come to terms with the implications of emancipation and the political and social agenda of Reconstruction.”
Where the first Reconstruction had politicians, the second had preachers (and later, again, politicians). And where the first gave us a new Constitution—through the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments—the second gave force to their provisions, through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. It’s these laws—and the court cases that followed—that dismantled Jim Crow and integrated blacks into American political life.
Outside the far, far fringes of American life, there’s no challenge to that inclusion. But as we see with large parts of the Republican Party—including today’s conservatives on the Supreme Court—there is a challenge to the race-conscious policies and measures we use to protect and secure the political participation of blacks and other minorities.
This attack has far more to do with partisan advantage than any racial animus—as Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott explained in his defense of the state’s voter ID law, the goal is to limit Democrats, not minorities. Still, the effect is the same: applying new state limits on participation that have their largest impact on minorities, with shrinking protection from the federal government.
In his 1883 ruling against the 1875 Civil Rights Act—which prohibited black exclusion from jury service and guaranteed equal treatment in public accommodations, public transportation—Justice Joseph P. Bradley took a stand that should sound familiar to contemporary opponents of so-called racial entitlements:
When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen, or a man, are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.
Replace “slavery” with “Jim Crow” and you have the popular conservative view of race and Constitution. And small setbacks aside, that view is on the march, with its crosshairs aimed at disparate impact and the Fair Housing Act.
Put another way, if the civil rights movement was Second Reconstruction, then—if we need a name for today’s push against its key measures—you could do worse than the Second Redemption.
By: Jamelle Bouie, Slate, October 10, 2014
“The Supreme Court vs. Eric Holder”: Why They’re So Wrong And He’s So Right About Voter ID
As my colleague Joan Walsh wrote when news of his pending resignation first hit the wires, Eric Holder’s legacy as U.S. attorney general is complicated. There’s a lot for a liberal to be unhappy about — too big to jail, the war on whistleblowers, continued acquiescence to the NSA — but there’s good stuff in there, too.
I was reminded of that when I watched a video of the attorney general that was released Monday morning, a short clip in which Holder blasts the Supreme Court’s decision last week to allow Ohio Republicans to reduce the amount of time allotted to Ohioans for early voting. The conservative movement’s recent embrace of policies that suppress the vote is one of the issues where Holder’s at his best. And as he argued in his new video, the extraordinary practical and symbolic meaning of the right to vote is the reason why.
“It is a major step backward to allow these reductions to early voting to go into effect,” Holder says in the video. “Early voting is about much more than making it more convenient for people to exercise their civic responsibilities,” he continues. “It’s about preserving access and openness for every eligible voter,” Holder argues, “not just those who can afford to miss work or who can afford to pay for child care.”
He’s absolutely right. While the orthodox Republican’s views on affirmative action or, say, criminal justice leave much to be desired, the campaign for voter ID laws being waged by the conservative movement — which was buoyed by the Supreme Court right-wing majority’s recent decision — strikes at something far more precious and fundamental. This, in other words, is not politics as usual.
To explain what I mean, I’m going to draw upon an analogy Jonathan Chait used a few months back, during his long debate with Ta-Nehisi Coates and others over the role culture and racism play in most African-Americans’ daily lives. I’m not going to get into that debate here (I think this piece makes plain where I land), but I want to adapt Chait’s analogy of life as a basketball game with crooked referees to the fight over voter suppression, where I think it’ll be considerably less problematic.
While it’s probably a mistake to think of the president and attorney general as mere coaches (i.e., players) in the context of fighting black poverty, when it comes to voter rights, it really is the courts — not the White House — we expect to play the role of fair-minded referee. And to give the judicial branch credit, it was initially doing an OK job of it in the Ohio case, twice shooting down Republicans’ attempt to disenfranchise Democrats in the state.
Indeed, in two separate rulings, judges saw the move for what it was: the political equivalent of a losing basketball team declaring to its sharpshooting competitor that shots made from behind the arc were now worth zero points instead of three. But that’s when Justices Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas stepped in, giving Ohio the go-ahead in a 5-4 decision that, for whatever reason, no member of the majority felt inclined to defend individually.
If you keep in mind that, Roberts excluded, this is the exact same group of men who just a few years ago were willing to destroy health care reform out of fear of government-mandated broccoli, you should have a sense of how patently weak the argument in favor of voter ID laws. Not only because the evidence that voter fraud is a real problem is essentially zilch, but because the attempt to deny millions of Americans their only real tool of self-government, their right to vote, is contrary to what most people think is so special about U.S. democracy.
On the most basic, essential level, our right to vote is about our right to be recognized as full and legitimate members of the community. It’s the way our democracy turns our God-given (or Universe-given, if you prefer) right to control ourselves into a contract we sign allowing other people — not only the government but civil society, too — to hold over us an enormous amount of authority. It’s how we say that even if we don’t like everything about this game, we’re still willing to play.
At the risk of oversimplification: Rousseau famously claimed society was nothing less than a system of control, a network of chains keeping us locked to the status quo. What makes Attorney General Holder’s Monday address so great, and his legacy on voting rights so commendable, is his understanding that by ruling in favor of Ohio conservatives, the Supreme Court is helping them throw away the key.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, October 6, 2014
Justice Ginsburg Was Right”: Hobby Lobby Decision; Already Wreaking Havoc
One of the hallmarks of the ongoing conservative legal revolution is that judicial decisions with enormous consequences are often downplayed by their engineers as just another day at the office (Citizens United, Carhart v. Gonzales), or as having no significance as precedent (Bush v. Gore). As Jeff Toobin explains at the New Yorker, the same phenomenon is occurring with respect to Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.
Justice Samuel Alito insisted, in his opinion for the Court, that his decision would be very limited in its effect. Responding to the dissenting opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who called it “a decision of startling breadth,” Alito wrote, “Our holding is very specific. We do not hold, as the principal dissent alleges, that for-profit corporations and other commercial enterprises can ‘opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs….’ ”
A sampling of court actions since Hobby Lobby suggests that Ginsburg has the better of the argument. She was right: the decision is opening the door for the religiously observant to claim privileges that are not available to anyone else.
One such matter is Perez v. Paragon Contractors, a case that arose out of a Department of Labor investigation into the use of child labor by members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (The F.L.D.S. church is an exiled offshoot of the Mormon Church.) In the case, Vernon Steed, a leader of the F.L.D.S. church, refused to answer questions by federal investigators, asserting that he made a religious vow not to discuss church matters. Applying Hobby Lobby, David Sam, a district-court judge in Utah, agreed with Steed, holding that his testimony would amount to a “substantial burden” on his religious beliefs—a standard used in Hobby Lobby—and excused him from testifying. The judge, also echoing Hobby Lobby, said that he needed only to determine that Steed’s views were “sincere” in order to uphold his claim. Judge Sam further noted that the government had failed to prove that demanding Steed’s testimony was not, in the words of the R.F.R.A., “the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.” That burden seems increasingly difficult for the government to meet.
The Supreme Court itself has suggested that the implications of Hobby Lobby were broader than Alito originally let on. Just days after the decision, the Court’s majority allowed Wheaton College, which is religiously oriented, to refuse to fill out a form asking for an exemption from the birth-control mandate—while retaining the exemption. There is another case, Little Sisters of the Poor v. Burwell, which is also pending, where a religious order asserts that the filling out of a form (which, if granted, would exempt them from the law’s requirements) violates their rights.
If just filling out a form can count as a “substantial burden,” it’s hard to imagine any obligation that would not.
It looks like the Court will soon have abundant opportunities to prove Ginsberg was absolutely right.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 1, 2014
“Blatant And Immediate”: The Supreme Court That Made It Easier To Buy Elections Just Made It Harder For People To Vote In Them
In case there was any remaining confusion with regard to the precise political intentions of the US Supreme Court’s activist majority, things were clarified Monday. The same majority that has made it easier for corporations to buy elections (with the Citizens United v. FEC decision) and for billionaires to become the dominant players in elections across the country (with the McCutcheon v. FEC decision) decided to make it harder for people in Ohio to vote.
Yes, this Court has messed with voting rights before, frequently and in damaging ways. It has barely been a year since the majority struck down key elements of the Voting Rights Act.
But Monday’s decision by the majority was especially blatant—and immediate. One day before early voting was set to begin in Ohio on Tuesday, the Supreme Court delayed the start of the process with a decision that will reduce the early voting period from thirty-five days to twenty-eight days.
Assaults on early voting are particularly troublesome, as the changes limit the time available for working people to cast ballots and increase the likelihood of long lines on Election Day. And changes of this kind are doubly troublesome when they come in close proximity to high-stakes elections, as they create confusion about when and how to vote.
American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio Executive Director Freda Levenson decried the ruling, calling it “a real loss for Ohio voters, especially those who must use evenings, weekends and same-day voter registration to cast their ballot.”
The ACLU fought the legal battle for extended early voting on behalf of the National Association of Colored People and the League of Women Voters, among others.
“To make (the Supreme Court ruling) even worse,” Levenson told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “this last-minute decision will cause tremendous confusion among Ohioans about when and how they can vote.”
Ohio Republicans had no complaints. They have made no secret of their disdain for extended early voting, which has been allowed for a number of years and which has become a standard part of the political process in urban areas where voters seek to avoid the long lines that have plagued Ohio on past Election Days.
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a top Republican, has taken the lead in efforts to restrict voting. In June, he established a restricted voting schedule. Husted’s scheme was upset by lower-court rulings. In particular, the courts sought to preserve early voting in the evening and on Sundays, which is especially important for working people.
Fully aware of that reality, the Supreme Court scrambled to issue a 5-4 decision that “temporarily” allows the limits on early voting to be restored. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy voted to allow Husted to limit voting, while Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan opposed the ruling.
Monday’s ruling was not a final decision; the Court could revisit the matter. But that won’t happen in time to restore full early voting before his year’s November 4 election.
The Court is sending a single of at least tacit approval of controversial moves by officials in other states—such as Wisconsin and North Carolina– to curtail early voting and access to the polls. Legal wrangling also continues over the implementation of restrictive Voter ID rules in those states and others—with special concern regarding Wisconsin, where a September federal appeals court ruling has officials scrambling to implement a Voter ID law that had been blocked by a lower-court judge.
Expressing disappointment that a narrow majority on the Supreme Court has permitted “changes that could make it harder for tens of thousands of Ohioans to vote,” Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, said, “Courts should serve as a bulwark against rollbacks to voting rights and prevent politicians from disenfranchising voters for political reasons.”
Weiser is right.
Unfortunately, the High Court is focused on expanding the influence of billionaires, not voters.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, September 29, 2014
“How The Supreme Court Protects Bad Cops”: How Many More Deaths And Riots Will It Take Before SCOTUS Changes Course?
Last week, a grand jury was convened in St. Louis County, Mo., to examine the evidence against the police officer who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, and to determine if he should be indicted. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. even showed up to announce a separate federal investigation, and to promise that justice would be done. But if the conclusion is that the officer, Darren Wilson, acted improperly, the ability to hold him or Ferguson, Mo., accountable will be severely restricted by none other than the United States Supreme Court.
In recent years, the court has made it very difficult, and often impossible, to hold police officers and the governments that employ them accountable for civil rights violations. This undermines the ability to deter illegal police behavior and leaves victims without compensation. When the police kill or injure innocent people, the victims rarely have recourse.
The most recent court ruling that favored the police was Plumhoff v. Rickard, decided on May 27, which found that even egregious police conduct is not “excessive force” in violation of the Constitution. Police officers in West Memphis, Ark., pulled over a white Honda Accord because the car had only one operating headlight. Rather than comply with an officer’s request to get out of the car, the driver made the unfortunate decision to speed away. The police chased the car for more than five minutes, reaching speeds of over 100 miles per hour. Eventually, officers fired 15 shots into the car, killing both the driver and a passenger.
The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and ruled unanimously in favor of the police. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the driver’s conduct posed a “grave public safety risk” and that the police were justified in shooting at the car to stop it. The court said it “stands to reason that, if police officers are justified in firing at a suspect in order to end a severe threat to public safety, the officers need not stop shooting until the threat has ended.”
This is deeply disturbing. The Supreme Court now has said that whenever there is a high-speed chase that could injure others — and that would seem to be true of virtually all high-speed chases — the police can shoot at the vehicle and keep shooting until the chase ends. Obvious alternatives could include shooting out the car’s tires, or even taking the license plate number and tracking the driver down later.
The court has also weakened accountability by ruling that a local government can be held liable only if it is proved that the city’s or county’s own policy violated the Constitution. In almost every other area of law, an employer can be held liable if its employees, in the scope of their duties, injure others, even negligently. This encourages employers to control the conduct of their employees and ensures that those injured will be compensated.
A 2011 case, Connick v. Thompson, illustrates how difficult the Supreme Court has made it to prove municipal liability. John Thompson was convicted of an armed robbery and a murder and spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row, because of prosecutorial misconduct. Two days before Mr. Thompson’s trial began in New Orleans, the assistant district attorney received the crime lab’s report, which stated that the perpetrator of the armed robbery had a blood type that did not match Mr. Thompson’s. The defense was not told this crucial information.
Through a series of coincidences, Mr. Thompson’s lawyer discovered the blood evidence soon before the scheduled execution. New testing was done and again the blood of the perpetrator didn’t match Mr. Thompson’s DNA or even his blood type. His conviction was overturned, and he was eventually acquitted of all charges.
The district attorney’s office, which had a notorious history of not turning over exculpatory evidence to defendants, conceded that it had violated its constitutional obligation. Mr. Thompson sued the City of New Orleans, which employed the prosecutors, and was awarded $14 million.
But the Supreme Court reversed that decision, in a 5-to-4 vote, and held that the local government was not liable for the prosecutorial misconduct. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said that New Orleans could not be held liable because it could not be proved that its own policies had violated the Constitution. The fact that its prosecutor blatantly violated the Constitution was not enough to make the city liable.
Because it is so difficult to sue government entities, most victims’ only recourse is to sue the officers involved. But here, too, the Supreme Court has created often insurmountable obstacles. The court has held that all government officials sued for monetary damages can raise “immunity” as a defense. Police officers and other law enforcement personnel who commit perjury have absolute immunity and cannot be sued for money, even when it results in the imprisonment of an innocent person. A prosecutor who commits misconduct, as in Mr. Thompson’s case, also has absolute immunity to civil suits.
When there is not absolute immunity, police officers are still protected by “qualified immunity” when sued for monetary damages. The Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia in 2011, ruled that a government officer can be held liable only if “every reasonable official” would have known that his conduct was unlawful. For example, the officer who shot Michael Brown can be held liable only if every reasonable officer would have known that the shooting constituted the use of excessive force and was not self-defense.
The Supreme Court has used this doctrine in recent years to deny damages to an eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched by school officials on suspicion that she had prescription-strength ibuprofen. It has also used it to deny damages to a man who, under a material-witness warrant, was held in a maximum-security prison for 16 days and on supervised release for 14 months, even though the government had no intention of using him as a material witness or even probable cause to arrest him. In each instance, the court stressed that the government officer could not be held liable, even though the Constitution had clearly been violated.
Taken together, these rulings have a powerful effect. They mean that the officer who shot Michael Brown and the City of Ferguson will most likely never be held accountable in court. How many more deaths and how many more riots will it take before the Supreme Court changes course?
By: Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine: Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, August 26, 2014
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