Justice Department looking forward to causing another mortgage meltdown

Our favorite racist activist lawyers at the Justice Department Civil Rights Division are back. Last week, the CRD reached a settlement with two subsidiaries of American International Group (AIG) for at least $6.1 million. (Talk about kicking a dead horse.) The lawsuit, as with almost every lawsuit brought by the Civil Rights Division, was based on race.

The settlement was filed today in conjunction with a complaint made by the Justice Department in U.S. District Court in Delaware. Brought under the federal Fair Housing and Equal Credit Opportunity Acts, the complaint alleges African American borrowers nationwide were charged higher fees on wholesale loans made by AIG Federal Savings Bank (FSB) and Wilmington Finance Inc. (WFI), an affiliated mortgage lending company.

AIG didn't intentionally charge African-Americans with higher fees. The CRD's complaint was on the basis of disparate impact, which bans lending practices where the intent isn't discriminatory but the outcome is. What probably happens is that black homeowners are charged more by insurance companies in general, not because of their race, but because the actuaries assess this demographic as being poorer and a higher risk.

Maybe the CRD thinks we should just crash the entire housing industry all over again? The single largest factor in the housing bubble collapse was the Community Reinvestment Act, which mandated that a certain percentage of loans be made to minorities. The hope was that more blacks and Latinos would end up able to purchase homes. The result was that mortgage companies were forced to make countless subprime loans that couldn't be paid back. This pumped more and more air into the bubble until it finally popped.

The CRD proudly announced that this is the first time a mortgage company has been sued based on racial factors and that it won't be the last. Under disparate impact, they can sue pretty much any company that charges an average of one cent more for minorities than whites. The Obama Administration and its executioners have, it seems, learned nothing.

Barack Obama's Sotomayor Justice

Remember the New Haven firefighters? They studied hard and passed an exam qualifying them to be firefighters in the city of New Haven, Connecticut. But their results were thrown out after New Haven determined that the test was invalid because not enough African-Americans had scored highly. The firemen sued the city and Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, ruled against them.

This toxic racism has spread from Sotomayor's office to Barack Obama's Justice Department. Today, Justice announced that it is suing the state of New Jersey. Why? New Jersey requires candidates seeking to become police sergeants to take an exam, and not enough African-Americans and Hispanics are passing.

According to the press release, Justice wasn't going to allow any employment practices that resulted in something called "disparate impact." Disparate impact, also known as adverse impact, is a legal theory loved by liberals that forbids any employment practice "that does not appear to be discriminatory on its face; rather it is one that is discriminatory in its application or effect." It's affirmative action gone wild -- if enough minorities can't pass the test, then the test itself is illegal, even if the intent was never to discriminate.

This travesty of a lawsuit is the result of Thomas Perez, the head of the Justice Department Civil Rights Division. Perez has pledged to increase hate crime prosecutions, among other racially discriminatory practices. He has promised to use his position to make sure any alleged victims of discrimination "are made whole." Thanks to disparate impact, Obama's Justice Department will practice Sotomayor Justice -- judging by skin color rather than the law.