HUD's New 'Fair Housing' Rule Establishes Diversity Data for Every Neighborhood in US

[Ryan Ruck]

Now we know why Stand Your Ground and gun ownership in general are being attacked. Can't have armed citizens interfering with their master plan.

I'm sure these are related:

• Social Engineering Bill In Senate May Force You Into A City
• Poverty Pervades The Suburbs
• Obama Signs 'Agenda 21' Related Executive Order - A Plan for World Government

HUD's New 'Fair Housing' Rule Establishes Diversity Data for Every Neighborhood in U.S.

July 22, 2013

To ensure that "every American is able to choose to live in a community they feel proud of," HUD has published a new fair-housing regulation intended to give people access to better neighborhoods than the ones they currently live in.

The goal is to help communities understand "fair housing barriers" and "establish clear goals" for "improving integrated living patterns and overcoming historic patterns of segregation."

“This proposed rule represents a 21st century approach to fair housing, a step forward to ensuring that every American is able to choose to live in a community they feel proud of – where they have a fair shot at reaching their full potential in life,” said HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan.

“For the first time ever," Donovan added, "HUD will provide data for every neighborhood in the country, detailing the access African American, Latino, Asian, and other communities have to local assets, including schools, jobs, transportation, and other important neighborhood resources that can play a role in helping people move into the middle class."

Social engineering

According to HUD, long-term solutions include "helping people gain access to different neighborhoods and channeling investments into under-served areas." The mapping tool may guide development and zoning decisions, for example.

In a July 16 speech to the NAACP, Donovan said the American Dream still isn't within equal reach of all communities. He lamented the lack of diversity in America's boardrooms, schools, and the nation's "strongest neighborhoods."

"We have got to shape a future where ladders of opportunity are available for all Americans," Donovan said. "For African Americans, this is critically important. Historically, for this community, the rungs on these ladders have been too far apart -– making it harder to reach the middle class."

Donovan said HUD's new neighborhood mapping tool, which uses Census data, will "expand access to high opportunity neighborhoods and draw attention to investment possibilities in under-served communities."

"Make no mistake, this is a big deal," Donovan said. "With the HUD budget alone, we are talking about billions of dollars. And as you know, decades ago, these funds were used to support discrimination. Now, they will be used to expand opportunity and bring communities closer to the American Dream."

Under the Fair Housing Act, HUD requires grantees, such as cities, that receive federal housing funds to "affirmatively further fair housing."

Under the proposed rule, the neighborhood data provided by HUD will be used to evaluate patterns of integration and segregation, racial and ethnic concentrations of poverty, and access to "valuable community assets." HUD wants to know if existing laws and policies -- such as zoning, financing, infrastructure planning and transportation -- create, perpetuate or alleviate segregation.

The proposed rule explicitly incorporates fair-housing decision-making into existing planning processes and "other decision-making that influences how communities and regions grow and develop."

Gee, wonder what the next step is for all those foreclosed homes.

It's coming...

[Ryan Ruck]

HUD Proposes New Rule For Fair Housing Act

July 19, 2013

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed a new rule for how local jurisdictions must comply with the fair housing requirement that they affirmatively further fair housing.

The requirement is at the heart of Westchester County’s legal troubles with the Fair Housing Act that led to a 2009 settlement still bedeviling the county. A District Court found the county had falsely certified that it had affirmatively furthered fair housing because it didn’t analyze race in its study of impediments to fair housing. The analysis is still at the center of the problems with the implementation of the settlement, particularly the analysis of zoning.

The new rule will replace the Analysis of Impediments with a new process for analyzing obstacles to fair housing and developing plans to overcome them. In proposing the rule, HUD acknowledged that the old way didn’t work well; the requirements were vague and little enforced.

“HUD’s Fair Housing Planning Guide (Planning Guide), a document issued in 1996, provides extensive suggestions but does not fully articulate the goals that AFFH must advance,” the proposed rule says. “In addition, HUD has never provided data to grantees to help frame their analysis, and AIs are not regularly submitted to HUD for review.”

It goes on to say: “the GAO found that there has been uneven attention paid to the AI by local communities in part because sufficient guidance and clarity was viewed as lacking. Specifically, GAO noted the uneven quality of existing AIs and found that ‘HUD’s limited regulatory requirements and oversight’ contribute to many grantees placing a ‘low priority on ensuring that their AIs serve as effective planning tools.’”

Here’s more from HUD:

HUD PUBLISHES NEW PROPOSED RULE ON AFFIRMATIVELY FURTHERING FAIR HOUSING

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published a new proposed rule to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing (AFFH) in the Federal Register today and made available background materials and a prototype geospatial tool. AFFH refers to the 1968 Fair Housing Act’s obligation for state and local governments to improve and achieve more meaningful outcomes from fair housing policies, so that every American has the right to fair housing, regardless of their race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability or familial status.

“This proposed rule represents a 21st century approach to fair housing, a step forward to ensuring that every American is able to choose to live in a community they feel proud of – where they have a fair shot at reaching their full potential in life,” said HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan. “For the first time ever, HUD will provide data for every neighborhood in the country, detailing the access African American, Latino, Asian, and other communities have to local assets, including schools, jobs, transportation, and other important neighborhood resources that can play a role in helping people move into the middle class. Long-term solutions will involve various strategies, such as helping people gain access to different neighborhoods and channeling investments into underserved areas. ”

The proposed rule was drafted in response to a 2010 GAO report and numerous requests from stakeholders, advocates, and HUD program participants seeking clear guidance and technical assistance. The proposed rule refines existing requirements so the individuals, organizations, and state and local governments implementing HUD programs better understand their requirements under the Fair Housing Act and have the tools they need to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing, ensuring that every American has the opportunity to live in the community of their choice without facing discrimination.

Under the proposed new rule, HUD will provide program participants with:

• A more clearly articulated definition of what it means to affirmatively further fair housing;
• An assessment template that replaces the current, loosely defined Analysis of Impediments;
• Nationally uniform data and a geospatial tool; and
• Clear guidance and technical assistance.

As part of a larger, locally-driven assessment process with public input, the data and guidance will provide an invaluable starting point as communities work to better understand their fair housing barriers and establish clear goals. Goals developed in the assessment process will connect to investment plans at the local and state levels where communities will outline their strategies. HUD anticipates that the new AFFH rule will empower local decision-making and foster smart government and better housing policies. The new rule will also better fulfill the aims of the Fair Housing Act through this proposed AFFH process rooted in data and integrated into other planning processes.

As part of the rule making process, members of the public will have an opportunity to review the proposed AFFH rule and submit their thoughts, comments or questions via Regulations.gov. The public comment period will last for 60 days starting on Friday July 19th.

[American Patriot]

So they are socially engineering neighborhoods now?

[Ryan Ruck]

New York City Plans To Attack Economic Segregation By Moving Poor Into Middle-Class Neighborhoods, Richer Into Poverty Spots

Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Vicki Been said the plan to build 80,000 new affordable apartments and preserve 120,000 units would create a more diverse city.

May 21, 2014

The City plans to attack economic segregation in its affordable housing plan — placing the poor in middle-class neighborhoods and the more affluent in high-poverty spots.

Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Vicki Been said the plan to build 80,000 new affordable apartments and preserve 120,000 units would create a more diverse city.

“We really have to make economic diversity a cornerstone of that plan,” she said at a City Council budget hearing Wednesday.

“That means that in some neighborhoods that have mostly middle or upper-income housing, that we would need to put affordable housing at the very lowest income,” she said.

“But in some communities where we have a great deal of poverty . . . we would try to bring more moderate (-income housing) into those neighborhoods, to try to achieve the kind of diversity that we want,” Been said.

De Blasio’s executive budget boosted the housing department’s capital cash to $3.1 billion, up from $1.9 billion in his January preliminary budget, to help pay for the ambitious proposal.

Been said the emphasis would be on two groups traditionally overlooked in city affordable housing programs — the very low income and the middle class. The city will quadruple the number of apartments geared to the poorest New Yorkers, who make less than $25,000 for a family of four, and increase by 50% the number for those making $68,000 to 103,000.

Exact locations where housing developments will be built have not yet been chosen.

Council housing chairman Jumaane Williams (D-Brooklyn) hailed the proposal, though he said he anticipated some resistance both from affluent New Yorkers unhappy about low-income developments in their neighborhoods and from residents of poorer areas who don’t want to be surrounded by housing that’s out of their reach.

“I do think there will be some concern in certain communities,” he added. “We will have to explain to people why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

[Ryan Ruck]

How Obama Stole Dubuque

January 13, 2016

What state is Dubuque in? If you answered Chicago, you are correct. Chicago’s no state, you say? Don’t be so 18th century — so “constitutional.” Dubuque is in Chicago, which is now a kind of state. Or to put it differently, the Obama administration is in the process of replacing our entire system of government — made up of nested local, state, and national, levels — with a regional framework. In Obama’s new dispensation, suburbs, small towns, and modest-sized cities like Dubuque will be turned into subordinate satellites of regional mega-cities like Chicago, regardless of which state these local governments are formally a part of.

Welcome to the world of “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH), President Obama’s transformative new regulation. How will AFFH work? The city of Dubuque gives us one of our best and most frightening previews yet. I hope the presidential candidates are watching, because Obama’s new AFFH regulation and the Dubuque fiasco ought to be an issue in this year’s Iowa caucuses. I also hope American citizens pay attention to the travesty in Dubuque, because it’s not too late to save your hometown from Dubuque’s fate. (I’ll tell you how to do this below.)

An account of Dubuque as a forerunner of a post-AFFH world comes to us courtesy of a stunning report by Deborah Thornton, a policy analyst for Iowa’s Public Interest Institute. The report tells the story of how Dubuque was pressured to cede large swathes of its governing authority to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has forced the city to direct its limited low-income “Section 8” housing resources, not to its own needy citizens, but to voucher-holders from Chicago.

Unlike the more familiar forerunner of AFFH, Westchester County, Dubuque is not an upper-middle-class suburb but a small and economically struggling city. At $44,600, median income in Dubuque is well below the state median of $51,843. Like other nearby Mississippi river towns with aging populations, Dubuque is hard-pressed to provide good jobs and decent housing for the low-income people already there: poor families with children, retired elderly, and disabled adults. The city’s priority is to revive its economy by keeping its young people from moving away, and by attracting new residents who are willing and able to start businesses. Like any city, Dubuque’s first obligation is to see to the needs of the citizens who already live there, vote, and pay taxes. Or so it was in pre-AFFH America.

Our story begins about eight years ago. Just as Dubuque was reeling from the effects of the 2008 recession and dealing with an uptick in its own low-income housing needs, the city was hit with a wave of “Section 8” low-income housing voucher applicants from Chicago. A few years earlier, Chicago had systematically demolished its most drug- and crime-ridden high-rise public housing facilities, using grants from HUD. Yet through its own mismanagement, Chicago had failed to properly replace its now depleted low-income housing stock, leaving many Chicago residents looking to use their Section 8 vouchers elsewhere.

With many more Section 8 applicants than it could house, Dubuque instituted a low-income housing point system granting preference to Dubuque residents, county residents, state residents, and out-of-state residents, in that order. Although HUD’s rules ostensibly allow localities to craft their own housing priorities, Dubuque’s point system was deemed unacceptable by HUD. The feds undertook a review of Dubuque’s housing policy that effectively treated the city as part of greater Chicago.

This, of course, is ridiculous. Dubuque is 200 miles and a four-to-five hour drive away from Chicago, even without traffic. And of course the two cities are in different states. But by effectively treating Dubuque and Chicago as part of the same “region,” HUD was able to declare Dubuque’s low-income housing point system discriminatory. Since the vast majority of Section 8 applicants from Chicago were African-Americans, Dubuque’s preferences for citizens of its own city, county, and state were deemed racist. HUD insisted that Dubuque would have to admit housing applicants in conformity with the demographics of the larger (HUD-defined) region. Somehow Dubuque had become a satellite of Chicago.

Having previously accepted HUD funding through the Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) program, as well as HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program, Dubuque was formally obligated to “affirmatively further fair housing” in whatever way HUD defined that obligation. Refusal to submit to HUD’s dictates would have led to the withdrawal of federal funding, a lawsuit for supposed discrimination, or both. The cowed elected officials of Dubuque accordingly signed a “voluntary” (in truth, forced) consent agreement that effectively ceded control of the city’s housing policy to HUD for at least five years.

Under HUD’s detailed oversight, Dubuque must now actively recruit Section 8 voucher holders from the Chicago area. In fact, as of January 2015, the percentage of African-American voucher users in Dubuque was larger than the percentage of African-Americans living in Chicago. The problem is that very few of these new public housing residents have ever lived or paid taxes in Dubuque, or even Iowa. The feds have essentially commandeered Dubuque to solve Chicago’s public housing shortage. HUD’s diktat also imposes a huge administrative burden on Dubuque, with monthly, quarterly, annual, and five-year plans to be filed and followed up on. (Yes, a “five-year plan.”) Having “voluntarily” consented to a federal takeover, Dubuque is now obligated to follow HUD’s every command for at least five years.

Thornton rightly notes that Dubuque is a template for the coming implementation of AFFH. The rule will make it easy for HUD to effectively annex other Iowa river-towns—like Clinton, Davenport, and Burlington—to greater Chicago, although those cities are no closer to Chicago than Dubuque. The same pattern will play out nationally under AFFH, Thornton warns.

In a post-AFFH world, every region of the United States will be compelled “to meet nationally determined standards for the management and makeup of every aspect” of local life, says Thornton. AFFH will also force local communities into regional consortia directed by what Thornton calls “unelected governing boards who do not represent the voters.” Those electorally unaccountable regional commissions, she continues, “will set targets for the desired percentage of ‘types’ of people to live in each area of the region.” Cities and businesses, “buried under mounds of paperwork,” will have no choice but to submit.

How can a housing rule control every aspect of local life? It’s far easier than you might imagine. AFFH redefines “fair housing” to include proximity to transportation, jobs, and schools. This will effectively extend the power that HUD now exercises over Dubuque’s housing policy to nearly every other aspect of local development and planning. Under AFFH, once a town takes HUD money, it effectively loses control not only over housing but schools, zoning, transportation, the environment, and business location. As Thornton concludes, “If you take their money, you play by their rules.”

Dubuque shows that, over time, Obama’s AFFH rule could spell the end of local government in America. Thornton rightly warns against the regional consortia provided for in AFFH. Once HUD pressures a municipality into such a regional governing entity, local control is lost. But the Dubuque case strikes me as an even scarier precedent than Thornton implies. A city may not even have to formally join a regional consortium to lose its capacity for self-government.

After all, HUD didn’t need to force Dubuque to formally join a regional consortium in order to turn it into a satellite of Chicago. All the feds had to do was classify Dubuque as part of greater Chicago, then judge the city’s housing demographics as out-of-balance with reference to the racial and ethnic make-up of the region as a whole. At that point, a trumped-up charge of racism and threats to withdraw funding or file a lawsuit “logically” followed. Without joining anything, Dubuque is for all practical purposes now part of Chicago, essentially because HUD has declared it so.

AFFH makes this trick particularly easy to pull off because the rule instructs all localities in receipt of federal grants to analyze their housing practices with reference to “regional data” provided by HUD. By forcing every town, small city, or suburb that takes HUD money to evaluate the “fairness” of its demographic mix with reference to the demographics of the nearest mega-city, HUD can effectively institute regional government in America by fiat. If the ethnic mix of your town is substantially different than the ethnic mix of a city even 200 miles, a five-hour drive, and another state away, you will have to recruit that city’s dominant ethnicities to populate your low-income housing, so long as HUD declares you to be in that “region.” As Iowa is to Chicago, so may New Hampshire soon be to Boston. Are you listening presidential candidates?

In its story on the announcement of AFFH, The New York Times quoted Secretary Julian Castro downplaying HUD’s intended enforcement efforts. Castro portrays the cutoff of federal funds as a last resort that he barely intends to use, if at all. Dubuque makes a mockery of Castro’s claim, unless you credit the absurd pretense that the Dubuque’s compliance agreement was in fact voluntary, rather than the response of a financially-strapped town to threats of federal defunding and/or lawsuits—threats levied on the basis of a thoroughly contrived “regionalist” premise. When it comes to housing, Secretary Castro is now forcibly controlling virtually every move Dubuque makes.

Come to think of it, Dubuque may not be in the state of Chicago after all. What state is Dubuque really in? If you answered H.U.D., you are correct.

If you don’t want your hometown to become the next Dubuque, there’s something you can do to prevent it right now. Organize your neighbors and force your local government to stop taking HUD money. (For more on how to do this, go here.)

[Ryan Ruck]

Say hello to the handiwork of your new Vice President, or more likely President.

Obama’s Last Act Is To Force Suburbs To Be Less White And Less Wealthy

May 8, 2016

Hillary’s rumored running mate, Housing Secretary Julian Castro, is cooking up a scheme to reallocate funding for Section 8 housing to punish suburbs for being too white and too wealthy.

The scheme involves super-sizing vouchers to help urban poor afford higher rents in pricey areas, such as Westchester County, while assigning them government real-estate agents called “mobility counselors” to secure housing in the exurbs.

Castro plans to launch the Section 8 reboot this fall, even though a similar program tested a few years ago in Dallas has been blamed for shifting violent crime to affluent neighborhoods.

It’s all part of a grand scheme to forcibly desegregate inner cities and integrate the outer suburbs.

Anticipating NIMBY resistance, Castro last month threatened to sue suburban landlords for discrimination if they refuse even Section 8 tenants with criminal records. And last year, he implemented a powerful new regulation — “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” — that pressures all suburban counties taking federal grant money to change local zoning laws to build more low-income housing (landlords of such properties are required to accept Section 8 vouchers).

Castro is expected to finalize the new regulation, known as “Small-Area Fair Market Rents” (SAFMR), this October, in the last days of the Obama presidency.

It will set voucher rent limits by ZIP code rather than metro area, the current formula, which makes payments relatively small. For example, the fair market rent for a one-bedroom in New York City is about $1,250, which wouldn’t cover rentals in leafy areas of Westchester County, such as Mamaroneck, where Castro and his social engineers seek to aggressively resettle Section 8 tenants.

In expensive ZIP codes, Castro’s plan — which requires no congressional approval — would more than double the standard subsidy, while also covering utilities. At the same time, he intends to reduce subsidies for those who choose to stay in housing in poor urban areas, such as Brooklyn. So Section 8 tenants won’t just be pulled to the suburbs, they’ll be pushed there.

“We want to use our housing-choice vouchers to ensure that we don’t have a concentration of poverty and the aggregation of racial minorities in one part of town, the poor part of town,” the HUD chief said recently, adding that he’s trying to undo the “result of discriminatory policies and practices in the past, and sometimes even now.”

A draft of the new HUD rule anticipates more than 350,000 Section 8 voucher holders will initially be resettled under the SAFMR program. Under Obama, the total number of voucher households has grown to more than 2.2 million.

The document argues that larger vouchers will allow poor urban families to “move into areas that potentially have better access to jobs, transportation, services and educational opportunities.” In other words, offering them more money to move to more expensive neighborhoods will improve their situation.

But HUD’s own studies show the theory doesn’t match reality.

President Bill Clinton started a similar program in 1994 called “Moving to Opportunity Initiative,” which moved thousands of mostly African-American families from government projects to higher quality homes in safer and less racially segregated neighborhoods in several counties across the country.

The 15-year experiment bombed.

A 2011 study sponsored by HUD found that adults using more generous Section 8 vouchers did not get better jobs or get off welfare. In fact, more went on food stamps. And their children did not do better in their new schools.

Worse, crime simply followed them to their safer neighborhoods, ruining the quality of life for existing residents.

“Males…were arrested more often than those in the control group, primarily for property crimes,” the study found.

Dubuque, Iowa, for example, received an influx of voucher holders from projects in Chicago — and it’s had a problem with crime ever since. A recent study linked Dubuque’s crime wave directly to Section 8 housing.

Of course, even when reality mugs leftists, they never scrap their social theories. They just double down.

The problem, they rationalized, was that the relocation wasn’t aggressive enough. They concluded they could get the desired results if they placed urban poor in even more affluent areas.

HUD recently tested this new theory in Dallas with disastrous results.

Starting in 2012, the agency sweetened Section 8 voucher payments, and pointed inner-city recipients to the far-flung counties surrounding Dallas. As government-subsidized rentals spread in all areas of the Metroplex (163 ZIP codes vs. 129 ZIP codes), so did crime.

Now Dallas has one of the highest murder rates in the nation, and recently had to call in state troopers to help police control it. For the first time, violent crime has shifted to the tony bedroom communities north of the city. Three suburbs that have seen the most Section 8 transfers — Frisco, Plano and McKinney — have suffered unprecedented spikes in rapes, assaults and break-ins, including home invasions.

Although HUD’s “demonstration project” may have improved the lives of some who moved, it’s ended up harming the lives of many of their new neighbors. And now Castro wants to roll it out nationwide. Soon he will give Section 8 recipients money to afford rent wherever they choose — and if they don’t want to move, he’ll make them an offer they can’t refuse.

Ironically, Hillary’s own hometown of Chappaqua is fighting Section 8 housing because of links to drugs and crime and other problems.

This is a big policy shift that will have broad implications, affecting everything from crime to property values; and it could even impact the presidential election, especially if Castro joins Hillary on the Democratic ticket.

[American Patriot]

I guess Obama doesn't like, you know, "get out often". My neighborhood in Colorado Springs was mostly white. But, it was a diversived neighborhood. Naturally done.

That is, there were whites, blacks, hispanics, asians.... They OWNED the houses, not renting and not running their properties down. Fact is, the demographics there nearly perfectly matched what the US Census said.

72% white, 17% black (or less) and a portion of others to fill the gaps.

The DIFFERENCE was they owned their houses.

They MAINTAINED their houses in the area (everyone).

In areas where Obama wants to shove in Muslims (let's face it, it's not blacks he's concerned about) they will force a reduction in the cost of homes, or worse, force people out to "rent" to low income people (or no income).

Sad part is... one day, in the not to distant future, someone will have to call in the National Guard when the folks revolt to prevent the government from telling them what to do.

[American Patriot]

By the way, I think if you check, you will find that they don't want you to live in an RV, a tiny home or something like that, and you MUST be connected to the "grid" because they want to keep track of you. Boats will be next.

[Ryan Ruck]

GOP Leaders Toss Loin Cloth to Democrats on Obama’s War on Suburbs

May 19, 2016

Former Sen. Jim DeMint used to say he’d rather have 30 principled conservative Republicans in the Senate than 60 liberal Republicans like Arlen Specter. Even many conservatives were skeptical of his strategy at the time. To this very day, many conservatives are convinced that you must always support the GOP nominee for Congress in a general election, even if he wasn’t the conservative you wanted in the primary. After all, it’s always better to have some Republican in office than a Democrat, right?

Wrong! And it’s about time we learn that lesson.

Today’s votes on Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) “war on the suburbs” program demonstrates, once again, that having a GOP conference full of liberals is actually worse than having a smaller conference full of conservatives. Much like an interception is worse than an incomplete pass in football or a ground out into a double play is worse than a strike out in baseball, electing liberal Republicans helps Democrats more in the long run than working with a minority of conservatives to combat the Left and strive to win future elections with an unvarnished message to voters.

As we observed earlier this week, Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) amendment to abolish the war on the suburbs would have drawn a sharp line between the parties and empowered Republicans to run against Democrats who allow the federal government to extort local communities into accepting their social engineering. Specifically, the Lee amendment would have defunded the entire AFFH tool which allows HUD to extort localities that don’t have enough low income housing in their jurisdictions to meet the illegal HUD regulation.

Instead of allowing that amendment to go unchallenged, leadership let liberal Republican Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who had never previously engaged on this issue, to work with Democrats on a bipartisan amendment “solving” the problem. Except it didn’t solve the problem; it merely prohibited an activity that doesn’t occur. It was crafted carefully to only prohibit HUD from actually redrawing zoning maps, something they have never done. They never tell county government exactly where they must redraw their maps, just that if they fail to comply with the data from the AFFH tool, they will lose their funding and be subject to anti-discrimination lawsuits. However, on paper, the Collins amendment sounds like it is blocking this unpopular regulation – exactly the cover Democrats needed!

All but 9 Democrats proceeded to vote for the Collins amendment today, giving them bipartisan cover in their states to claim they stopped HUD’s intrusion into local zoning laws. The 9 no votes came from Democrats in very liberal states or those not up for reelection this cycle. Clearly, most Democrats are feeling the heat on this issue.

Then, knowing that all Democrats would vote down the Lee amendment, most Republicans, including members of leadership, were free to vote the right way on the Lee amendment with the full confidence that it would be defeated anyway. The Senate voted 60-38 to table (kill) the Lee Amendment, with 16 Republicans falling on their swords, so many more can get a hall pass. Needless to say, all but a few Republicans will not utter a word about this issue to the media in their home states and make this an election issue. This is the muddled mess we have with a bipartisan oligarchy.

What transpired today is reminiscent of the Corker-Cardin Iran bill, which gave Democrats cover because it was sold to the public as a means of giving Congress input into the Iran deal, when in fact, the bill ensured that Obama would unilaterally ratify the treaty unless an insurmountable super-majority actively opposed it. It was worse than passing nothing because it gave Democrats a much-needed loin cloth from the political fallout without actually making the deal better in any way.

This has been the hallmark of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) Senate over the past two years. Whereas a majority party in the Senate is supposed to embarrass their opponents with tough amendments in order to win back the White House and a 60-seat majority in the chamber, McConnell’s Republicans have been blocking conservative amendments. They even shield Democrats from any exposure to tough votes. Today, Susan Collins went a step further and handed the Democrats their own phony bill, perfectly crafted to give off the veneer of defending local government.

This is an example of subtraction by addition in political math. Had we just had 30 solid conservatives we would have ended up with a similar result, but at least the battle lines could have been drawn in a clear fashion for all Americans to see the differences between the parties. With Susan Collins and the loin cloth Republicans, Democrats can now have their cake (block conservative policy) and eat it to (avoid the political fallout).

At some point, conservatives need to look beyond the next election and understand that if they fail to build an apparatus for electing conservatives and creating a conservative party, not only will Democrats keep winning policy and culture battles, Republicans will obfuscate any difference thereby shielding the Left from electoral reprisal. It’s better to start with a small army that is committed to battling the enemy than with a large army full of those who turn their guns on their own soldiers and protect the enemy forces. Under the current failed system, we can’t even strive for a better result and hope for a better day.