“Who is it that makes plans, telling others where they should live, handing them instructions of where to move and how to build their habitation? Plantation owners, overlords, that’s who. And who, pray tell, is commanding the American people of every color, ethnicity, creed and economic status to reconstruct communities according to their own ideas of fairness and correct integration quotas? The new slave owners, otherwise known as government, whose administrative bureaucrats represent the Executive Branch.” 1

When the all-encompassing Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation was first proposed in 2013, we addressed this inherent enslavement of every American to federal authority. Does the term “enslavement” hit a raw nerve… good. The article, 21st century Slavery – HUD vs MLK , took the issue of a federal agency dispensing zoning directives for neighborhoods, your neighborhood, to the crux of the problem – the creation of a new federal plantation.

Senator Mike Lee, joined by Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Jeff Sessions and David Vitter, is sponsoring an amendment that would defund what is, in Lee’s own words, essentially a national zoning board. What is certain is that the administration has been trampling on state’s rights by issuing a decree on who uses what bathroom, and, now, counties by undermining their self-determination. All of it is achieved through the one thing, the only thing that federal agencies have to offer: funds.

Just as serfs and slaves were beholden to the landowners as the dispensers of necessities of life, modern day local public agencies (from schools to economic development boards) have become accustomed to operating off of federal grant money. This is the dangling worm that caught the fish, and trying to remove the hook is almost impossible without considerable pain.

Worse than this is the endemic discrimination with which these agency overseers have infected the communities. Whether it’s separating fractional minorities of transgenders or ethnic and economic groups, regulations like the AFFH breed divisiveness.