Who controls the zoning in your town — your local elected government or Barack Obama? Who controls decisions in your neighborhood about where schools, shopping malls, and apartment buildings are located — your local elected government or Barack Obama? Who controls whether you live in a densely packed neighborhood with real barriers to travel by automobiles, or a car-friendly bedroom suburb — you or Barack Obama? That’s what Congress is about to decide.


I’ve written about President Obama’s wildly overreaching and altogether transformative Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation, and the effort in Congress to defund it. The die will be cast this week, as the Republican leadership in Congress decides how hard to push to include in the Transportation Housing and Urban Development (THUD) appropriations bill the amendment defunding AFFH proposed by Representative Paul Gosar (R., Ariz,) and passed by the House this past spring. With the Republican base exasperated and looking for its leadership to show some kind of backbone, this might be one of the easiest and most substantive moves Republicans in Congress could make to block one of Obama’s transformative initiatives.

For a quick and pointed case to that effect, see this piece by Ken Blackwell and Rick Manning, “Congress must stop Team Obama’s plan to radically reengineer America’s neighborhoods.”


— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He can be reached at comments.kurtz@nationalreview.com.