President Obama has big plans for how we should live. We’ve written about these plans — which fall under the label “regionalism” — here, here, and elsewhere. In essence, Obama seeks to fulfill the left’s longtime dream of redistributing money from the suburbs to the cities and inner-ring suburbs, and imposing racial and income balance in every neighborhood.

Obama has put these plans on hold until after the November election, but Arizona congressman Bill Gosar wants to shine the light on them before then. Thus, as Stanley Kurtz reports, Gosar plans to offer an amendment to the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Bill that would bar the use of funding to implement, administer, or enforce the Obama administration’s proposed rule on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH).

The AFFH rule is the vehicle through which the Obama administration intends to conduct an assault on the suburbs and to implement its vision of how we should live. It forces every municipality receiving federal aid to conduct a survey of its neighborhoods by race, ethnicity and income. If the mixture is not to the federal government’s liking, changes would have to be made on pain of losing federal funding. This, as Kurtz says, would effectively strip local governments of their zoning powers.

Gosar presents the following explanation for his amendment:

American citizens should be free to choose where they would like to live and not be subject to neighborhood engineering and gerrymandering at the behest of an overreaching federal government. Local zoning decisions should be made by local communities, not bureaucrats in Washington, DC.

The logic seems unassailable to me, but what are the prospects for Gosar’s amendment? According to Kurtz, it has a chance of passing the House. The Senate, of course, is a very different proposition.

But Gosar is doing the nation a service just by bringing his amendment to a vote and thereby raising the visibility of Obama’s regionalist agenda. In Kurtz’s words, “it would be a novel and useful development to see Obama and the Democrats shouldering the political consequences of their policies, something they are expert at avoiding.”

If you would like to urge your congressman to support the Gosar amendment, you can do so by calling the U.S. Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. The good folks who work the switchboard will put you right through to your representative’s office.