Congress up to vote on stopping Obama from taking over zoning laws

While our attention has been elsewhere, one of the most draconian acts of this administration can be stopped by Congress with the Gosar Amendment. Obama has plans to create “utopian” communities and decide who and what lives and is built in our communities. Please write your Rep. Please read the embedded links in the post below for this chilling attack on our freedom. Here we go:

This week marks the moment of truth for the effort to defund President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation — a stunningly ambitious attempt to force Americans to change the way they live. AFFH seeks to use the power of the national government to create communities of a certain kind, each having what the federal government deems an appropriate mix of economic, racial, and ethnic diversity.

Stanley Kurtz frames the issue this way:

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.

The Obama administration’s Housing & Urban Development department is embarking on a social engineering experiment that wipes out one of the fundamental functions of local government – making neighborhood zoning decisions.

Through its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation, the president is seeking to diminish both liberty and local autonomy – hoping to supplant the foundational American ideal of equality of opportunity with the far left’s vision of imposed egalitarian outcomes.

The moment of truth has arrived because this week the Republican congressional leadership will decide how hard to push to include Rep. Paul Gosar’s amendment defunding AFFH in the Transportation Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill. The House passed the Gosar amendment this spring. However, it is far from clear that the Gosar defund language will be retained. That depends on how committed Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are to its retention.

Ken Blackwell (the former mayor of Cincinnati) and Rick Manning make the case for insisting on the Gosar amendment here. They argue that the amendment is necessary to protect the most fundamental function of local governments – to control over where and what is built in their community.

More at Powerline blog