EaBo Clipper

I uncovered this little gem today. It seems as though Deval Patrick, among other Racialist policies forced the Chevy Chase bank to open a branch in DC. He did this by saying the bank was racist for not doing so. This speech by Orrin Hatch in 1997 lays it all out:

Mr. Lee’s supporters have characterized him as a "pragmatist" – a "practical litigator," rather than a pro-preference ideologue. That is a familiar tune in this debate. Three years ago, the President nominated another individual who was widely hailed as a pragmatist. Deval Patrick, another man for whom I have a high personal regard, was described by one paper as "a practically oriented working lawyer." Based upon those assurances, I resolved to set aside my concerns about Mr. Patrick’s views, gave him the benefit of the doubt, and supported his nomination.

But upon assuming the reigns of the Civil Rights Division, Mr. Patrick revealed himself to be a liberal civil rights ideologue. He used statistical racial imbalances and the vast resources of the Justice Department to extract race-conscious settlements from businesses and governments, large and small. For example, he undertook a credit-bias probe of Chevy Chase Savings & Loan in Maryland based largely on the fact that the bank had opened branch offices in the District of Columbia suburbs, but not in the city itself. There was no evidence that the bank had discriminated against qualified individuals seeking bank services. Nevertheless, Mr. Patrick entered into a consent decree that essentially forced the bank to open a branch in a low-income District neighborhood, and measures the bank’s compliance with the decree by assessing whether the the bank achieves a loan market share in minority neighborhoods that is "reasonably comparable" to its share in non-minority neighborhoods. Mr. Patrick’s Civil Rights Division took it upon itself to decide where a bank must do business, and then implemented dubious statistical measurements to determine whether the bank’s efforts stayed clear of the Division’s view of the law.

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Given Deval Patrick’s excesses in the Department, I am unprepared to again give the benefit of the doubt to a liberal activist nominee described by political allies as a "pragmatist" and a "conciliator." When asked at his hearing how he would differentiate his views from those of Mr. Patrick, Bill Lee was unable to muster a response.

Kind of interesting coming from a guy that worked for predatory lender Ameriquest.

Deval Patrick ... Together We Can... Enact Quotas