Republicans Stoke White Resentment Over Discrimination In The World Of Car Loans

West Virginia is the Trumpiest state in the union. The PVI is R+19 and Trump beat Hillary 489,371 (68.5%) to 188,794 (26.4%). Trump won every single county in the state. (In the primary, Bernie also won every single county in the state and beat Hillary 124,700 (51.4%) to 86,914 (35.8%). In fact, on primary day, there were plenty of candidates where Bernie took more votes than Trump. West Virginia voters wanted change; they voted for change in the primary-- and took a gamble-- a bad one-- in the general.

Joe Manchin is a very popular politician in West Virginia and his popularity is despite him being a Democrat. so when he votes with the Republicans-- as he often does-- voters back home don't hold it against him. It helps bolster his popularity. Wednesday he took a very bad vote. He was the only Democrat to cross the aisle and vote with the Republicans on a bill that will hurt West Virginia voters. But it won't hurt his reelection chances; it will improve them. It shouldn't.

The Senate voted 51-47 to kill another pieces of Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This pieces was a policy warning auto lenders not to discriminate against minority borrowers. An old friend, Karl Frisch, the executive director of Allied Progress, a consumer watchdog group, said that "Many auto dealers are actively discriminating against people of color. This behavior is pervasive, and the CFPB’s guidance would help to end it. They may try to dress it up with political spin, but today the Senate endorsed discrimination."

The Washington Post reported that "The fight centers on guidance issued by the CFPB in 2013 that took aim at a common industry practice that allows auto dealers to mark up interest rates offered by finance companies. Finance firms such as Ally set an interest rate based on objective criteria-- including borrowers’ credit history and the size of their down payments. Auto dealers are then free to raise the interest rates within certain limits. The finance companies and the dealers split the extra profits.

The CFPB argued that auto dealers were using that discretionary markup to charge black and Hispanic borrowers more than white ones, even if they had the same credit scores. Over several years, the agency fined several auto lenders millions of dollars for discriminating against minority borrowers, and some lenders stopped allowing discretionary markups, cutting into auto dealer profits.

The guidance quickly became one of the CFPB’s most controversial campaigns. House Republicans launched a multiyear investigation into the matter, arguing that the CFPB used faulty data to support the policy. The guidance, auto dealers said, made it more difficult to offer consumers discounts on their car purchases out of fear they would be accused of discrimination.

House Republicans are eager to follow suit. The grotesquely crooked chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Jeb Hensarling (R-TX),-- who sits safely in an uber-gerrymandered district that stretches from Mesquite and the suburbs east of Dallas all the way into the most backward and racist part of the state where Louie Gohmert's, Kevin Brady's and Brian Babin's districts meet (PVI is R+16) turned reality upside down with his statement on stoking white resentment: "Studies showed that the rule could lead to many credit-worthy borrowers paying more for their auto loans."

Antoinette Sedillo Lopez is a former University of New Mexico law professor who has used her legal background to fight for social justice. This outrageous GOP action in the Senate is in her wheelhouse... so I asked her about it. She told me that "If Congress votes to kill these provisions that protect consumers, it is effectively voting to enable discrimination in auto lending. The ECOA (Equal Credit Opportunity Act) exists for the express purpose of preventing the types of systemic discrimination that existed in the industry prior to the CFPB being created. The reversal flies in the face of the overwhelming evidence that when African Americans or Latinos go to purchase a vehicle, dealerships are twice as likely to add a markup to a loan than compared to their white counterparts. Congress should be in the business of protecting consumers and ultimately regulating systemic market problems like these, and not in the business of reversing important evidence-based reforms."

Hopefully, Alan Grayson, no fan of the sleazy kind of racism Hensarling practices, will be back in Congress in January-- working on issues like this again. After the vote he told us flatly that "This reflects a deep divide in America politics and society. You can be for an unfettered 'free market,' or you can be against discrimination, but not both. Many Americans had hoped that we had decisively chosen the latter over the former when we integrated lunch counters, but apparently not."