Tomorrow morning, the House Financial Services Committee will hold a hearing on proposals to enhance the Community Reinvestment Act. The CRA, which was started under Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s and renewed again in the 1990s, is a piece of legislation that requires banks to make efforts to lend to more minority and low-income potential homeowners. And boy, does that make people angry. The CRA is a recurring target for the free-markets-right-or-wrong crowd to blame the financial crisis on. It makes an attractive straw man - as an example of government intervention in a financial market that existed pre-crisis, replete with liberal sympathies for the underserved, it strongly meets two of the main criteria for an ideological attack.
