The Disparate Impact standard is critical to continued and enhanced opportunity to access fair credit, housing, and homeownership. Demos strongly opposes efforts to undermine this longstanding enforcement tool.
As part of an effort to reshape rules around debt and lending to reduce racial wealth inequality, we propose establishing a public credit registry to gradually replace the current for-profit credit reporting system.
Our current system of campaign finance reform suppresses the political power of people of color and that lack of political power has had proven, lasting consequences.
Adding a question on citizenship status to the decennial census to which every household in the United States is required to respond is entirely unnecessary for the proper performance of the Census Bureau’s functions, and will greatly impair the quality, utility and clarity of the 2020 Census.
The state legislature should support the Maryland Law Enforcement and Governmental Trust Act (“Trust Act”) and its model of limiting state and local involvement with federal immigration law enforcement.
A report on the ability of local communities to decide, based on their own form of local government, how they may enact policies to protect immigrant rights.
Public financing of elections, as a state and local democracy reform, can help enhance the political voice and power of working-class people and people of color. It is an effective antidote to the outsized influence corporations and major donors currently have on both politics and policy.
In 2010 and 2011, Maryland and New York took bold steps to correct the problem known as prison gerrymandering, a problem resulting from the United States Census Bureau’s practice of counting incarcerated individuals as residents of their prison cells rather than their home communities.