Washington, D.C. – In the fractious congressional battle over labor secretary nominee Thomas Perez, St. Paul pastor Fredrick Newell is the star witness caught in the middle.
Newell, a longtime neighborhood jobs activist, became an unlikely witness Tuesday for Republicans in a duel with the Obama administration over civil rights law.
In a joint session to hear Newell's story, House Republicans questioned whether Perez, the Justice Department's civil rights chief, dropped Newell's whistleblower suit against the city of St. Paul last year as part of a "secret deal" to keep an unrelated housing discrimination case from going to the U.S. Supreme Court.
That has put Newell, a businessman and pastor of True Spirit Ministries on St. Paul's East Side, at the forefront of Republican efforts to upend the Perez nomination. He has also become a key figure in their battle against the Democrats' expansive view of "disparate impact" — the idea that discrimination doesn't have to be intentional.
Newell, who often seemed like a spectator at his own hearing on Tuesday, said he was nevertheless happy to get a public airing of his case before Congress. But as a 54-year-old black Mississippi native and an Obama supporter, he said he had no interest in becoming a pawn in a larger partisan battle.
"Let's put it this way," he said in an interview after the hearing. "I'm a minority, so I've seen the effects of discrimination. I have no problem with the [Democrats'] disparate impact theory at all."
Newell's story has a tangled history going back to Vice President Walter Mondale, who sponsored the landmark Fair Housing Act as a U.S. senator from Minnesota in the 1960s. He and other civil libertarians grew concerned last year about the legal ramifications of a lawsuit brought by Twin Cities' landlords, who contended that St. Paul's strict code enforcement depleted the city's housing stock for minorities.
Although the case was brought by mostly white landlords, it was based on the theory that St. Paul's housing policies hit poor minority renters the hardest.