Yesterday the Justice Department filed a “Statement of Interest” in a housing case, warning landlords that refusing to rent units to people with criminal records can run afoul of the Fair Housing Act, since such a refusal can have a “disparate impact” on the basis of race and ethnicity.

I believe this may be the first such filing by the Obama administration since, alas, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling last year that disparate-impact claims may be brought under the FHA, but it is no surprise. The Court was warned, by my organization and others, that this was a logical consequence of interpreting the Act this way, and HUD guidance from earlier this year contained the same warning for landlords.

It’s easy to come up with hypotheticals of silly rules landlords might have (refusing to rent to someone who ran a stop sign 50 years ago?), but of course the issue is: Who decides whether the rule make sense or not, the person who owns the building or a federal bureaucrat? And of course it makes no sense at all to say that silly rules are fine if they result in no racial or ethnic disproportion, but are of great interest to the federal government if they lead to such politically incorrect imbalances. Thanks a lot, Justice Kennedy.