Last night, the House of Representatives approved an “emergency plan to rescue the nation’s domestic automobile industry” that would extend General Motors and Chrysler $14 billion in loans. However, the measure currently lacks the votes to pass in the Senate, and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has threatened to kill the bill.

And conservatives are not stopping there. Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), and others have put forth their own “no-bailout alternative” to the loan.

The “alternative” is all of two pages, one of which is spent criticizing the proposal passed by the House. With the remaining page, conservatives reveal that their plan for helping “the Big Three to become competitive again” amounts to busting their union. After stating that United Auto Workers hold “to concessions already made” conservatives demand that the union:

Concedes the elimination of Supplemental Unemployment Benefits; Concedes elimination of the Jobs Bank Program; Agrees to either reduce company retiree health care obligations or otherwise convert a portion of such obligations into equity; and Agrees to reduce wages and benefits to the levels paid by non-Big Three manufacturers.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) said yesterday on NPR that, in regards to an auto loan, “we’re not going to do it with the barnacles of unionism wrapped around their necks.”

First, it is worth pointing out that the UAW has already agreed to suspend the Jobs Bank, and delay automaker payments to a retiree health care fund. Furthermore, the union has implemented a plan to permanently shift retiree health costs into a UAW trust fund in 2010. Therefore, the second and third “concessions” that conservatives are demanding have, for all intents and purposes, already happened.

The other two “concessions,” however, are where the trouble really begins. The last one implies that Big Three workers are paid substantially more than their non-Big Three, non-unionized counterparts. However, as the New York Times and the New Republic pointed out, UAW workers don’t earn significantly more in hourly wages. The first, meanwhile, calls for cutting unemployment benefits at a time when economists and lawmakers are advocating extended benefits as an important response to the financial crisis.

Ultimately, these union-busting demands are counterproductive. As David Madland and Harley Shaiken note, “unions help foster a competitive high-wage, high-productivity economic strategy“:

Unionization and high worker productivity often go hand-in-hand. Fairness on the job and wages that reflect marketplace success contribute to more motivated workers. Given the pressures of globalization and competitiveness today, unions have been responsive to increasing productivity and embracing new innovations.

The UAW has already conceded to help the Big 3 manage their financial troubles. New innovations — not a lower-paid, uncared for workforce — will help Detroit get back on its feet.

In a New York Times op-ed today, Howard Husock, vice president for policy research at the Manhattan Institute, is the latest in a string of conservatives to try pinning blame for the housing crisis on low-income borrowers and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Husock claims that, “the American public will be ill served” if community-reinvestment rules and affordable housing goals are “allowed to continue unchanged“:

There’s little doubt that the rating agencies helped inflate the housing bubble. But when we round up all the culprits, we shouldn’t ignore the regulators and affordable-housing advocates who pushed lenders to make loans in low-income neighborhoods for reasons other than the only one that makes sense: likely repayment.

As Matt Taibbi put it responding to similar sentiments from Byron York, “Tell me you’re not ashamed to put this gigantic international financial Krakatoa at the feet of a bunch of poor black people who missed their mortgage payments.”

The notion that loans made to lower-income borrowers through the CRA somehow caused the housing crisis has been thoroughly debunked again and again. Only six percent of the subprime loans made by CRA-covered lenders went “to lower-income borrowers or neighborhoods in their CRA assessment areas,” while 60 percent went to middle- or high-income borrowers. It was non-bank mortgage companies — not covered by CRA — that originated 50 percent of subprime loans, while another 30 percent were made by non-bank subsidiaries of banks or thrifts.

After promoting that idea that the CRA helped ignite the housing crisis, Husock goes on to claim that “we no longer need blunt regulatory instruments to draw lenders into low-income neighborhoods.” This is also a misguided assessment, as lenders are still discriminating against aspiring minority homeowners.

Just this week, the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity released a report showing that “U.S. housing is still racially segregated 40 years after civil rights laws to end unfair practices”:

The report found that whites got better loans than blacks, Latinos and Asians, who make up roughly a third of the population and who were sometimes steered away from buying homes in predominately white communities.

As Federal Reserve Board Governor Randall S. Kroszner said last week “CRA has, in fact, been helpful in alleviating the financial isolation of many areas of concentrated poverty.” This week, meanwhile, the Times’ editorial board advocated “strengthening fair-lending laws, especially the Community Reinvestment Act.” Indeed, weakening these regulations in a misplaced attempt at assigning blame for the housing crisis is counterproductive, and will further exacerbate already existing housing divisions.