Blame Congress, not Supreme Court, for eviction ruling

Let’s catch up. On March 27, 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act, and Donald Trump signed it into law. One provision of the massive $2.2 trillion legislation imposed a temporary ban on evictions for renters in response to the economic hardships caused by the pandemic. The case for the moratorium at the time didn’t rest on public health, but on the fact that the country was heading into a lockdown. Asking people to pay rent when they were told they couldn’t go to work didn’t make a lot of sense.

When the ban expired, long after the lockdowns ended, Congress opted not to extend it. So, with much self-congratulation, the Trump administration’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an eviction moratorium of its own, this time under the dubious pretext of stopping the spread of COVID-19. That moratorium extended into the first months of the Biden administration.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that the CDC didn’t have the authority to nullify rental contracts across the country, but if Congress wanted to pass a law to continue the policy, as it had under the CARES Act, it could.

Congress declined. Instead, leading Democrats asked Biden in effect to defy the court and just do it again. At first, the White House said it couldn’t because that would be unlawful. But then Biden did it anyway, admitting he was doing it just to buy some time and violating his oath of office in the process.

As expected, the court blocked the ban.

”Last night, the Supreme Court immorally ripped away that relief in a ruling that is arbitrary and cruel,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement the following day.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) denounced the decision by a ”Republican-packed Supreme Court” that he said will ”put millions of people in danger.” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) declared on Twitter, ”The Supreme Court is on the wrong side of history in the midst of this crisis.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement that the administration is ”disappointed” with the ruling, which it knew was coming.

I think the conservative majority wasn’t nearly as ”extreme” as it should have been. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in his July ruling, had told the administration it couldn’t do this unilaterally. The president responded in bad faith. The court should have read him the riot act.

Moreover, the very idea that a politically appointed bureaucrat has carte blanche to do whatever he or she wants simply by invoking a crisis is a profoundly dangerous principle. You’d think Democrats, after four years of fretting over Donald Trump as a would-be dictator and his various assaults on democratic and constitutional norms, would have some appreciation of this.

Personally, I’m not convinced…