The Supreme Court has answered President Joe Biden’s attempt to violate the rule of law and unilaterally extend the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s unconstitutional eviction moratorium with a firm “No.”
In a 6-3 ruling, the court made it clear that the CDC does not have the authority to deprive landlords of their property rights, no matter how serious the coronavirus pandemic might be.
“It would be one thing if Congress had specifically authorized the action that the CDC has taken. But that has not happened. Instead, the CDC has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination. It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts,” the justices said in an unsigned per curiam opinion.
Moreover, to grant the CDC the kind of power that it attempted to take for itself would upend the entire balance of government. If the CDC was allowed to stop millions of landlords from collecting payment in the name of public health, the court said, what could it not do?
Alarmingly, there were three justices who disagreed with this point and argued the CDC should have as much authority as it wants in the midst of a public health crisis. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer cited the rising number of delta variant cases nationwide and claimed that this is somehow reason enough to grant the CDC a power that does not exist. Again, where would this kind of reasoning stop? We already know our public health officials are more than willing to shift the goalposts whenever it fancies them — does anyone want to find out just how far they’d be willing to take this?
The bureaucracy is not a monarchy. It cannot just rule as it pleases, no matter how much Biden would like it to. Of course, Biden knew this would be the result. He admitted that he knew what the CDC was doing was unconstitutional but that he test his luck anyway. The court rightly struck him down — this time for good.
