Despite the Supreme Court’s explicit warning that any executive extension of the federal eviction moratorium would be struck down, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided this week to implement a new moratorium anyway for two months. When asked about the legal obstacles this policy would inevitably run into, President Joe Biden admitted that what his administration is doing is illegal, but he said he doesn’t care.
“Constitutionally, the bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster,” Biden admitted during a press conference on Tuesday. “Look. I want to make it clear. I told you I would not tell the Justice Department or the medical experts or scientists what they should say or do, so I don’t want to get ahead of the CDC.”
He continued, “At a minimum, by the time it is litigated, we’ll probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are, in fact, behind in the rent and don’t have the money.”
In other words, Biden knows that the CDC is acting illegally but wants the agency to continue to act illegally until the courts can get around to stopping it. Litigation takes time, which means the moratorium could be in effect for weeks, maybe even months, before it is struck down. And even when it is declared unconstitutional, there is no way to go back and force renters to pay the money they owed when the moratorium was in place, even if the moratorium itself was illegal.
This is such a flagrant violation of the law and the constitutional bounds of Biden’s presidency that it’s a wonder no one outside of conservative circles seems to care.
Imagine, for a moment, if the Supreme Court had told former President Donald Trump that he could not use military funds to build the southern border wall without congressional approval. (In reality, it allowed the construction to continue in a 5-4 ruling last summer.) And imagine if Trump responded by tweeting that he was just going to build the wall anyway. The uproar from Democrats and the liberal media would have been immediate. They would have slammed his executive overreach as a hopeful dictatorship, and they would have been right to do so. The president cannot rule as he pleases. He is necessarily checked by Congress and the courts, and when one branch of government has very clearly forbidden him from overstepping the bounds of his authority, he has a constitutional duty to listen.
Biden is trying to see just how much he can get away with, and he deserves a sharp and immediate rebuke. Pandemic or not, the separation of powers still applies, and no president should be able to defy this constitutional principle in a blatant manner without facing serious consequences for doing so.
