Tag Archives: eviction moratorium

Modified Good News

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On Wednesday I reported that the Supreme Court had struck down the CDC’s extension of the eviction moratorium (article here). However, the celebration may have been a bit premature.

Yesterday NewsMax reported the following:

The court’s action late Thursday ends protections for roughly 3.5 million people in the United States who said they faced eviction in the next two months, according to Census Bureau data from early August.

The court said in an unsigned opinion that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reimposed the moratorium Aug. 3, lacked the authority to do so under federal law without explicit congressional authorization. The justices rejected the administration’s arguments in support of the CDC’s authority.

“If a federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue, Congress must specifically authorize it,” the court wrote.

Just for the record, I don’t believe that Congress has the authority to specifically authorize a moratorium on evictions. An eviction is usually the result of someone either not paying their rent or destroying the rental property. Those events are usually detailed in a contract that the renter signs with the Landlord. That contract requires the payment of rent and puts certain requirements on the tenant for the upkeep of the property. For Congress to interfere in a private contract between the renter and the Land goes against the private property rights guaranteed by our Constitution. A Supreme Court that was actually upholding the U.S. Constitution would strike down any law from Congress that interfered with private property rights.

Actions Have Consequences

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A news source called NTD posted an article on Wednesday about the impact of the eviction moratorium. NTD is a New York-based, global television network founded in 2001 by Chinese-Americans who fled communism. I think their perspective is very interesting.

The article reports:

Extended rent moratoriums and the slow distribution of billions in federal rent assistance are driving many small landlords to call it quits.

“Nobody wants to become a landlord anymore,” said Diane Baird, executive director of the Lake Erie Landlord Association. “And we have very few new people entering into the business.”

The Lake Erie Landlord Association represents landlords in northern Ohio, southern Michigan, and western Pennsylvania.

Jon Frickensmith, president of the South Wisconsin Landlord Association, told The Epoch Times, “Multiple landlords have told me they are selling out. They ask us how to get out of the business and how to get the tenants out of their houses. These are mom-and-pop operators, the kind of landlords that are willing to take tenants with bad credit or a criminal history. This will only add to the housing crisis.”

The vast majority of landlords in the United States are individuals, with most owning one or two rental houses.

The article notes:

The National Equity Atlas estimates that American landlords are owed more than $21 billion in overdue rent.

Don James, president of the Florida Landlord Association in Coral Gables, believes the moratorium is detrimental to renters as well as landlords.

“We as landlords cannot enforce our rental contracts and, this being a seller’s market, (it) is forcing landlords to sell their properties. This is going to cause shrinking of rental facilities, thus hurting renters.”

Mike Bodeis, president of the 450-member Port Huron Area Landlord Association, and himself the owner of 40 rental houses, told The Epoch Times, “It’s a myth that 3.6 million Americans may soon be made homeless. Two-thirds of them could be paying their rent, but are not because they choose not to. They did not choose to pay their rent or utility bills with all the stimulus money they received.

To illustrate, Bodeis said, “In one eviction, in which I personally participated, we took six flatscreen TVs out of the house. It’s all about priorities.”

I have seen this lack of priorities in action before. Poverty has a lot more to it than how much money a person makes. It has to do with learning to set priorities and make responsible decisions. After hurricane Katrina, residents in New Orleans received government checks of a couple of thousand dollars to provide for temporary housing–the government understood that much of the housing in New Orleans was uninhabitable after the hurricane. As soon as those checks were received, business at the strip clubs and riverboat gambling casinos increased rapidly. Many of the people who received those checks had never been taught to plan for the future or to be financially responsible. Many people who were out of work because of the Covid epidemic did the same sort of thing.

The problem of reckless personal spending has its roots in our culture, our education system, and our government. Our government sets the example of reckless spending; our citizens follow that example. Out schools do not teach basic life skills such as budgeting, basic financial planning, and personal responsibility. Our culture is one of instant gratification–the use of credit cards is encouraged, enormous education debt is encouraged, and many Americans have incurred more debt than they will ever be able to pay off.

Putting a moratorium on evictions is not the answer. Getting the money to the renters who need it and somehow putting guardrails around how the money is spent is what is needed.

Remember That Oath?

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When President Biden was sworn in as President, he took the following oath of office:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of  the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Note the part that says preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

Yesterday Hot Air reported the following  regarding President Biden’s eviction moratorium:

This is the aspect of his moratorium chicanery that I find most breathtaking, the frank admission that he’s trying to exploit the legal process to extend a dubious executive order. Most everyone else has focused on the substance of what the White House did, replacing a certainly illegal moratorium order with a new one which they have every reason to know is almost certainly illegal.

And that’s appalling. But the problem could be solved if the courts reacted quickly by scheduling an expedited hearing on the numerous challenges to the new order. When the president is as candid as Biden is here in admitting that he’s gaming the judicial system to keep an illegal measure in place for as long as he can, they have a duty to stop him by putting all other business on hold to consider the merits of that measure. If they don’t, they’re letting him get away with it.

Look at it this way. If this court fight drags out for six months and SCOTUS finally rules that the new moratorium is also illegal, as everyone expects, what’s to stop the White House from drafting yet another moratorium that’s a tiny bit different from the previous one and litigating the lawfulness of the new order for six months after that? Biden is engaged in litigation that’s dilatory by design, which he admits. It’s essentially frivolous. The courts have to show him that that won’t work.

The article concludes:

“Specifically, and in blatant violation of his solemn duty to execute the laws faithfully, Biden has usurped Congress’s legislative authority and declared the power to legislate,” writes Andy McCarthy. “He is running roughshod over the separation of powers, which is the foundation of our constitutional framework, limiting power and preserving liberty.” His old boss Barack Obama did the same thing when he seized Congress’s immigration power to legalize DREAMers under DACA. But Obama didn’t face a recent Supreme Court ruling directly on point that should have steered him away from attempting such a thing. And his DACA order didn’t come pre-packaged with a dilatory legal strategy designed to keep the program up and running while meritless litigation played out in court. Even if, ah, it’s sort of worked out that way in practice.

He will not be impeached–the Democrats control the House of Representatives (and the powers that be are not fond of Kamala Harris)-but he should be.

Ignoring The U.S. Constitution One Article At A Time

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On Tuesday, Breitbart reported that President Biden had reversed his previous position and renewed the moratorium on evictions.

The article reports:

Socialist Democrats such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rallied to her cause, holding rallies at the capitol to demand the administration act. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) also joined the protests and sang, “This Land Is Your Land” in defiance of Biden’s decision.

The president reversed his decision on Tuesday after it was clear that leftists were furious with it.

At the White House, Biden complained the courts prevented him from extending the moratorium by ruling against the Centers for Disease Controls order in July.

“Look, the courts made it clear that the existing moratorium was not constitutional, that it wouldn’t stand,” Biden said.

Biden’s new eviction moratorium, scheduled for release Tuesday evening, will reportedly extend protections for up to 80 percent of Americans in some of the areas experiencing a rise in cases.

But Biden conceded his new moratorium would also likely face legal challenges.

“At a minimum, by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some additional time,” he said.

So let’s look at this for a minute. The Centers for Disease Controls (CDC) does not have the power to make laws. That is the obvious problem. Next, the federal government does not have the power to cancel a private contract (rental agreement) between two private parties. Also, if the tenant is excused from paying rent, why isn’t the landlord excused from paying the mortgage on the property? This extension will force some landlords to go into foreclosure themselves. The right to private property is one of the foundations of our Constitution. The eviction moratorium strikes a blow at private property–it is the government telling the landlord that he cannot evict people who are not paying the rent due him.

In December 2010, I posted an article about the connection between private property rights and the prosperity of a county. Basically the article notes that private property rights are one of the keys to bringing a country out of poverty and into prosperity. So why then are we undermining those rights?

Hot Air posted an article today about the impact of the decision to extend the eviction moratorium on landlords.

The article notes:

When the eviction moratorium does eventually come to an end, property owners will be reluctant to evict tenants who communicated with them in good faith, worked out payment plans, and applied for government assistance, Pinnegar said. On the other hand, people who “ghosted” their landlords – meaning they stopped paying rent, stopped responding to emails and letters, and actively avoided contact – likely won’t be given the same benefit of the doubt.

“There will be some evictions,” Pinnegar said, “but I think the conversation about millions of people being evicted, and homeless centers being overrun, and people on the streets, it’s a great exaggeration that I think unfortunately is driving public policy.”

The government is meddling where it shouldn’t meddle. Someone in Washington needs to have the courage to stand up and say this is unconstitutional.