Let the moratorium on evicting renters die. Trump should not have let the CDC enact it

A lot of us were left scratching our heads at some governmental proclamations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the strangest was the decision to cede national housing policy authority to the unelected bureaucrats at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who again this week have well overstepped their constitutional bounds.

You might’ve thought the Department of Housing and Urban Development would have been given this duty. Rather, it fell to the recognized housing and property rights experts at the CDC to enact a moratorium on evicting renters, which has raised serious questions about governmental encroachment on property rights and commercial activity.

Last spring, Congress included in the CARES Act a temporary and limited halt to evictions for just over 12 million Americans. The original, narrow moratorium began on March 27 of last year and expired less than four months later.

But then something truly weird happened: President Donald Trump signed an executive order giving the CDC more power than Congress ever intended, greatly expanding the size and duration of the moratorium program. The public health agency now wielded much wider authority to stop evictions for all renters and homeowners, so long as they met rather broad criteria.

A stroke of Trump’s Sharpie granted sweeping new protections to roughly 40 million American renters — individuals making up to $99,000 a year, or a married couple making up to $198,000. Many of these upper earners never missed a paycheck during the pandemic, but apparently needed this unprecedented government help on top of the direct relief payments they received from the government.

This was a decidedly non-conservative thing for Trump to do: stripping the rights of property owners by forcing them to continue housing non-paying renters for free.

Predictably, people abused the order. The New York Times reported on a Queens landlord whose tenants “have not paid rent in 15 months, bang on the ceiling below her bed at all hours for no apparent reason and yell, curse and spit at her… A tenant in the basement apartment also stopped paying rent, keyed (the landlord’s) car and dumped packages meant for her by the garbage.”

And the property owner, owed $36,000 in unpaid rent at the time of the reporting, was powerless to do a thing about it. The landlord in this case isn’t some real estate mogul who wipes her tears with stacks of cash. Rather, she’s a physician’s assistant who rents bedrooms in her home to make extra money.

Nearly half of all American rental units are owned by “mom and pop” landlords, the small property owners who took the brunt of the financial hardship and abuse caused by the CDC’s order. The policy sprang from a big-hearted desire to help the downtrodden in a time of need, as big government overreach always seems to do. But this idea, like Cousin Eddie visiting for Christmas, has long overstayed its welcome.

Ironically enough, if there were one area where Trump might’ve had some prior policy knowledge, it should have been the property rights of landlords! Alas, if Trump possessed such knowledge, he did not apply it. Property owners were forced into federal court for relief.

It finally came in July of this year, when two Trump-appointed Appeals Court judges from Kentucky — Amul Thapar and John Bush — joined a third colleague on the Sixth Circuit in ruling the CDC does not have the authority to interrupt the property rights of landlords.

“While landlords and tenants likely disagree on much, there is one thing both deserve: for their problems to be resolved by their elected representatives," Judge Thapar wrote.

How novel! Sweeping changes to American property rights law should be made by — gasp! — the lawmaking body, Congress.

​Judge Bush’s opinion was also notable, as it followed the CDC’s logic to its conclusion. The policy “would grant the CDC director near–dictatorial power for the duration of the pandemic, with authority to shut down entire industries as freely as she could ban evictions …”

Before the Sixth Circuit ruling, the Supreme Court could have done in June what Thapar and Bush had the courage to do by striking down the moratorium nationally. However, by a vote of 5-4 and in an opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court did not outright kill the program but said Congress would have to pass new legislation to extend it beyond the expiration date of July 31. It was a weaselly opinion from Kavanaugh, who opted to let the program simply expire instead of putting it out of its constitutional misery.

The moratorium briefly expired at the end of July, causing a full-blown meltdown of liberal Democrats in Congress, many of whom won their elections by promising everything from free college to free rent. Democrats pointed fingers up and down Pennsylvania Avenue as House members rushed toward the exits for a seven-week summer recess.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who the press often reminds us is the legislative mastermind of our generation, couldn’t cobble together the votes to pass an extension. Biden issued a desperate new 60-day order on Tuesday, but questioned the constitutionality of his own actions during the announcement. 

Biden knows full well what he’s doing is illegal, but that it will take time for a legal challenge to the new order to make its way through the courts. Just Monday, in fact, his White House admitted that the CDC did not have the authority to extend the moratorium. But on Tuesday, Biden, the supposed moderate bent on protecting our democratic standards, once again caved to the socialist extremists in his party — norms, laws, and the Constitution be damned.

Thapar and Bush had it right, while Trump, Pelosi, and now Biden — strangely united in yet another terrible policy idea — have it wrong. This dangerous encroachment on liberty, commerce and property rights should be allowed to die. Giving socialists like Rep. Cori Bush — who has been sleeping on the Capitol steps in a successful effort to pressure Biden into taking an illegal action — an inch when it comes to nationalizing private property means they will never look back as they attempt to take mile after mile.

The CDC, which is run and staffed by unelected bureaucrats who have embarrassed themselves time and again during the pandemic, is not the proper agency for such sweeping action, especially on a topic about which it possesses little to no expertise. If Speaker Pelosi and the progressives in her conference want to effectively nationalize private property, they should have the guts to pass a law rather than hide behind the unaccountable federal bureaucracy.