Before you respond to this post, be aware that the topic of this thread is specifically about how the US Constitution relates to the Eviction Moratorium. You can talk about natural rights, but the purpose of this thread is NOT so much to debate whether the Eviction Moratorium was a good policy. It seems these days government is just ignoring the Constitution, treading over it. It's like people are just forgetting how things are supposed to work. At various times in the country's history there were short periods where several laws were passed that disregarded the Constitution. These were difficult periods such as the US Civil War, the Great Depression, and little bit during World War II. So all this is not completely without precedent. The worrying thing though is the country seems to be quickly entering into a period of a "new normal" where people will just ignore these constitutional issues and assume nothing is out of the ordinary about government passing whatever regulations are thought best. On January 8, 2020, the government department known as the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued an order that made barred owners of rental properties from evicting the people that had been renting those properties if they could not pay. The law under which this order was made is a very broad and vaguely worded one, and it is arguable whether the CDC truly had the legal authority to issue such an order. However, this order was given the force of law by the courts. The Democrats who were in the majority over the government at that time supported this policy, and were not going to let anything be done to stop this order. Normally the federal level of government is not supposed to have the jurisdiction over regulating something like this, which is a matter for individual state governments to control. However, in this situation the CDC cited a connection (although a tenuous one) between the coronavirus disease pandemic and evictions, using this as a justification for exerting control over private rental properties, supposedly this policy was needed to help stop the spread of disease which could then spread throughout the country. Obviously this is a huge stretch of an interpretation of the US Constitution. The rationale seems to have been that if people were evicted, they might then either become homeless or have to crowd into smaller spaces with other people, causing them to be more likely to be infected with the disease. There may also have been an element of needing to do something to stop evictions to be able to maintain the societal shutdown (closure of many business establishments) which was causing job losses. Such an order interferes with one of the basic tenants of property rights. The property owner no longer has the right to do with his property as he wishes. He has to let people continue to use it, without fair compensation, even though that prevents him from being able to earn money from that property. It is also altering the terms of the contract in a way unfair to the property owner, who was not aware what the new terms would be when the contract was entered into. The CDC's Eviction Moratorium Is Unconstitutional | Cato at Liberty Blog Apparently the moratorium on evictions is hurting small "mom and pop" landlords the most. A year into the pandemic, small landlords are draining savings and cashing out 401(k)s as they shoulder billions of dollars in unpaid rent. For mom-and-pop landlords -- that is, people with small real estate holdings who depend on monthly rent payments for income or to pay their mortgages on properties -- Biden's executive order was nothing short of devastating. About 30 percent of mom-and-pop landlords in the United States are considered low- to moderate-income households, meaning they make less than $50,000 per year, according to a 2020 report by the Brookings Institution. The report also claims that rent makes up about 20 percent of these households' total income. Additionally, mom-and-pop landlords take on many of the expenses associated with owning and maintaining their rental properties. For a typical rental property with four or fewer units, operational expenses per unit tend to range from $4,600 to $5,400 per year, at times consuming more than half the income generated by the property. This means when rent payments are missed, it's much easier for small landlords to fall behind and much more detrimental to their financial health, the Brookings Institution report says. Mom-And-Pop Landlords 'Helpless,' Hurt Under Eviction Moratoriums | Across America, US Patch "Most residential landlords in the country own fewer than five properties, so it’s definitely a myth that most of the people affected by this are big companies, big corporations - majority of the time, it’s mom and pop," said Caleb Kruckenberg. "This is their entire livelihood. What people don’t understand is they still have all the same bills," he said. Eviction moratorium hurting owners, from mom-and-pop landlords to property giants - Washington Times The order is going to continue until July 2021. The case did reach the Supreme Court, but the court declined to stop it. The judge with the deciding vote, Kavanaugh, decided not to do anything because it was set to expire anyway in only one month.
The only thing scarier than mishandled, unconstitutional power grabs is opening the Constitution up for editing to supposedly fix the system to better meet our needs!! Now, emergency powers are not in the US Constitution, but legal experts say that it was implied (Emergency Powers | Wex | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute (cornell.edu)). Cornell Law School (at the link) talks about presidential power. I don't know how the CDC fits into all that, but I think that the Centers for Disease Control is an executive-branch agency. So, it's positioned under the Presidential branch of the government. It's unfortunate that Landlords were left out of the stimulus packages, but what is done in the past cannot be changed. It was a once-in-a-century pandemic. When faced with a homelessness crisis it became the government's job to promote the general welfare of most of society. That's in the Preamble of the US Constitution.
Oh yeah? Who's going to pay for that? Richer landlords? This whole idea of free money and stimulus packages seems completely nonsensical, if you take just one step back. There are hundreds of different things that "only happen once in a hundred years". Just being rare isn't automatically enough to justify it. If it had been something like all out wartime or an imminent invasion, maybe, maybe I could see it. The connection to emergency powers here just seems too indirect and tenuous. You could justify anything that way. Yeah, basically Communism. You head down that road, there won't be much stopping you. And no, that's not what the Constitution meant. It meant government can spend it's own money on various things promoting the general welfare.
Hey, that's my line! Of course we can't take care of everybody! We just don't have an unlimited supply of everything. But that also takes away the free market economy that is business-friendly and also dissolves the debts of businesses that go under through bankruptcy. I don't want Communism! That leads to heavy labor on a farm in utter poverty and starvation.
I think your start date is wrong. There were no known covid cases in the US on January 8, 2020. IIRC it didn't start nationally until the CARES Act was passed in late March. It only applied to property with federally backed mortgages. The state moratoriums have been the real bane for landlords. Earlier on, it didn't matter that much in my state anyway because the courts themselves were in emergency operations mode to where only criminal cases without juries and emergency hearings were being conducted through early fall. As for the federal aspect, Congress has the authority to restrict federal courts except in SCOTUS original jurisdiction cases. The real meaty question is whether or not they exceeded their power by creating defacto rules that extended onto state courts.
My first comment is that, despite you beginning your fairly long OP with the emphasizing reminder-- -- I did not see a single quote from the Constitution, nor even the citation of any of its clauses. The worrying thing about this, is that PF seems to be entering into a new normal, when people will just ignore the posted criteria for a thread, even if they are the ones who stated that criteria. As the Court System is as jam-packed with challenges as ever, this concern of yours seems to be over a fiction. Whenever the Constitutionality of something seems challengeable, to the opposition, it is being challenged. You offer no evidence, to the contrary, and in fact end your OP, stating that this order was challenged, & made it to the Supreme Court (a month before the order was slated to expire). FYI, if the, "courts," concur that something has been issued in a lawful manner, that is a confirmation of its legal authority; ANYTHING, technically,"is arguable"-- just not in a winnable way. Again, you don't go into the legal or Constitutional specifics at all, but I assume the reason that the CDC had a power that it doesn't, "normally," have, was because it was an emergency power, to protect public health. Read the emboldened part that you, yourself, wrote; there is nothing the least bit describable as tenuous, about the connection between evictions, and the spread of the infection. For that matter, the fact that people were unable to pay their rent, was directly attributable to the health emergency, as well. Again, property rights can be overridden for various reasons, and in the interest of public health (a Constitutional charge, of the government), during a medical state of emergency, is clearly one of them. You just disregarded your thread's other precept, to which you had called special attention at the outset: Whether the landlords are big corporations or, "mom & pop," operations, is completely meaningless, from a legal, which is to say, Constitutional, perspective (which was supposed to be the specific topic of this thread, if I'm not mistaken.
Hmmmm.....and NOBODY calculated at the get-go that it would likely bankrupt the "mom and pops", thus putting a great deal of properties on the market to snapped up by "savvy" investors, or their "blind trust" proxies.....yeah, baby! As for what's "Constitutional" it's what the powers that be say it is until it's upheld or rejected by SCOTUS.
