In an article at nationalreview.com on the 6-3 ruling by the Supreme Court against the CDC eviction moratorium, Justice Breyer is quoted as follows:
Justice Stephen Breyer argued in a dissent that “it is far from ‘demonstrably’ clear that the CDC lacks the power to issue its modified moratorium order.” Breyer’s dissent was signed by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
Really ? Really really? Please state the law that allows that !! Other than the absolute broadest and most ridiculous interpretation possible, there is NO LAW that allows the CDC to issue a moratorium.
If there is, then the CDC can literally do almost anything under the guise of battling a pandemic.
Here is the section of the Supreme Court ruling that shows you how lawless the CDC was:
The Government contends that the first sentence of §361(a) gives the CDC broad authority to take whatever measures it deems necessary to control the spread of COVID–19, including issuing the moratorium. But the second sentence informs the grant of authority by illustrating the kinds of measures that could be necessary: inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of contaminated animals and articles. These measures directly relate to preventing the interstate spread of disease by identifying, isolating, and destroying the disease itself. The CDC’s moratorium, on the other hand, relates to interstate infection far more indirectly: If evictions occur, some subset of tenants might move from one State to another, and some subset of that group might do so while infected with COVID–19. See 86 Fed. Reg. 43248–43249. This downstream connection between eviction and the interstate spread of disease is markedly different from the direct targeting of disease that characterizes the measures identified in the statute. Reading both sentences together, rather than the first in isolation, it is a stretch to maintain that §361(a) gives the CDC the authority to impose this eviction moratorium.
Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan were against Trump stopping DACA – claiming it violated the APA – but were for Biden canceling the Trump rule requiring illegal immigrants to stay in Mexico, even though the other 6 Justices used the same APA logic. They completely ignored their “Ruling” against Trump. Blatant hypocrisy. Do you think they will be fair when it comes to the CDC overreach ?
Do you notice you don’t see story after story of the effects this moratorium has had on landlords? The msm is nothing more than the propaganda arm of the dem/lib/prog party.
The left – including 3 supreme court justices – simply want to make the law up as they go.
Charles Cooke, also writing in The National Review on this matter, writes:
Besides, the majority continued, even if the text were ambiguous, the sheer scope of the CDC’s claimed authority under §361(a) would counsel against the government’s interpretation.” Why? Because, as an elementary constitutional matter:
We expect Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of “vast ‘economic and political significance.’” Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, 573 U. S. 302, 324 (2014) (quoting FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 529 U. S. 120, 160 (2000)). That is exactly the kind of power that the CDC claims here.
And that “kind of power,” they recorded, has never been claimed before under that statute:
This claim of expansive authority under §361(a) is unprecedented. Since that provision’s enactment in 1944, no regulation premised on it has even begun to approach the size or scope of the eviction moratorium. And it is further amplified by the CDC’s decision to impose criminal penalties of up to a $250,000 fine and one year in jail on those who violate the moratorium. See 86 Fed. Reg. 43252; 42 CFR §70.18(a). Section 361(a) is a wafer-thin reed on which to rest such sweeping power.
The bottom lines: The rules of statutory construction do not allow this interpretation. Congress is expected to be precise when doling out broad powers to the executive — which, in any case, it is allowed to do only up to a certain point. The fact that we have a pandemic “does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends.” And the CDC doesn’t get to make this call; Congress does. “If a federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue,” the majority concluded, “Congress must specifically authorize it.”
Which all of us, including Joe Biden, already knew.
To which Justice Breyer countered: “If Congress had meant to exclude these types of measures from its broad grant of authority, it likely would have said so.”
This is an utterly astonishing way of looking at the law, which, if adopted widely, would amount to nothing less than an inversion of our written constitutional system and a recipe for exactly the sort of fused-power “tyranny” that James Madison warned us about in Federalist Papers 47 through 51.
In concert, Breyer proposed that because Congress wrote a statute that serves “to empower the CDC to take ‘other measures, as in [its] judgment may be necessary,’” much of what the CDC does during a crisis should be assumed to be fine. But, as the majority opinion makes clear, when taken together these arguments would lead to a de facto executive-branch dictatorship:
Indeed, the Government’s read of §361(a) would give the CDC a breathtaking amount of authority. It is hard to see what measures this interpretation would place outside the CDC’s reach, and the Government has identified no limit in §361(a) beyond the requirement that the CDC deem a measure “necessary.” 42 U. S. C. §264(a); 42 CFR §70.2. Could the CDC, for example, mandate free grocery delivery to the homes of the sick or vulnerable? Require manufacturers to provide free computers to enable people to work from home? Order telecommunications companies to provide free high-speed Internet service to facilitate remote work?
Here is another article from nationalreview.com by Carrie Severino on the moratorium. In it she writes:
It called the CDC’s stretching of the Public Health Service Act “unprecedented” and “a wafer-thin reed on which to rest such sweeping power.” The agency went so far as to impose criminal penalties of up to a $250,000 fine and one year in jail for violators.
Stop and think about that. The CDC gave itself the authority to fine land lords and put them in jail. And no one at the CDC gets fired for this? You just lose a lawsuit. Zero consequences. Amazing.
She goes on to write:
But the lawlessness of the Biden administration’s position, and the Breyer dissent, which amounts to an op-ed on public-health policy, should leave no doubt in anyone’s mind about the contemporary Left’s approach to the Court.
And that’s exactly right. It’s lawlessness.