Supreme Court rejects latest moratorium on evictions.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the Biden administration’s latest moratorium on evictions, ending a political and legal dispute during a public health crisis in which the administration’s shifting positions had subjected it to criticism from adversaries and allies.
The court issued an eight-page majority opinion, an unusual move in a ruling on an application for emergency relief, where terse orders are more common. The court’s three liberal justices dissented.
The decision puts hundreds of thousands of tenants at risk of losing shelter as the administration struggles to speed the flow of billions of dollars in federal funding earmarked for people who are behind in rent because of the coronavirus pandemic and its associated economic hardship.
Only about $5.1 billion of the $46.5 billion in aid had been disbursed by the end of July, according to figures released Wednesday, as bureaucratic delays at the state and local levels have snarled payouts.
The majority opinion, which was unsigned, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had exceeded its authority.
“The CDC has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination,” the opinion said. “It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts.”
Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the three dissenting justices, faulted the court for its haste during a public health crisis.
“These questions call for considered decision-making, informed by full briefing and argument,” he wrote. “Their answers impact the health of millions. We should not set aside the CDC’s eviction moratorium in this summary proceeding.”
He added that “the public interest is not favored by the spread of disease or a court’s second-guessing of the CDC’s judgment.”
The majority said the issues were fully considered and straightforward.
“It is indisputable that the public has a strong interest in combating the spread of the COVID-19 delta variant,” the opinion said. “But our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends.”
“If a federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue,” the opinion said, “Congress must specifically authorize it.”
The administration at first had concluded that a Supreme Court ruling in June effectively had forbidden it from imposing a new moratorium after an earlier one expired at the end of July. While the administration had prevailed in that ruling by a 5-4 vote, one member of the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, wrote that he believed the moratorium to be unlawful and that he had cast his vote to temporarily sustain it only to allow an orderly transition.
He wrote that he wouldn’t support a further extension without “clear and specific congressional authorization (via new legislation).”
Congress didn’t act. But after political pressure from Democrats, a surge in the pandemic and new consideration of the legal issues, the administration issued a moratorium Aug 3 that was the subject of the new ruling.
The administration’s legal maneuvering might have failed, but it bought some time for tenants threatened with eviction. In unusually candid remarks this month, President Joe Biden said that was part of his calculus in deciding to proceed with the new moratorium, which was set to expire Oct. 3.
Congress declared a moratorium on evictions at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, but it lapsed in July 2020. The CDC then issued a series of its own moratoriums, saying they were justified by the need to address the pandemic and authorized by a 1944 law.
People unable to pay rent, the agency said, shouldn’t be forced to crowd in with relatives or seek refuge in homeless shelters, spreading the virus.
The last moratorium, which was put in place by the CDC in September and expired July 31 after being extended several times by Congress and Biden, was effective at achieving its goal, according to an analysis of filings by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. It reduced by about half the number of eviction cases that normally would have been filed since last fall.
But landlords have said the moratoriums saddled them with billions of dollars in debt. The challengers in the current case — landlords, real estate companies and trade associations led by the Alabama Association of Realtors — argued that the moratorium wasn’t authorized by the law the agency relied on, the Public Health Service Act of 1944.
That law, the challengers wrote, was concerned with quarantines and inspections to stop the spread of disease and didn’t bestow on the agency “the unqualified power to take any measure imaginable to stop the spread of communicable disease — whether eviction moratoria, worship limits, nationwide lockdowns, school closures or vaccine mandates.”
The CDC responded that the moratorium was authorized by the 1944 law. Evictions would accelerate the spread of the coronavirus, the agency said, by forcing people “to move, often into close quarters in new shared housing settings with friends or family, or congregate settings such as homeless shelters.”
The moratorium, the administration told the justices, was broadly similar to quarantine.
“It would be strange to hold that the government may combat infection by prohibiting the tenant from leaving his home,” its brief said, “but not by prohibiting the landlord from throwing him out.”
The case was complicated by congressional action in December, when lawmakers briefly extended the CDC’s moratorium through the end of January in an appropriations measure. When Congress took no further action, the agency again imposed moratoriums under the 1944 law.
The new moratorium wasn’t identical to the earlier one, which had applied nationwide. It was instead tailored to counties where COVID-19 was strongest, a category that currently covers some 90 percent of counties in the U.S.
Biden was frank in discussing his reasoning, saying the new measure faced long odds but would buy tenants some time.
“The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster,” he said Aug. 3. “But there are several key scholars who think that it may — and it’s worth the effort.”