SCOTUS Lifts Eviction Moratorium, Again: Read It For Yourself

In an unsigned eight page ruling, the Supreme Court for a second time ruled the CDC’s eviction moratorium exceeded it’s authority. “It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority” the ruling states, while Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor dissented.

SCOTUSBlog:

Just under two months after a divided court allowed an earlier moratorium to remain in place, the Supreme Court on Thursday night blocked the Biden administration from enforcing the latest federal moratorium on evictions, imposed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The justices divided along ideological lines, with the court’s three liberal justices – Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – dissenting from the unsigned eight-page decision. The ruling was the second defeat for the Biden administration on the so-called “shadow docket” in three days, following the court’s refusal on Tuesday night to block a lower court’s order requiring the Biden administration to reinstate the Trump-era “remain in Mexico” policy.

The decision on the eviction moratorium was a decisive rebuke for the Biden administration, with the majority writing that it “strains credulity to believe” that the public-health law at the center of the case gives the Centers for Disease Control the power to enact the moratorium. “If a federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue,” the court stressed, “Congress must specifically authorize it.”

When the justices were asked to intervene at the end of June, they were considering whether to lift a ban on evictions that applied to all rental properties in the United States. The CDC had extended the moratorium through July 2021.

A group of Alabama real estate agents and landlords went to federal court in Washington, D.C., to challenge the moratorium. They argued that the CDC lacked the authority to impose the moratorium, which they say is costing landlords billions of dollars in unpaid rent each month.

A divided Supreme Court rejected the challengers’ plea to lift the earlier iteration of the ban on evictions. Justice Brett Kavanaugh provided the key vote to keep the moratorium in place. Although he agreed with the challengers that the CDC lacked the power to issue the moratorium, he joined Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices – Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – in voting to leave the ban in effect, explaining that it was scheduled to expire at the end of July.

The White House initially indicated that the CDC would not extend the moratorium when it expired. But when Congress failed to do so, the CDC issued a new version of the moratorium that applied to most, though not all, of the country and was slated to last until Oct. 3.

The real estate agents and landlords returned to court to challenge the new version of the moratorium. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, who had previously agreed with them that the CDC does not have the authority to issue the ban, reasoned that because the new version was “virtually identical” to the version covered by her earlier ruling, her “hands are tied” by an appeals court decision putting that order on hold.

The challengers then went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which left the new version of the moratorium in place in a brief order last week.

Read the Supreme Court ruling on the eviction moratorium for yourself here: