Based on your analysis I’d say Biden’s only realistic option is to not blink. The GOP ain’t offering him any other option but to pull the trigger now. Anything he gives them will just get pocketed and then they’ll come back to extort him again.
No, it will probably be work requirements for social insurance programs, discretionary spending caps and changes to IRS policy. That's what Biden and McCarthy are talking about now.
It'll hurt the libs, but nothing they can't realistically give on.
The discharge petition is useless, currently, agreed. But it sits there offering a ready and prompt offramp the moment that five republican congresscritters get spooked by what their wingers (And Kevin who’s on those wingers leashes) are getting them into.
It's not, though, that's just it. By far the best and quickest way to a deal as an agreement between President Biden and Speaker McCarthy (That's another point Liam Donovan has been harping on btw).
If somehow you had five Republicans and 213 Democrats all signed on to a discharge petition, then this plan goes from the impossible to theoretically possible. (AFAIK there aren't 213 Demo signatures on any discharge petition btw). But even allowing for that, that's only the beginning of umpteen rounds of legislative japery.
The GOP asks are far more doable, especially once they've been boiled down to something like what I wrote earlier. Which btw, is as good a guess as any as to where it ends up.
so your side believes this is important enough to hand China economic victory?
If there is economic turmoil as a consequence of the debt limit issue, and if as a consequence of the economic turmoil that China can opportunistically advance its interest to the detriment of ours, then we have yet another example of foreign policy incompetence from the Biden Administration.
And if I'm guessing right, Kevin McCarthy is probably telling President Biden this to his face as I write.
Oh tosh, they weren’t demanding that Trump pass huge tax increases or other unpopular reversals of the tiny number of Trumps accomplishments in office.
The Republicans aren't either, except for the fact that Biden played his cards the particular way that got us to here.
If Biden had been picking off stray Republicans here or there since December or January or whatever, things would be a lot better for him now.
Instead, the President has been fronting us for six months, so the House GOP passed the LSGA. And among the provisions of the LSGA is the repeal of the IRA, the last gasp of the Covid stiumulus and all the money that they armtwisted Joe Manchin to sign off on.
Even now, it's very unlikely that IRA will be repealed as part of the debt limit increase, but the only reason it ever got into play in the first place was because the Demos put it there.
The Demos (and others) vaguely thought there was too much federal government spending under the Trump Administration. But they never really tried to fight any of it. They had other priorities, and there wasn't anything in particular they wanted to cut for fiscal reasons.
The deficit hawks didn't have anything to latch onto, and were basically out in the cold. That's not the case here obv.
The real question is if Biden doesn’t blink when the business interests will do so and yank the leash on their pet centrist GOP congresscritters to pass a clean debt limit increase, the discharge petition would only need 5 votes to move it along.
A discharge petition is the solution to a different problem. A discharge petition is a for a situation where you have a presumably bipartisan working majority in the House for this or that that does not include the Leadership. Then, if the stars line up right, you can use a discharge petition to get a bill out of committee and onto the floor and presumably from there to a final vote.
Here, there is no working majority for anything the Demos want, or anything remotely close to it. The members are solid behind the Leadership.
From your pov, it's better and easier to just assume that discharge petitions don't exist. The fact that they do exist doesn't change anything in any meaningful way.
If Biden doesn't blink, we are going over Niagara Falls.
So, Koz, would you say the Dems missed an opportunity when they raised the debt ceiling for multiple republican Presidents without extorting concessions?
They didn't, see Liam Donovan about that in general.
twitter.com/LPDonovan/status/1654532789448867842
But frankly whether they did or didn't doesn't change where the Demos are now.
The debt ceiling is real. What's fake is the idea that Mommy can grab the candy bar out of the kid's hand and put it back if she's willing to listen to the kid cry in the car on the way home.
Koz, my buddy, you’ve been assuring me the Dems are doomed and will never be elected again since, what, before Obama’s landslide? And then, in your second breath, you add that if Trump is nominated (which seems a not at all unlikely proposition at this point) then the Dems will win it all. Frankly that’s a shocking climb down from you.
Yeah, I've changed my mind on quite a few things, that's one.
I agree that a lot of ostensibly non-partisan business and media figures are showing their cards with their behavior on this matter and that, going forward, anyone who believes them to be non-partisan should correct their thinking on the matter and recognize them as merely disguised fiscal republicans and treat them accordingly.
That's just not gonna fly, because they really are nonpartisan.
But as far as this goes, they're with us and if the pressure continues to escalate, it's more likely to fall on you than us.
I agree, in this case the correct play is refuse to pay a ransom and then when the markets finally begin to panic force through the discharge petition or, if that doesn’t work, continue issuing debt and take it to court so this matter is resolved for good.
Heh, as if.
When and if the panic does set in, I can tell you it's not going to be the GOP's who back down.
Push comes to shove, I'd still say it's more likely than not that we'll have a deal. But that's by no means a certainty. If you and the people who and the people in Washington who in some ways are positioned "like" you who in a week or two still think the same way as you do now, we _are_ going over Niagara Falls. I am convinced of that.
In terms of a clean or clean-ish debt limit passing the House, it's not just that McCarthy doesn't favor that. There's not one solitary vote in the GOP caucus in favor that. Moreover, there isn't even the prospect of one GOP vote in favor of that anywhere across the distant horizon.
No, Demos and Joe Biden are going to cave to get out of this jam.
Libs think it's like that, but in reality it's not. In the real world, the debt ceiling is a real thing. It creates a real veto point, and GOP is exploiting that veto point to win real concessions.
The sooner we all get on the same page for this, the happier we'll all be.
Chait and you are both wrong. Demos have all the culpability for this.
You gotta play the ball where it lies. At some level, it's reasonable to think that a golf course with a debt ceiling on it is a stupid course. But that's not important right now, more importantly it's not anything in your capacity to change. So pull a club out of your bag and figure something out.
Gonna quibble with your definition of M1 because you omit liquid deposits in banking institutions. If you’re just looking at currency, and omitting deposits altogether, what you’ve got is M0 and that’s a far smaller number than M1.
Between the comments and the OP, Burt's written a lot here. And without directly addressing any one particular point, it's important to note that Burt is right at the meta level about one important thing.
There is no unilateral action by the Executive Branch which resolves the problem without one or more of, causing substantial adverse disruption of the markets, including Treasury auctions. Or directly causing economic disruption. Or (and this has for the most part been ignored), not being able to generate enough revenue to fund the government operations on a stable basis.
Eg, things like a premium bond or the trillion dollar coin are actually not bad ideas, _if_ it's a matter of keeping the trains from derailing while Biden and Kevin McCarthy hammer out something for the long term. The problem for libs is, even if such things "work", they don't work for long and for that reason they don't mitigate the GOP's leverage with the debt limit.
A lot of libs have, in their own minds, believed that such things are questionably legal, so if the comeuppance comes, it will have to be from the Supreme Court. Eg, Biden invokes the 14th Amendment, and unless and until SCOTUS says he can't everything is kosher.
But that's not true. The Supreme Court is only one of several parties who could throw monkey wrench in the libs plans, and probably not the most important ones.
My own personal take is that the assorted elite “masters of the universe” set don’t love the risk of what the GOP is doing but would love to get some outcomes out of it that they’d like- to wit some kind of deficit reduction that isn’t paired with revenue increases.
I think you're understating things by quite a bit. One of the key developments over the last say, 4 to 6 weeks is that Wall Street, the nonpartisan deficit hawks, the Chamber of Commerce, etc, are perfectly fine with getting together with the Republicans in the House and putting Biden over a barrel to extract some budget cuts and policy changes in return for lifting the debt ceiling.
If it becomes a periodic republican extortion mechanism, as it rapidly is becoming, then the next time the Dems have the trifecta it’ll be gone, and rightly so.
There will never be another Demo trifecta again in our lifetimes, with one major caveat.
If Trump wins the nomination, then Demos are going to win everything remotely plausible and a few things that aren't. In 2024 and probably a couple cycles after that. Eg, recently I think Sean Trende has tweeted that Sen Ted Cruz and the GOP Presidential ticket in Texas are at least small underdogs, and there's been some people pearl clutching over that.
But if Trump is the nominee, I don't think that's the least bit outlandish. (if he is not the nominee, that's ridiculous.)
Specifically, Joe Biden has known since whenever this was going to come up, and for months he's been fronting us, "We're too cool to negotiate with Republicans, gotta go eat ice cream."
Well guess what, he's not that cool after all. He's not, the libs are not, the Demos are not, and in all likelihood the President and the Democrats in Congress are going to have to pay a lot more to get out of this jam than they would if they were good faith actors back in January/February or some other reasonable time.
There's obviously a lot of words here, and by the grace of God I might comment on them at least at some modicum of depth. But for now, let's note that the reason that the reason we're having this particular problem at the moment is that liberals are bad people.
His response to Ian was pretty well received and a big reason for his landslide election victory a couple of months later.
I think this is right, and it's an important example of what I was trying to get at before.
I think the CW has internalized that DeSantis is the same as Trump except without the baggage. And he is that but still, it's the wrong lens to be looking through.
He's also good at things like wildlife preservation, disaster relief, education, and other parts of governance that are kinda mundane, depending on your perspective. And fwiw, he actually seems to care about those things as well.
My point is, DeSantis hasn't campaigned on these things, yet. But he doesn't have to because the campaign is long, and previously hidden aspects of a person or is record will surface at some point.
So, if you have the substance and the record that DeSantis has, there will come a time when it carries the day.
Question for you: Did Trump participate in all this folksy campaign stuff in the run up to ’16? I honestly have no idea, I wasn’t watching the GOP primary closely at that time and I certainly wasn’t watching Trump closely.
I'm pretty sure he did, though tbh I don't remember exactly. He certainly wasn't running the Mar-a-Logo campaign he's doing today.
Most importantly, the Trump _rallies_ were absolutely fresh and compelling political theater in 2016, whereas they are basically irrelevant now. He was routinely filling football stadiums back then (and now he's lucky if he can sell out a hotel ballroom).
Of course, every candidate run his own to some degree unique race. But there shouldn't have been any doubt from the 2016 campaign that Trump had the energy for the job. But now he's more low-energy that Jeb ever was.
The OP is basically the conventional wisdom as it stands right now, but at least as far as the GOP nomination is concerned, I'm not having it.
I'd venture the GOP nomination is about 80-10-10, ie 80% DeSantis, 10% Trump, 10% anybody else. The conventional wisdom has turned against this hard over the last six weeks ago, enough for me question my own thoughts on the matter. But on second look, and at least for now, I've decided I was right the first time.
There's a lot of reasons for this, but one that I haven't seen anybody else mention is simply that the campaign season will turn against Trump. Trump has declared himself as a candidate, but I don't think he has any intention of running a meaningful campaign, and he certainly hasn't yet.
The American people have an intuitive sense of campaign season, and the rituals and drama associated with that. Candidates are expect to go to the Iowa State Fair and give a speech to fairgoers while standing on hay bales. They are also expected to visit Bill and Theresa Henrickson in Manchester NH and persuade a dozen or so activists in their living room. The debates are a part of this, but not all of it so people talking about what's going to happen in the debates aren't necessarily wrong, but they are probably not telling the whole story either.
In any event, this is the sort of drama that is going to make the Trump campaign not viable. It hasn't mattered yet, because it's not campaign season yet. But from, say August through January of next year it will be.
Donald Trump is not going to be able to generate traction in the news cycle by publishing some widely ignored quasi-tweets on Truth Social about Ron DeSanctimonious when other candidates are out there making real news at events on the campaign trail.
You bring up a number of things, which I'm sure are related in your mind but not necessarily in mine or in the context of my earlier comment. Underlying this, I suspect without knowing for sure that you and I are working at cross-purposes.
Again, without knowing for sure, I'm going to say that you and your organization believe that tenants ought to be able to live indefinitely in the units they have rented whether or not they are current on the rent. Whereas I believe, at least in the worst housing markets (Bay Area, LA/Orange County, San Diego, NY, Boston) it is in the _public_ interest to evict nonpaying tenants. We have to be able use the available rental housing stock, as much as it exists, for housing of qualified paying tenants.
Obviously this is in the interest of landlords, but it's also in the interest of paying tenants as well, in that they will have access to reasonable housing somewhere, not just in terms of dollar amount of rent, but also availability at any price, and avoiding convoluted and invasive screening processes.
As far as your bill of particulars go, some of them are interesting and others are, to me at least, routine things that sound ominous. For example, the idea of deals in the hallway seems pretty basic to me. In every settlement negotiation, what's offered in settlement is irrelevant if the negotiation fails and they go to trial or hearing or whatever.
Or the idea that landlords will refuse to rent to prospective tenants who want to negotiate the terms of the lease, I don't think you are appreciating the implications of that.
On the other hand, you also assert that some courts require the tenants pay whatever the landlord says they owe in order to get to defend themselves. That shouldn't happen, if in fact it does. And to the extent that it does, somebody, judges, legislatures whoever, should stop it.
Thanks, I was wondering what it was. That comment seemed rather anodyne to trigger a moderation filter, but such is life I guess. At least I know one more character string to avoid.
Let’s call it even, then. I AGREE with you that there needs to be an efficient eviction process. I wish you would agree with me that it needs to be fair and Constitutional.
This is an odd comment. To put it in these terms, I'd say the eviction processes (they vary substantially by jurisdiction, of course) are already fair and Constitutional. To the extent that there is any defect in lack of respect to a legitimate equity interest, it's the landlords who are being treated harshly.
It's possible, I believe to have a different process (especially wrt California) that would also be fair and Constitutional and better serve everybody's interests. Especially if one were to additionally consider adjacent policy areas, eg zoning and land use.
But you didn't really argue that, which is what I meant when I said that the Constitutional frame of reference is a red herring. The Constitution governs, for exactly the reasons you mentioned above. But it's not really pertinent, for the reasons PD Shaw and I wrote.
Or more specifically, the Sixth Amendment doesn't apply directly since these aren't criminal cases. So that leaves Due Process. Forgive me, I had forgotten or never knew that you represented small landlords back when you were practicing in California. And you hint, though you don't directly state, that there are routinely de jure or de facto Due Process defects in eviction proceedings. By contrast, I assert that all of your tenant counterparties got their Due Process (as they would in any other jurisdiction if it matters).
And to be honest, it doesn't seem to be an especially close call, either. It's not even like certain situations in criminal law where things are honored more often in the breach than in the observance.
Eviction proceedings are only formalities to the extent that the facts behind them are cut-and-dried. When that's not the case, they are anything but formalities.
Which, at minimum, requires notice of charges and penalty, the right to retain and enjoy the assistance of legal counsel, a neutral decision-maker, an opportunity to present evidence to that neutral decision-maker, and an opportunity to challenge evidence offered against you — all before a decision as to whether or not state power is deployed to then deprive you of that property interest.
So, to the extent that you disagree with me, are you aware of circumstances these elements of Due Process routinely didn't happen?
As an aside, I have some libertarian sympathies, but I wouldn't characterize myself as being libertarian.
On “Shake Shack, Suspect Specie, and Sane Stewardship of the State”
No, it will probably be work requirements for social insurance programs, discretionary spending caps and changes to IRS policy. That's what Biden and McCarthy are talking about now.
It'll hurt the libs, but nothing they can't realistically give on.
It's not, though, that's just it. By far the best and quickest way to a deal as an agreement between President Biden and Speaker McCarthy (That's another point Liam Donovan has been harping on btw).
If somehow you had five Republicans and 213 Democrats all signed on to a discharge petition, then this plan goes from the impossible to theoretically possible. (AFAIK there aren't 213 Demo signatures on any discharge petition btw). But even allowing for that, that's only the beginning of umpteen rounds of legislative japery.
The GOP asks are far more doable, especially once they've been boiled down to something like what I wrote earlier. Which btw, is as good a guess as any as to where it ends up.
"
If there is economic turmoil as a consequence of the debt limit issue, and if as a consequence of the economic turmoil that China can opportunistically advance its interest to the detriment of ours, then we have yet another example of foreign policy incompetence from the Biden Administration.
And if I'm guessing right, Kevin McCarthy is probably telling President Biden this to his face as I write.
"
The Republicans aren't either, except for the fact that Biden played his cards the particular way that got us to here.
If Biden had been picking off stray Republicans here or there since December or January or whatever, things would be a lot better for him now.
Instead, the President has been fronting us for six months, so the House GOP passed the LSGA. And among the provisions of the LSGA is the repeal of the IRA, the last gasp of the Covid stiumulus and all the money that they armtwisted Joe Manchin to sign off on.
Even now, it's very unlikely that IRA will be repealed as part of the debt limit increase, but the only reason it ever got into play in the first place was because the Demos put it there.
"
The Demos (and others) vaguely thought there was too much federal government spending under the Trump Administration. But they never really tried to fight any of it. They had other priorities, and there wasn't anything in particular they wanted to cut for fiscal reasons.
The deficit hawks didn't have anything to latch onto, and were basically out in the cold. That's not the case here obv.
"
A discharge petition is the solution to a different problem. A discharge petition is a for a situation where you have a presumably bipartisan working majority in the House for this or that that does not include the Leadership. Then, if the stars line up right, you can use a discharge petition to get a bill out of committee and onto the floor and presumably from there to a final vote.
Here, there is no working majority for anything the Demos want, or anything remotely close to it. The members are solid behind the Leadership.
From your pov, it's better and easier to just assume that discharge petitions don't exist. The fact that they do exist doesn't change anything in any meaningful way.
If Biden doesn't blink, we are going over Niagara Falls.
"
No, not at all. GOP knows perfectly well the possibilities for many adverse outcomes, if the debt ceiling isn't raised.
And in that world that's where they (and me for that matter) have decided to try to hold its line.
If you really really want to try us, we're here.
"
They didn't, see Liam Donovan about that in general.
twitter.com/LPDonovan/status/1654532789448867842
But frankly whether they did or didn't doesn't change where the Demos are now.
"
Yeah, but no.
The debt ceiling is real. What's fake is the idea that Mommy can grab the candy bar out of the kid's hand and put it back if she's willing to listen to the kid cry in the car on the way home.
"
Yeah, I've changed my mind on quite a few things, that's one.
That's just not gonna fly, because they really are nonpartisan.
But as far as this goes, they're with us and if the pressure continues to escalate, it's more likely to fall on you than us.
"
Heh, as if.
When and if the panic does set in, I can tell you it's not going to be the GOP's who back down.
Push comes to shove, I'd still say it's more likely than not that we'll have a deal. But that's by no means a certainty. If you and the people who and the people in Washington who in some ways are positioned "like" you who in a week or two still think the same way as you do now, we _are_ going over Niagara Falls. I am convinced of that.
In terms of a clean or clean-ish debt limit passing the House, it's not just that McCarthy doesn't favor that. There's not one solitary vote in the GOP caucus in favor that. Moreover, there isn't even the prospect of one GOP vote in favor of that anywhere across the distant horizon.
No, Demos and Joe Biden are going to cave to get out of this jam.
"
Libs think it's like that, but in reality it's not. In the real world, the debt ceiling is a real thing. It creates a real veto point, and GOP is exploiting that veto point to win real concessions.
The sooner we all get on the same page for this, the happier we'll all be.
"
Chait and you are both wrong. Demos have all the culpability for this.
You gotta play the ball where it lies. At some level, it's reasonable to think that a golf course with a debt ceiling on it is a stupid course. But that's not important right now, more importantly it's not anything in your capacity to change. So pull a club out of your bag and figure something out.
"
Between the comments and the OP, Burt's written a lot here. And without directly addressing any one particular point, it's important to note that Burt is right at the meta level about one important thing.
There is no unilateral action by the Executive Branch which resolves the problem without one or more of, causing substantial adverse disruption of the markets, including Treasury auctions. Or directly causing economic disruption. Or (and this has for the most part been ignored), not being able to generate enough revenue to fund the government operations on a stable basis.
Eg, things like a premium bond or the trillion dollar coin are actually not bad ideas, _if_ it's a matter of keeping the trains from derailing while Biden and Kevin McCarthy hammer out something for the long term. The problem for libs is, even if such things "work", they don't work for long and for that reason they don't mitigate the GOP's leverage with the debt limit.
A lot of libs have, in their own minds, believed that such things are questionably legal, so if the comeuppance comes, it will have to be from the Supreme Court. Eg, Biden invokes the 14th Amendment, and unless and until SCOTUS says he can't everything is kosher.
But that's not true. The Supreme Court is only one of several parties who could throw monkey wrench in the libs plans, and probably not the most important ones.
"
Very easily. Pay him what he wants. And reading the tea leaves, it doesn't look like the ransom is that much.
(Frankly, this part of the whole drama is the silliest imo.)
"
I think you're understating things by quite a bit. One of the key developments over the last say, 4 to 6 weeks is that Wall Street, the nonpartisan deficit hawks, the Chamber of Commerce, etc, are perfectly fine with getting together with the Republicans in the House and putting Biden over a barrel to extract some budget cuts and policy changes in return for lifting the debt ceiling.
There will never be another Demo trifecta again in our lifetimes, with one major caveat.
If Trump wins the nomination, then Demos are going to win everything remotely plausible and a few things that aren't. In 2024 and probably a couple cycles after that. Eg, recently I think Sean Trende has tweeted that Sen Ted Cruz and the GOP Presidential ticket in Texas are at least small underdogs, and there's been some people pearl clutching over that.
But if Trump is the nominee, I don't think that's the least bit outlandish. (if he is not the nominee, that's ridiculous.)
"
Specifically, Joe Biden has known since whenever this was going to come up, and for months he's been fronting us, "We're too cool to negotiate with Republicans, gotta go eat ice cream."
Well guess what, he's not that cool after all. He's not, the libs are not, the Demos are not, and in all likelihood the President and the Democrats in Congress are going to have to pay a lot more to get out of this jam than they would if they were good faith actors back in January/February or some other reasonable time.
"
There's obviously a lot of words here, and by the grace of God I might comment on them at least at some modicum of depth. But for now, let's note that the reason that the reason we're having this particular problem at the moment is that liberals are bad people.
On “It’s Going to Be Biden v Trump Again”
I think this is right, and it's an important example of what I was trying to get at before.
I think the CW has internalized that DeSantis is the same as Trump except without the baggage. And he is that but still, it's the wrong lens to be looking through.
He's also good at things like wildlife preservation, disaster relief, education, and other parts of governance that are kinda mundane, depending on your perspective. And fwiw, he actually seems to care about those things as well.
My point is, DeSantis hasn't campaigned on these things, yet. But he doesn't have to because the campaign is long, and previously hidden aspects of a person or is record will surface at some point.
So, if you have the substance and the record that DeSantis has, there will come a time when it carries the day.
"
I'm pretty sure he did, though tbh I don't remember exactly. He certainly wasn't running the Mar-a-Logo campaign he's doing today.
Most importantly, the Trump _rallies_ were absolutely fresh and compelling political theater in 2016, whereas they are basically irrelevant now. He was routinely filling football stadiums back then (and now he's lucky if he can sell out a hotel ballroom).
Of course, every candidate run his own to some degree unique race. But there shouldn't have been any doubt from the 2016 campaign that Trump had the energy for the job. But now he's more low-energy that Jeb ever was.
"
The OP is basically the conventional wisdom as it stands right now, but at least as far as the GOP nomination is concerned, I'm not having it.
I'd venture the GOP nomination is about 80-10-10, ie 80% DeSantis, 10% Trump, 10% anybody else. The conventional wisdom has turned against this hard over the last six weeks ago, enough for me question my own thoughts on the matter. But on second look, and at least for now, I've decided I was right the first time.
There's a lot of reasons for this, but one that I haven't seen anybody else mention is simply that the campaign season will turn against Trump. Trump has declared himself as a candidate, but I don't think he has any intention of running a meaningful campaign, and he certainly hasn't yet.
The American people have an intuitive sense of campaign season, and the rituals and drama associated with that. Candidates are expect to go to the Iowa State Fair and give a speech to fairgoers while standing on hay bales. They are also expected to visit Bill and Theresa Henrickson in Manchester NH and persuade a dozen or so activists in their living room. The debates are a part of this, but not all of it so people talking about what's going to happen in the debates aren't necessarily wrong, but they are probably not telling the whole story either.
In any event, this is the sort of drama that is going to make the Trump campaign not viable. It hasn't mattered yet, because it's not campaign season yet. But from, say August through January of next year it will be.
Donald Trump is not going to be able to generate traction in the news cycle by publishing some widely ignored quasi-tweets on Truth Social about Ron DeSanctimonious when other candidates are out there making real news at events on the campaign trail.
On “Biden’s Renter’s Bill of Rights: Is it Time for the Right to Counsel to Evolve?”
You bring up a number of things, which I'm sure are related in your mind but not necessarily in mine or in the context of my earlier comment. Underlying this, I suspect without knowing for sure that you and I are working at cross-purposes.
Again, without knowing for sure, I'm going to say that you and your organization believe that tenants ought to be able to live indefinitely in the units they have rented whether or not they are current on the rent. Whereas I believe, at least in the worst housing markets (Bay Area, LA/Orange County, San Diego, NY, Boston) it is in the _public_ interest to evict nonpaying tenants. We have to be able use the available rental housing stock, as much as it exists, for housing of qualified paying tenants.
Obviously this is in the interest of landlords, but it's also in the interest of paying tenants as well, in that they will have access to reasonable housing somewhere, not just in terms of dollar amount of rent, but also availability at any price, and avoiding convoluted and invasive screening processes.
As far as your bill of particulars go, some of them are interesting and others are, to me at least, routine things that sound ominous. For example, the idea of deals in the hallway seems pretty basic to me. In every settlement negotiation, what's offered in settlement is irrelevant if the negotiation fails and they go to trial or hearing or whatever.
Or the idea that landlords will refuse to rent to prospective tenants who want to negotiate the terms of the lease, I don't think you are appreciating the implications of that.
On the other hand, you also assert that some courts require the tenants pay whatever the landlord says they owe in order to get to defend themselves. That shouldn't happen, if in fact it does. And to the extent that it does, somebody, judges, legislatures whoever, should stop it.
"
Thanks, I was wondering what it was. That comment seemed rather anodyne to trigger a moderation filter, but such is life I guess. At least I know one more character string to avoid.
"
Bueller, anybody?
"
This is an odd comment. To put it in these terms, I'd say the eviction processes (they vary substantially by jurisdiction, of course) are already fair and Constitutional. To the extent that there is any defect in lack of respect to a legitimate equity interest, it's the landlords who are being treated harshly.
It's possible, I believe to have a different process (especially wrt California) that would also be fair and Constitutional and better serve everybody's interests. Especially if one were to additionally consider adjacent policy areas, eg zoning and land use.
But you didn't really argue that, which is what I meant when I said that the Constitutional frame of reference is a red herring. The Constitution governs, for exactly the reasons you mentioned above. But it's not really pertinent, for the reasons PD Shaw and I wrote.
Or more specifically, the Sixth Amendment doesn't apply directly since these aren't criminal cases. So that leaves Due Process. Forgive me, I had forgotten or never knew that you represented small landlords back when you were practicing in California. And you hint, though you don't directly state, that there are routinely de jure or de facto Due Process defects in eviction proceedings. By contrast, I assert that all of your tenant counterparties got their Due Process (as they would in any other jurisdiction if it matters).
And to be honest, it doesn't seem to be an especially close call, either. It's not even like certain situations in criminal law where things are honored more often in the breach than in the observance.
Eviction proceedings are only formalities to the extent that the facts behind them are cut-and-dried. When that's not the case, they are anything but formalities.
So, to the extent that you disagree with me, are you aware of circumstances these elements of Due Process routinely didn't happen?
As an aside, I have some libertarian sympathies, but I wouldn't characterize myself as being libertarian.
"
I think I have a comment that needs to be pulled out of purgatory.
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