"Under what authority"

From A Federal Judge Just Struck Down One of the CDC’s Most Blatant Power Grabs by Brad Polumbo.  In the first century of the American Republic, it was absolutely routine, whatever the policy, treaty, purchase, that it was made perfectly plain as to what authority legitimated the action.  "Under what authority" was part and parcel for any action at any level of government and any branch of government.

We got complacent. 

We don't do that much anymore and we should actually be doing it much more given how much policy making and legislation is now being generated by independent agencies or even third-parties outside the government. 

Covid-19 just revealed how deep the rot has gone into the timbers of the Republic.  Mayors, Governors, Agency Chiefs all got into the act of issuing edicts without the authority to do so.  Whether it was lockdowns, or changing the process of voting.  They acted like miniature autocrats, telling everyone else what to do and too few people asking "Under what authority"?

2020 saw an onslaught of bad policy coercively imposed without authority.

2021 will begin to see some, ideally all, such overreaches reversed.  And particularly nice would be to see those mini-authoritarians punished for the damage they have done to citizens.

Did you know that unelected bureaucrats at the Centers for Disease Control have the power to unilaterally commandeer rental properties nationwide? Or, at least, they did until yesterday—when a federal judge ruled that the CDC’s so-called “eviction moratorium” is illegal.  

Here’s the background.

Back in September, the CDC issued a mandate that landlords could not evict non-paying tenants in most circumstances. Landlords who violated the order faced potential penalties up to a $100,000 fine and a year in jail. In doing so, it essentially permitted renters to occupy their landlord’s property indefinitely without payment. This wrought havoc on the rental market and has financially ruined many middle-and-working class landlords.  

 

But even setting the dysfunctional results of the policy aside, the CDC was always relying on razor-thin legal justification for its mandate. It pointed to one vague law that says during a pandemic the CDC director “may take such measures to prevent such spread of the diseases as he/she deems reasonably necessary, including inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of animals or articles believed to be sources of infection.” 

 

The legality of using this one narrow provision to commander the national rental market was always highly suspect.  

Indeed, Judge Dabney L. Friedrich wrote in her Wednesday ruling striking down the moratorium that the CDC’s logic would mean that “so long as the Secretary [of the Department of Health and Human Services] can make a determination that a given measure is ‘necessary’ to combat the interstate or international spread of disease, there is no limit to the reach of his authority.” Clearly, she says, that is not authorized by the law’s text and was not Congress’s intent during its passage.

“It is the role of the political branches, and not the courts, to assess the merits of policy measures designed to combat the spread of disease,” the judge wrote. “The question for the Court is a narrow one: Does the Public Health Service Act grant the CDC the legal authority to impose a nationwide eviction moratorium?  

“It does not," Judge Friedrich concluded. 

We have lot of constitutional cleaning up to do and a lot of cleaning out of power grabbing politicians and bureaucrats.