Monday, August 2, 2021

You have to piece it together

Truly astonishing and dismaying.  

This is pure intra-party politics with her own party.  There is no way she could tweet this if she had any regard to truth.

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the CDC claimed to have the authority to officially require an end to evictions for the duration of the pandemic, estimating that it would end by July 31, 2021.  This was an indirect seizure of private property, the government targeting the estimated 500,000 landlords across the nation and who were being put on the financial hook by the CDC.

It is important to distinguish that this was not a rental subsidy or a rent suspension; it was a moratorium on evictions.  The rent due added up over the duration of the pandemic but there was no recourse for landlords.  Theoretically, when the moratorium finally expired, landlords would be paid the full amount of the rent due by their tenants.  Statistically, that was never likely to happen.  By the time renters could be evicted for non-payment of rent, landlords would conceivably have racked up massive losses.  

The desire to protect vulnerable renters from the consequences of a mishandled response to Covid is understandable.  Congress had the choice of passing properly constituted legislation which would have suspended evictions and held landlords whole through federal payments covering the resultant losses or alternatively passing legislation that made landlords explicitly and solely responsible for paying for a federal welfare program from which everyone else benefitted.  

Congress did not have the stomach for such legislation.  They did not want to spend federal money, nor did they want to be explicit that they were narrowly targeting landlords, a large number of whom will presumably go bankrupt, not having been paid for eighteen months.

Instead they allowed the CDC to pass its edict banning evictions until July 31, 2021.  

By November 24, 2020, Georgia and Alabama Realtor Associations launched a lawsuit fast-tracked to the Supreme Court challenging the authority of the CDC to target a sector of the economy to pay someone else's expenses.  They were explicit that there was a problem to be solved (evictions), that the proposed CDC solution would cause financial damage to the real estate sector, and that the solution was for the Federal government to fund the costs of such an eviction moratorium.  

AAR is a strong advocate for private property rights. The federal government cannot seize a person’s land, their farm, their home, or their private property unlawfully and unconstitutionally without due process and just compensation afforded by the Constitution. Further, the federal government cannot block a person’s constitutional rights to access the courts, to seek redress, and to defend against the federal government’s unlawful takings in the court system.  

In very short order, by June 29, 2021, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 judgment refusing to lift the eviction moratorium set to expire one month later on July 31, 2021.  However, voting with the majority, Justice Kavanaugh explicitly stated in his opinion that the CDC had exceeded its authority and that he was only voting to not lift the eviction moratorium because it was to expire in a month anyway and Congress still had time to pass new legislation to replace the CDC edict which exceeded its authority.  Effectively 5-4 voted to allow the moratorium to run out its last month but 5-4 explicitly judged the CDC to have exceeded its authority.

In that month, Pelosi as leader of the House could have passed new legislation shouldering the financial burden of the moratorium.  Alternatively, the White House could have attempted an Executive Order to extend the moratorium (though that almost certainly would also have been found to be unconstitutional but would have bought some time.)

In the event, the White House reminded the House of Representatives (Pelosi) on July 29th that Congress needed to do something to address the moratorium eviction which would expire in two days.  As chronicled in Politico, Pelosi and her caucus leaders scrambled around in a half-hearted fashion to scrounge up legislation acceptable within their own caucus and were unable to do so.  

If Politico and Pelosi are to be believed, Pelosi's office had not focused on the June 29th Supreme Court decision or had not understood the implication of it.  They had a month to act and either chose not to do so or were indeed incompetent in understanding the Supreme Court decision and incompetent in coordinating with the White House to address it.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion, given that Pelosi is a sharp operator, that this was simply too hot a potato to handle.  No one, not the White House nor Pelosi, wants to bankrupt 200,000 mom-and-pop landlords and no one wants to add several hundreds of billions of dollars to deficit spending just as inflation is rearing its head.

Not willing to bare the political cost of extending an eviction moratorium another few months, all that is left for Pelosi and Biden is to dodge responsibility.  They neither want to blame the other since Democrats control both the Executive branch and the Legislative branch.  

That is the context for Pelosi's tweet.  She is ignoring the fact that the CDC has already been judged to have exceeded its authority.  They cannot extend the moratorium.  This is just disingenuous political theater trying to take the spotlight off of a self-repugnant choice that the Democratic leadership chose to make, i.e. not extend the eviction moratorium.  

Political theater also covers the finger-pointing about the last minute deadline.  Both the White House and the House of Representatives were aware that the CDC moratorium would expire July 31st and could not be extended because five Supreme Court justices had already determined that the CDC had illegally exceeded its authority.  

Honest reporting would summarize this as "Democrats choose not to extend the eviction moratorium as too expensive."  But honest reporting is not what we get these days.  You have to piece it together.  If you are a Democrat concerned about the welfare of the poor, the Democratic leadership just failed for not having the courage to make the argument to the nation that this was worthwhile legislation.

It is all part of the Mandarin Class's inexorable undermining of trust in government.  The Democrats did what they thought necessary for political survival and threw the renters under the bus and then did a bunch of hand-waving and misdirection, facilitated by the mainstream media, to hide the fact that they could not persuade their own Caucus much less the whole House to support the moratorium. 


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