In the hubbub of today’s news about Andrew Cuomo’s inability to keep his hands to himself and whether or not he’ll resign (spoiler: he won’t) a little bit of news came out. No doubt it is welcome news to the few folks who weren’t eligible for unemployment and didn’t move to where they could work as well as to the idiots that collected that money and didn’t bother to pay their rent. It comes as a hard blow to those who have had their property hijacked and are still having to pay all the costs associated with that ownership. I’m frankly amazed a lot of them didn’t just stop paying their mortgages and let the bank deal with the tenants.
I’ve been on the bad end of an eviction and my heart does go out to those facing one – even the idiots that backed themselves into that corner. But we can’t as a nation keep stealing other people’s stuff – no matter how scared we are of a disease that has better than a 98% survival rate. The day comes when the piper must be paid.
The problem was manufactured by government. Ideally, we should simply sue the Congress that passed this nonsense and let them individually pay for it. There are good reasons not to do that – mostly that it’s wrong since that Congress is our dog and it’s our fault if we didn’t keep it on a leash, and they don’t have that much money anyway. So that leaves us, dear fellow taxpayers – but the reality is that we don’t want to print that much money.
That leaves letting the other shoe fall – something that would probably have been a lot less painful had we done it a year ago. Delaying isn’t going to solve the eviction crisis – it’s probably not going to delay it indefinitely either. The courts are well aware that the Federal courts are no longer in agreement. Probably few judges are going to read much into the Supreme Court allowing the moratorium to expire rather than end it a week early – that was most likely a gesture to Congress to give them a chance to act or at least explain why they wouldn’t and the judges know it.
Faced with impending political doom, Congress did what it does best – it messed up. With zero chance of passage even in a regular timeframe, they wasted time trying to push through an emergency act that was DOA before it was even drafted. So then they call on the Executive – who just got told off in no uncertain terms by both a Federal court and the Supreme Court – to violate the Constitution.
To his credit, the Biden admin resisted for a few days – I mean that, it really is a credit that he at least started out deferring to the Supreme Court’s decision in the one area where the Court has supremacy. Then he folded like a cheap card table – and the CDC, ever the loyal lapdog, deliberately and with malice aforethought, violated the United States Constitution.
This is a test of the Supreme Court – will it stand by its ruling or will it stick its collective head in the sand as the executive branch runs amok? If it does nothing, it sentences itself into irrelevancy – no court packing required. The tiger is paper after all.
And there’s a very real chance the Court will do just that. Standing up for what’s right when it’s not politically popular is the one thing the Supreme Court totally and completely stinks at – remember Plessy v Ferguson? Yeah, that’s what happened then, too. Doing nothing when it should be doing something? The Supreme Court is a champion at that game, Baby!
Where does that leave the rest of us right now?
I’m dubious that landlords across the nation are going to take this lying down. There are plenty of lawyers who probably need some business about now – everyone staying home messes with their clientele, too. I expect there are already cases being filed – denying landlords the right to their day in court is flat out wrong and always was.
There will also be courts that simply ignore the CDC – they know who actually oversees their work. No judge wants a smackdown from an appellate court – and least of all a rare one from the Supreme Court. Many already see the way the wind is blowing – you can only play ‘trample other people’s rights’ for so long. And frankly, the fact that they now have clear direction from the Federal courts is probably more than enough for many judges to just do the right thing and ignore an order that is not lawful. We’ll see shortly.
Tomorrow, I’m going to be writing my congressmen – all three of them. I’ll publish a copy for those of you who want to do so yourselves and would like to see it. Tonight I’m writing this – and fussing like crazy on social media. It’d be nice if others join in – but I figure I have to do what I believe is right whether anyone else comes along or not.
Because our American Constitution is worth fighting for – and it’s NOT OKAY for anyone to violate the Constitution that so many fought and died for – and that so very many more believe in and trust for the security of their liberty.
