VACATED

SCOTUS Strikes Down Biden’s Eviction Moratorium Extension

Biden’s administration issued the extension to the yearlong moratorium while acknowledging that its legal standing to do so was questionable at best.

The Supreme Court ruled that Joe Biden’s extension of a coronavirus pandemic eviction moratorium was unconstitutional Thursday. The court had already ruled the moratorium, issued via the CDC in July 2020, was unconstitutional without an act of Congress that would pass it into law. Biden’s administration issued the extension while acknowledging that its legal standing to do so was questionable at best. The high court’s three liberal justices dissented. The conservative majority opinion read, “It would be one thing if Congress had specifically authorized the action that the CDC has taken. But that has not happened. Instead, the CDC has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination. It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts.”