First a little history on the eviction moratorium.
Back on March 13, 2020, President Trump declared COVID-19 a national emergency and two weeks later, he signed the CARES Act into law. The CARES Act included a 120-day eviction moratorium with respect to rental properties that participated in federal assistance programs or were subject to federally-backed loans.
In August, he directed the HHS and CDC to look into whether or not a continuing moratorium would slow the spread of the chinese coronavirus. Come September, the CDC issued a public health order that banned all evictions nation-wide.
This week a Federal judge struck down that eviction moratorium. Judge Dabney Friedrich, from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, is the first to set aside the moratorium on a nationwide basis.
The long and short of it is that the CDC does not have the authority to issue such orders under the law that authorizes the agency. You can read the full decision below:
This case isn’t the first one where the CDC lost. It is however the first that applies nationally. U.S. District Court Judge J. Philip Calabrese in Ohio decided in March that the CDC lacked the legal authority to issue the nationwide freeze as did federal Judge J. Campbell Barker in the Eastern District of Texas.
It should be noted that this decision does not affect any of the state or local eviction bans that are in place now, but you can bet that this case, and the other two mentioned above will weigh heavily on those cases.
Like most of the covid diktats issued, the eviction moratorium was nothing but a power grab by unelected bureaucrats. It’s past time for the courts to rein them in. Hopefully this becomes a trend . . . .