Speaker Nancy Pelosi is supposed to be in charge of one of the two houses of the legislature. But she wants President Joe Biden to bypass her and legislate on his own, and she isn’t the only Democrat with that mindset.
Pelosi and her leadership team issued a statement calling on the Biden administration to extend the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s moratorium on evictions to Oct. 18. This came in response to House Democrats failing to convince even their own majority to push through a bill that would do just that after Biden had asked Congress to extend the moratorium.
Pelosi asserted that the CDC “has the power to extend the eviction moratorium” and wondered why it would not do so “in light of the delta variant.”
The CDC has the power to extend the eviction moratorium. As they double down on masks, why wouldn’t they extend the moratorium in light of delta variant?
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) August 1, 2021
Aside from the fact that the eviction moratorium is a terrible policy and the panic being pushed over the delta variant is overblown given how the surge in cases is no longer so closely tied to a surge in deaths, Pelosi’s statement is just incorrect. While the Supreme Court upheld the CDC’s moratorium until it expired on July 31, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his concurring opinion that any future extensions would have to be passed through Congress.
This is nothing new for congressional Democrats, at least when there is a Democrat in the White House. One of the first things Chuck Schumer did after becoming the Senate majority leader was urge Biden to bypass Congress entirely to address climate change. “He can do many, many things under the emergency powers … that he could do without legislation,” Schumer said.
Many Democratic candidates for president made ignoring Congress a major part of their platforms, the most notable being Kamala Harris’s assertion that if Congress didn’t pass what she wanted on gun control in 100 days, she would simply enact it by executive decree. She then laughed at Biden’s assertion that the president should follow the Constitution.
But Harris ended up as the vice president to Biden, whose warnings about the limits of executive action were followed by a flood of executive orders shortly after he was inaugurated. Now, Biden is once again trying to find a legal avenue to extend the moratorium, despite the White House acknowledging that “the Supreme Court has made clear that this option is no longer available.”
Democrats want the panic over the delta variant to remain because it gives them more of an excuse to shrug legislating off to the emergency powers of the executive branch. “Pen and phone” governance is now the preferred form of “legislating” among Democratic politicians, at least until the next Republican enters the Oval Office.
