The Biden administration this month launched its most diabolical attack yet on our freedoms, and it is likely to get away with it because congressional Republicans either don’t understand the stakes or are too timid to stand up and fight.
At issue is the new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-promulgated eviction moratorium. If President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and their cronies get away with this new direct assault on property rights, they will have set a remarkably damaging precedent, and from there, there’s no telling how long our constitutional republic will stand.
Let’s start with a definition. What is “property”?
There are many definitions, but for our purposes, I prefer the definition employed by Richard Pipes in his 1998 work, Property and Freedom, which says that “property refers to the right of the owner or owners, formally acknowledged by public authority, both to exploit assets to the exclusion of everyone else and to dispose of them by sale or otherwise.”
The CDC has just promulgated an order “temporarily halting evictions in counties with heightened levels of community transmission in order to respond to recent, unexpected developments in the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the rise of the Delta variant … Accordingly … a landlord, owner of a residential property, or other person with a legal right to pursue eviction or possessory action, shall not evict any covered person from any residential property in any county or U.S. territory while the county or territory is experiencing substantial or high levels of community transmission of SARS-SoV-2.”
In other words, under the order, property owners in the affected areas, which, covering 87% of the counties in the country, are not “targeted” or “limited,” no matter what the White House says, are denied their ability to evict a tenant who has not paid his rent. That is a clear denial of landlords’ property rights. They are no longer allowed to exploit their own assets, and they are not allowed even to dispose of them by sale.
Effectively, it’s as if the government had seized their property without compensating them for it.
The Supreme Court recently made known its beliefs on the matter. In a late June ruling, a majority of the court held that the CDC had overstepped its authority in issuing its original eviction moratorium last September but agreed to leave it in place because it was going to expire in a matter of weeks. Further, said the court, any new eviction ban would have to be accomplished by means of an act of Congress.
Biden knows this. Asked about the prospects of extending the CDC’s original eviction moratorium, he said, “I have been informed [the CDC] is about to make a judgment as to potential other options. Whether that option will pass constitutional muster with this administration, I can’t tell you. I don’t know. The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.”
Whether it’s constitutional or not, Biden wants to do it anyway, because he believes it will buy him time to relieve a current headache. “But, at a minimum,” he continued, “by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some additional time” to address the problem with other means.
To those who would say, “But it’s not the renter’s fault he can’t pay his rent, and the landlord is just a greedy, faceless megamillions corporation, anyway,” please keep in mind that it’s not the landlord’s fault the tenant cannot pay his rent, either. Further, the CDC didn’t issue an order to the banks, the insurance companies, the mortgage lenders, and/or the IRS telling them they can no longer collect the monies due them from landlords who are no longer receiving rent payments from their tenants — and most landlords, I’m willing to bet, would object if the CDC tried to issue such an order.
Moreover, according to the most recent statistics, “mom and pop” landlords are the owners of almost 23 million rental units. That’s about 40% of the rental properties available. Further, 40% of landlords own property worth less than $200,000, and another 30% own property valued in the $200,000-$400,000 range. So more than two-thirds of landlords own property valued at $400,000 or less. These are not greedy, faceless megamillions corporations. They are our friends, neighbors, and coworkers. And their government is shafting them.
But the government is doing more than just shafting landlords with this eviction moratorium. It is shafting all of us, because those property rights the government is attacking are the rights on which all our other rights rest.
Devotees of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels the world over know this. In their 1848 pamphlet, “The Communist Manifesto,” Marx and Engels declared that “the theory of the Communists may be outlined in a single sentence: Abolition of private property” and then went on to outline the steps necessary to move a society from capitalism to communism, with this listed as their first step: “Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land for public purposes.”
Perhaps it’s been so long since congressional Republicans read Marx and Engels that they don’t recognize a step toward communism when they see it. (Something tells me the same cannot be said of Pelosi.) One thing’s for sure: If the Republicans don’t soon stand up and fight this, they will have allowed the Marxism they claim to be fighting to notch a huge victory.
Bill Pascoe, a political consultant, has been working to defend and extend individual liberty for more than 40 years.
