When Vice President Al Gore was caught soliciting campaign donations from the White House, he excused himself by repeating one of the slipperiest phrases in the dictionary of political dodges. There was, he intoned seven times in an excruciating 1997 press conference, “no controlling legal authority” to confirm that his money grubbing was illegal. His logic, if you can call it that, was that since no court decision could be cited — no one had ever had the gall to dispute the matter before a judge — it was impossible to be sure he’d done wrong.
The problem for President Joe Biden and his lawless administration today is that their ban on landlords kicking out tenants who don’t pay their rent is proscribed by a very clear controlling legal authority. The Supreme Court ruled in June that the eviction moratorium put in place by former President Donald Trump as part of the nation’s emergency pandemic response would be unconstitutional without new legislation from Congress.
Biden knows this and acknowledged it, saying, “The bulk of constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster,” but then he did it anyway. So, on the one hand, he offered a weak excuse to his radical left wing, which pretends all landlords are rapacious, pin-striped plutocrats and should be treated as beyond the protection of the law. And on the other, he brazenly gave himself a few extra weeks to sort out the problem before the slow-turning wheels of justice produce further challenges and hearings.
In doing so, he added another layer of cynical Democratic chicanery to public confusion about the proper role of the law. When it thwarts their agenda, they ignore or denounce it, as when they excuse criminal vandalism as political protest, or when courts uphold state voting rules designed to ensure election integrity. But when it is on their side, such as when the Supreme Court discovered a constitutional right to abortion, or decided that the Obamacare insurance mandate was a tax, they treat it as sacrosanct and beyond the purview of politics.
Democrats and the “living constitution” judges they favor are motivated largely, sometimes solely, by the outcomes they want; principles be damned. And this makes sequences of events such as those involving the eviction moratorium useful, outrageous though they are. They expose just how cynical the party of the Left is willing to be. It knows something is unconstitutional, acknowledges it repeatedly, then does it anyway, without a backward glance at the presidential inauguration oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Sooner or later, the Left will doubtless tell us that the oath and the Constitution are just “misinformation” or “disinformation” designed to mislead the rubes of the Right. Democrats’ deployment of those phrases in an effort to censor speech they find inconvenient is the subject of David Harsanyi’s feature, “The Disinformation Deception.” In our cover story, “Murky Future,” Varad Mehta argues that the 2022 electoral odds may finally be too steep for Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski to survive.
