Eviction Moratorium

Tucker Carlson, Fox News.

On New Year’s Day of this year, Rochelle Walensky was just a college professor in Massachusetts. You’d almost certainly never heard of her. You definitely didn’t vote for her at any point, because Walensky had never run for office.

As of January first, Walensky’s political power was precisely the same as yours and everyone else’s in this supposedly self-governing republic: she had one vote out of a nation of 320 million people. And then, just a few weeks later, everything changed, for her, and for the rest of us.

Joe Biden appointed Walensky to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. At the time, it didn’t seem like a huge deal at the time. The CDC is not a legislative body. It is a public health bureau. It was originally designed to fight malaria, and it did a good job.

The CDC gathers information about diseases and then releases guidance about those diseases to the country. The CDC does not make laws in this country. It’s not allowed to. Under the U.S. Constitution, making laws is the exclusive role of Congress.

You vote for your senators and congressmen and they decide what the rules are. That’s known as representative democracy. It’s been our system for nearly 250 years. But apparently, it is now over. Rochelle Walensky now makes the laws.

Walensky announced last month that she has decided to nationalize America’s rental properties, millions and millions of them from Maine to California. Tenants are no longer required to pay their rent.  

Property owners cannot evict them under any circumstances. Making someone pay to live on your property is now a federal crime. Try it, and you can wind up in prison, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

At the same time, you should know, property owners will still be required to pay the banks that hold their mortgages. There’s no moratorium on mortgages.

It’s hard to overstate what a momentous change this is. It means among other things that private property no longer exists in the United States. You thought you owned your home. Not anymore. Rochelle Walensky does. She’ll decide who can live there, under what circumstance and for how long. 

Is this a good idea? Of course not.  It’s totalitarian. But there’s an even more pressing question at the center of this story — a principle that defines what kind of country this is and what kind of country it will be going forward: Where did Rochelle Walensky get the power to do this, to suspend private property rights in America? The answer is, she simply asserted the power.

Walensky claimed she had the authority, and no one stopped her from exercising it. She signed an official-looking order declaring that her opinion is now the law, and so it is the law. But wait, you say. That doesn’t seem very American. Shouldn’t somebody vote on this? If we’re going to continue to pretend this is a democracy, and you hear that on television constantly, then shouldn’t our elected lawmakers make the laws?

Nope. And they’re not going to. Nancy Pelosi has refused to call a vote on the matter, and she runs the Congress, she decides. Most Republicans haven’t said a word. That means that an unelected college professor you hadn’t heard of six months ago is now in charge of your country.  

If you’re wondering how all of this can possibly be legal, rest assured that it’s not — it’s not even arguably legal. We know for a fact that it’s not. The Supreme Court just ruled on the question, specifically.

The court found that the CDC does not have the right to institute a nationwide eviction moratorium. Period. Only Congress can do that. Now, the court didn’t make us guess on their view on this, the court put that in writing, in the clearest possible language. There’s no debate about that. The Biden Administration just ignored what the court said.

How can they do that?  

Congresswoman Maxine Waters of Los Angeles understands exactly how they did it. One thing Maxine Waters knows well is how third-world regimes operate. When you want something, you simply take it. You’ve got the guns. Who’s going to stop you? Might makes right.

Nancy Pelosi knows that too. Pelosi knows that what Rochelle Walensky just did is illegal by definition. She also knows that openly ignoring a Supreme Court ruling will mean the end of our current system. That’s fine with Nancy Pelosi.  

“The CDC has the power to extend the eviction moratorium,” Pelosi said. She didn’t explain where that power comes from. She simply declared that it exists, as dictators do.  

Keep in mind that even Joe Biden, who knows very little, knows that what his administration has just done is against the law. He said it on camera yesterday: 

JOE BIDEN: I’ve sought out constitutional scholars. To determine what is the best possibility, that would come from executive action or the CDC judgment. What could they do that was most likely to pass muster? Constitutionally. The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster. Number one. But there are several key scholars who think that it may and it’s worth the effort. 

So the eviction moratorium has been in place for months, it has just recently been extended. So people have debated this, jurists have weighed in on it, and so we know, it won’t pass, “constitutional muster,” says Biden. In other words, it’s illegal.

Now folks, believe it or not, our founding fathers could see this coming 232 years ago.

Dave Roos is a freelance writer based in the United States and Mexico. A longtime contributor to HowStuffWorks, Dave has also been published in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek.

When the 13 United States of America declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1776, the founders were attempting to break free from the tyranny of Britain’s top-down centralized government. Very similar to what we are seeing here in the US today.

But the first constitution the founders created, the Articles of Confederation, vested almost all power in individual state legislatures and practically nothing in the national government.

The Articles of Confederation set up a government run by Congress, with no President. Can you imagine?

The result—political chaos and crippling debt that almost destroyed the country before it got started.

So the founders met again in Philadelphia in 1787 and drafted a new Constitution grounded in a novel separation of state and national powers known as federalism.

While the word itself doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution, federalism became the guiding principle to safeguard Americans against King George III-style tyranny while providing a check against rogue states.

The Articles of Confederation were written and ratified while the Revolutionary War was still raging. The document is less of a unifying constitution than a loose pact between 13 sovereign states intending to enter into “a firm league of friendship.”

Absent from the Articles of Confederation were the Executive or Judicial branches, and the national congress had only the power to declare war and sign treaties, but no authority to directly levy taxes.

As a result, the newly independent United States was buried in debt by 1786 and unable to pay the long-overdue wages of Revolutionary soldiers.

The U.S. economy sunk into a deep depression and struggling citizens lost their farms and homes.

In Massachusetts, angry farmers joined Shays’ Rebellion to seize courthouses and block foreclosures, and a toothless congress was powerless to put it down.

George Washington, temporarily retired from government service, lamented to John Jay, “What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal & fallacious!”

Alexander Hamilton called for a new Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 where the Articles of Confederation were ultimately thrown out in favor of an entirely new form of government.

When the United States cut ties with Britain, the founders wanted nothing to do with the British form of government known as “unitary.”

Under a unitary regime, all power originates from a centralized national government (Parliament) and is delegated to local governments. That’s still the way the government operates in the UK.

Instead, the founders initially chose the opposite form of government, a confederation.

In a confederation, all power originates at the local level in the individual states and is only delegated to a weak central government at the states’ discretion.

When the founders met in Philadelphia, it was clear that a confederation wasn’t enough to hold the young nation together. States were fighting over borders and printing their own money. Massachusetts had to hire its own army to put down Shays’ Rebellion.

The solution was to find a middle way, a blueprint of government in which the powers were shared and balanced between the states and national interests.

That compromise, woven into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, became known as federalism.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights created two different kinds of separation of powers, both designed to act as critical checks and balances.

The first and best-known of the separation of powers is between the three branches of government: Executive, Legislative and the Judiciary.

If the president acts against the best interests of the country, he or she can be impeached by Congress.

If Congress passes an unjust law, the president can veto it.

And if any law or public institution infringes on the constitutional rights of the people, the Supreme Court can remedy it.

But the second type of separation of powers is equally important, the granting of separate powers to the federal and state governments.

This is the key to where we are today in our fight with an all too powerful federal government.

Under the Constitution, the state legislatures retain much of their sovereignty to pass laws as they see fit, but the federal government also has the power to intervene when it suits the national interest.

As we discussed last week, under the “supremacy clause” found in Article VI, federal laws and statutes supersede state law.

Federalism, or the separation of powers between the state and federal government, was entirely new when the founders included it in the Constitution.

While it functions as an important check, it’s also been a continual source of contention between the two levels of government.

In the final run-up to the Civil War, the Southern states seceded from the Union in part because of the federal government was unconstitutionally encroaching on their “domestic institutions” of slavery.

According to James Madison, a committed federalist, the Constitution maintains the sovereignty of states by enumerating very few express powers to the federal government, while “[t]hose which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”

Article I Section 8 contains a list of all of the “enumerated” powers that are exclusively delegated to the federal government. Those include the power to declare war, maintain armed forces, regulate commerce, coin money and establish a Post Office.

But that very same Section 8 also includes the so-called “Elastic Clause” that authorizes Congress to write and pass any laws that are “necessary and proper” to carry out its enumerated powers.

This is where the train jumps off the tracks.

These powers are known collectively as “implied powers” and have been used by Congress to create a national bank, to collect a federal income tax, to institute the draft, to pass gun control laws and to set a federal minimum wage, among others.

Other than that, the Constitution grants almost all other power and authority to the individual states, as Madison said.

While the Constitution doesn’t explicitly list the powers retained by the states, the founders included a catch-all in the 10th Amendment, ratified in 1791:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Those so-called “reserved” powers include all authority and functions of local and state governments, policing, education, the regulation of trade within a state, the running of elections and many more.

So this brings us back to our original topic of the eviction moratorium. Our forefathers saw the threat of an all powerful central government and set up a system to control it.

When followed, it works.

The question now is, “What happens when the system is implemented, and the federal government chooses to ignore the results?

The south answered that question in 1861.

It is my sincere hope that we have not reached that point again, but I think you can now see how critical the eviction moratorium issue is in deciding the future of our country and where we go from here.

Are we beyond the point of no return?