Federal judge rules eviction moratorium is unconstitutional
A federal judge in Texas on Thursday ruled that the federal moratorium on evictions is unconstitutional, according to court documents.
US District Judge John Barker, who was appointed by then-President Donald Trump to the court in the Eastern District of Texas, stopped short of issuing a preliminary injunction, but said he expected the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to respect his ruling and withdraw the moratorium.
“The federal government cannot say that it has ever before invoked its power over interstate commerce to impose a residential eviction moratorium. It did not do so during the deadly Spanish Flu pandemic. Nor did it invoke such a power during the exigencies of the Great Depression. The federal government has not claimed such a power at any point during our Nation’s history until last year,” Barker wrote.
Although the Covid-19 pandemic persists, he said, “so does the Constitution.”
But the property owners argued in their lawsuit that the federal government didn’t have the power to stop evictions. Barker sided with that argument, writing in his ruling that Congress also lacked the authority to grant the CDC the power to halt evictions nationwide, and noted that the moratorium threatened to encroach on landlords’ rights under state law.
This eviction rule is such an overstep. Talking about opening the door to deadbeat tenants and such.
We rent a house to my son and he was going to get a roommate until he read about this and we all became concerned we wouldn’t be able to kick the roommate out for non-payment or property destruction.
Anyway, everything the lefties/communist government is doing seems designed to destroy small businesses. Even the fines for different things - large corps can absorb those costs but small businesses can’t. I had a friend back in Obama days who had an organic, free range small farm. We bought from her all the time. She had to stop because all the regulations were costing her too much.