Millions of Families Face Eviction This Week. Who Bears the Blame For This Catastrophe?

Photo by Michael Dwyer / AP

When the federal moratorium on evictions put in place by the CDC expired over the weekend on July 31, the finger-pointing was already in full swing. Should House Leadership, Senate Republicans, the White House, the Supreme Court, or local officials bear the blame for this looming fiasco?

House Progressives blasted the White House primarily for failing to inform Congress of the situation and to act unilaterally to keep 7.4 million tenant households from facing possible evictions this week. One Congressmember, Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) drove home the point by sleeping on the steps of the Capitol in protest over the lack of action. Before being elected to Congress, Bush had been evicted three times and was left to sleep in her car with her two children, and she knows first hand the fear, pain and loss involved with homelessness. She was joined in her protest by progressive “squad” members Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA).

Speaker Nancy Pelosi also called on the Biden Administration to issue an order to extend the moratorium in spite of the lack of Congressional action. Pelosi had taken heat as well for waiting too long to move to extend the ban, but she noted that such a bill would be pointless so long as the Senate currently lacked the votes needed to approve the extension. Her eleventh-hour attempt to lob a bill over to the Senate anyway by unanimous consent was blocked by Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), who has decried the ban on evictions as unconstitutional. 

House Republicans do not support the current bill as written and are using the delay in its handling to dig in. “I oppose this rushed partisan legislation for several reasons,” said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). “First, the bill before us does not provide clear and specific clarification on CDC’s authority. It simply extends the CDC's moratorium, based on an authority the courts have ruled does not exist. The reason this bill simply extends the unlawful order is because it was written last night at the last minute, despite the White House and congressional Democrats’ full knowledge for over a month that this moratorium would lapse absent congressional action.” Recognizing that the bill did not have the support of Republicans, Speaker Pelosi pared back the proposed moratorium language and opted not to bring the legislation to a vote. Its fate now is less than clear.

For its part, the White House insists it has tried everything it can to get the CDC to extend the ban but pointed to the Supreme Court as the source of its woes. The Biden Administration claims it is hamstrung by a recent decision by Justice Brett Kavanaugh who stated, “In my view, clear and specific congressional authorization (via new legislation) would be necessary for the CDC to extend the moratorium past July 31.” Kavanaugh was one of five justices who voted to leave the moratorium in place. Despite strong pressure from the White House, the CDC reported back that it lacked legal authority to make any carve-outs and extend the ban, even in light of the surging delta variant.

Progressives such as Maxine Waters (D-CA) are urging the White House to order the moratorium extended anyway and buy time as it is fought out in the courts, thus protecting the most vulnerable families from immediate eviction. But this argument was rejected as too direct a flouting of express Supreme Court language, something that could imperil any future health policy edicts from the CDC. The White House is continuing to search for any solid legal authority to extend the ban but has thus far come up empty.

Federal lawmakers and the White House are in agreement, however, that the true issue isn’t with federal law or policy but rather with the states, who have received more than enough aid to prevent evictions but have failed to disperse nearly any of it. Indeed, the amount already allocated to the states is $46.5 billion but only $3 billion has been spent, with the rest not clearing the red tape involved—a bureaucracy that local officials say is driven by a desire to prevent fraud and weighed down by complex paperwork.

This political circular firing squad may explain why the allocated aid remains undistributed and no federal aid is forthcoming, but it does little to help millions of tenants who are months behind on rent, or the tens of thousands of landlords who have been neither able to collect it nor re-let their properties to those who can afford to pay it.

It’s also clear that the impact of the expiration of the moratorium will be uneven, with big blue states like California and New York having already extended their moratoriums while many red states have done little to nothing to protect the most vulnerable, poorest families. In many liberal states, judicial processes related to eviction were stayed while the moratorium was in place. But in more conservative states like Florida and Ohio, judges have been encouraged to permit filings and proceedings to proceed all the way up to the point where the sheriff is called in to deliver the eviction notice. 

Thus, and rather perversely, while the moratorium is unlikely to have an immediate impact on renters in blue states that have much higher vaccination rates and less of a current crisis with the delta variant, across red states it may immediately send many poor families into shelters, to crowded living quarters with extended families, or out onto the streets, all in the middle of a surge in Covid-19 cases. While federal officials are working furiously with many local jurisdictions to urge the speeding up of the release of allocated funds, by mid-week those efforts will fall far short of what is needed as law enforcement fans out to execute on eviction orders.

It is possible that Senate and House leadership will call Congress back into session, as the $1 trillion infrastructure bill has yet to pass and negotiations on the size of the budget reconciliation bill remain unresolved. Should this happen, there is also a chance that an extension bill could still emerge, though perennial thorn-in-the-side Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) has indicated she will not change her vacation plans to attend an extended session simply to pass the reconciliation bill. Meanwhile, all this paralysis may prove catastrophic for millions of families, particularly across the South and Midwest, who are unable to access aid, unable to make good on back rent, and are facing eviction for themselves and their families during this pandemic surge.