Judge suggests ‘gamesmanship’ at play with CDC’s latest eviction moratorium
The question of whether millions of people could be soon evicted from their homes is in front of DC District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Donald Trump appointee who previously ruled with the landlord groups that have challenged the moratorium in court.
At a court hearing on Monday, she weighed a request by the landlords to halt the version of the moratorium issued Tuesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It is really hard … to conclude that there is not a degree of gamesmanship going on,” Friedrich said, pointing to the Supreme Court’s handling of the issue and the comments made by Biden administration officials.
Still Friedrich said she felt as if her hands were tied by how the DC appellate court has handled the litigation over the moratorium. That court said that an earlier version of moratorium could continue, and the Supreme Court let that previous moratorium — which was set to expire on July 31 — to continue as well.
“Tell me why my hands are not tied in light of the D.C. Circuit’s opinion,” Friedrich asked the landlords’ lawyer, Brett Shumate.
Weighing a concurrence from Kavanaugh
When the landlords then took the case to the Supreme Court, it too let the previous iteration of the moratorium — which was set to expire on July 31 — to stand. The vote was 5-4 and Kavanaugh, a conservative who provided liberals a swing vote in the case, wrote a concurrence indicating that he only did so because of the CDC’s assurance that it would not be extend the moratorium beyond that date.
Kavanaugh wrote that “clear and specific congressional authorization (via new legislation) would be necessary for the CDC to extend the moratorium past July 31.”
In the wake of that concurrence, the White House put the onus on Congress to act on addressing the pending eviction crisis. But as pressure continued to build — and Democratic lawmakers were unable to move legislation on their own — the Biden administration reversed course with another, more targeted moratorium issued by the CDC on Tuesday.
A promise for a decision in the ‘near future’
Even though Friedrich has pointed comments about the Biden administration’s maneuver, she she still spent a significant portion of Monday’s hearing grilling the landlords’ lawyer on whether she actually has the ability to block the moratorium.
She said that she was having a “hard time” with the landlords’ arguments that she should not follow the DC Circuit Court’s decision that previously allowed the moratorium to stand.
Meanwhile, the judge questioned Justice Department attorney Brian Netter on whether the new eviction order that much more tailored than the previous version, as it will still covers the vast majority of the country.
Friedrich wrapped up the roughly 30-minute hearing with a promise that she’d issue a decision on whether to block the new version of the moratorium “in the near future.”
