Liberals interpret the written law very differently.
And that is problematic, according to an analysis by Christopher Bedford, a senior editor at The Federalist, who explained on the organization’s website.
He’s also vice chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, a board member at the National Journalism Center, and the author of The Art of the Donald, and commented on the decision by the Supreme Court this week that a Biden administration moratorium on evictions of those who refuse to pay rent wasn’t constitutional.
It was a 6-3 majority that said it “strained credulity” to think a law allowing for fumigation or the destruction of disease-ridden animal carcasses to prevent the spread of disease also allowed the government to deprive, without compensation, home owners of their properties and give them to non-rent-paying tenants.
“The left thinks its power is so overarching as to impact nearly every citizen, so broadly interpreted as to be essentially limitless, and so singularly vested as to be checked virtually solely at the discretion of the bureaucracy itself,” Bedford explained.
Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonya Sotomayor all agreed on their version of the Public Health Service Act of 1944.
That states: “The Surgeon General may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.”
Bedford wondered: “What’s that got to do with banning property owners from doing business with renters? To forbid them from ejecting squatters from their land? As written, not much at all.”
But, he found, Breyer believes the law says “we can kill your dog in a plague, so we also have the power to say you don’t have to work during COVID.”
He noted the liberals get to that point by citing the law’s reference to “other measures.”
Breyer said after all, if Congress did not want such a power to exist, it would have said so.
“By not specifically naming every single means of identifying, isolating, and destroying COVID, Congress gave the CDC limitless authority to do as it pleases,” Bedford explained Breyer thought.
The Supreme Court, in fact, said just last year, “Our precedents require Congress to enact exceedingly clear language if it wishes to significantly alter the balance between federal and state power and the power of the Government over private property.”
It was the Centers for Disease Control that arbitrarily extended an earlier, and now expired, congressional eviction moratorium.
Breyer’s claim was that “because this is an emergency, and by going to work, people put themselves at risk of dying. Nevermind that nurses, grocery clerks, flight attendants, bartenders, police officers, construction workers, cab drivers, soldiers, cooks, trash collectors, cameramen, janitors, plumbers, warehouse employees, bouncers, pilots, firemen, musicians, engineers, and a whole host of others have long been back at work. Nevermind that the United States economy needs workers so badly some businesses are going under for lack of them,” Bedford explained.
He noted that Breyer admitted property owners were injured by the action, but that eviction was “irreparable harm.”
He wrote, “Breyer completely neglects to even try to explain how evictions are more dangerous than the masses of Americans freely moving out of New York, California, Oregon, D.C., and other COVID-obsessed areas, or going about their day to day business, but in his thinking, he doesn’t need to: The CDC is not to be questioned on law or constitutional authority by any court in this land.”
He said, “For the past 18 months, we’ve suffered under the thumb of this sort of unchecked bureaucracy: Closed schools, masked children, shuttered businesses, canceled weddings, restricted hospitals, forbidden funerals — even the public drug dens and homeless camps now filling major cities are products of CDC ‘guidance.’ For ‘public health and safety,’ we’re told.”
