On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tried to give itself powers that the Constitution doesn’t allow and found itself bitch-slapped down by a Trump-appointed judge.
The judge made a remark to the CDC, saying “Although the COVID-19 pandemic persists, so does the Constitution.”
US District Court Judge John Barker in Texas gave a ruling in favor of a group of landlords and property managers who argued that the CDC was going beyond its authority, The Hill reported.
The case, Lauren Terkel, et al. vs. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, et. al., was about whether or not the CDC could enforce a moratorium on landlords executing evictions.
“This lawsuit presents the question whether the federal government has authority to order property owners not to evict specified tenants,” the summary stated. “Plaintiffs argue that this authority is not among the limited powers granted to the federal government in Article I of the Constitution, and thus the decision whether to enact an eviction moratorium rests with a given State. Disagreeing, the federal government argues that a nationwide eviction moratorium is within Article I’s grant of federal authority to regulate commerce among the States.”
The case concentrated specifically on federal “police powers” without getting into whether or not the states could do it, which according to the 10th Amendment, they can.
“This lawsuit does not question that the States may regulate residential evictions and foreclosures, as they have long done…” Judge Barker wrote. “But while the States have broad authority to enact legislation for the public good—what we have often called a ‘police power — the Federal Government, by contrast, has no such authority.”
Finally, a judge who read and understand Federalist 45 and the 10th Amendment. Thank you, President Trump!
Judge Barker’s ruling was that the federal government does not have the power to force moratoriums on evictions, and then went further to slam the federal government’s overreach of powers over the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The federal government cannot say that it has ever before invoked its power over interstate commerce to impose a residential eviction moratorium,” he wrote. “It did not do so during the deadly Spanish Flu pandemic. Nor did it invoke such 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.”
“And the government’s claim of constitutional authority is broad,” he added. “The government admits that nothing about its constitutional argument turns on the current pandemic…”
I love it when a judge speaks intelligently about the Constitution.
The judge pretty much insulted the lawyers for the federal government by letting them know that he understands that they’re trying to pull a fast one on the Constitution’s limitations of powers.
“The federal government thus claims authority to suspend residential evictions for any reason, including an agency’s views on ‘fairness,’” Barker wrote.
Basically, the judge said the Executive branch declared they have the power to enforce moratoriums on evictions just because they really really want to. This is another case of when Joe Biden made campaign promises that he should have known he wouldn’t have the authority to do if elected president. But the problem with progressives is that they never gave a damn about Constitutional limitations, they just push through what they want when they want and how they want it. Thank God President Donald Trump appointed so many conservative constitutionalist judges to the federal bench.
The judge refers to the Lopez case to compare a general inference about the federal government’s police powers.
“As to the broader implications of the government’s arguments, they too suggest a breakdown in the demarcation of traditional areas of state concern,” he wrote. “While valid federal law is of course supreme, a court assessing a law’s validity under the Commerce Clause may not ‘pile inference upon inference in a manner that would bid fair to convert congressional authority under the Commerce Clause to a general police power of the sort retained by the States.’”
I love this guy! He was talking about the Supremacy Clause, which progressives think means all federal laws supersede all state laws, and that’s nonsense. Federal law supersedes state laws only when the federal law was created Constitutionally, which technically would exclude about 99 percent of laws passed by Congress. The reason the Founders put that in there is that they figured that the states just created the federal government and gave them enumerated powers, about 18 of them. So what they were saying was why would we give the federal government 18 enumerated powers only to have the states who in the future might not like a law that came from one of those 18 enumerated powers and create their own laws that would supersede that over the federal government? So, what they did was said that any valid law and the word valid is where we lose the progressives because they don’t understand that valid means Constitutionally proper.
So, what the judge is saying is that the federal government cannot take one valid law (read Constitutional) and link it to something that isn’t but they really really want it to be valid, and then declare that what they really really want is valid law. And that’s because it’s stupid.
“Because the remaining plaintiffs are entitled to judgment as a matter of law, the court enters summary judgment granting declaratory relief in their favor,” Judge Barker ruled. “Although the COVID-19 pandemic persists, so does the Constitution. Declaring the scope of constitutional power is thus proper relief, and a federal court with jurisdiction has a ‘virtually unflagging obligation . . . to exercise that authority’ to resolve a case before it.”
He basically told the Biden administration that the Constitution is the remedy for their perverse reading of the powers of the federal government. You gotta love it when freedom wins.
