6-3 Ruling Puts End to Nationwide Residential Eviction Moratorium
In a late night “shadow docket” ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority struck down the controversial nationwide CDC Eviction Moratorium which paused virtually all residential evictions in the country through October 3. The eviction moratorium, first put in place by the Trump administration in July 2020, expired at the end of July 2021. Previously, Justice Kavanaugh indicated that the Court would strike it down, but allowed it to expire on July 31. But with increasing Covid rates over the summer, the Biden administration’s Centers for Disease Control put a new moratorium in place tied to county Covid-19 transmission rates.
The challenger in the lawsuit, the Alabama Association of Realtors, petitioned the Supreme Court for the very rare immediate expedited review. The Court’s majority granted review, and found that the CDC’s limited public health statutory authority was not broad enough to shut down all evictions across the country, ruling that “the CDC has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination. It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts.”
Unless Congress passes legislation providing for eviction protections (which it unsuccessfully tried to pass earlier in the summer), the Supreme Court’s ruling clears the way for hundreds of thousands of evictions to resume across in the country. Looming overhead also are billions of rental aid funds which have yet to be distributed by federal agencies and state governments. This was noted by the Court’s three liberal dissenting justices, along with the Delta variant surge.
Here in Massachusetts, the Legislature previously enacted a quasi eviction moratorium which pauses all evictions where a tenant has applied for…