This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, August 7th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When President Biden moved forward with another moratorium on evictions spurred by the

pandemic and pressure from his fellow

Democrats he did so against the advice of his own lawyers previous rulings from

the courts including the Supreme Court and a radically less serious set of circumstances than a year ago.

Cato's Walter Olson takes us through the relevant facts.

Let's do a little background here first.

What did the CDC say last year when you and I spoke and you said that the

CDC's eviction moratorium has some weak grounding in law but probably that wouldn't stand up to scrutiny.

Yeah, I said at the time that when the CDC under the direction of then President Trump declared a nationwide

moratorium on evictions, I said its legal basis for doing so was very flimsy. It cited a statutory provision giving it something of a blank ticket authority to combat communicable disease epidemics as part of a list of things like

fumigating arriving shipments for pests

and quarantining travelers who go across state lines,

a list of traditional public health powers

closely linked to preventing traditional public health dangers and then it said and whatever other

I mean I don't remember the exact phrase but but but there was an etc kind of clause. Now, etc.

Clause is always dangerous and the reading

that the CDC had to apply back then in order to pretend

to authority was that this etc clause really envisioned giving the

CDC of power over the entire national economy over contracts between landlord and tenant in all 50

states over a power to rewrite contracts, a power to prevent the operations of state and municipal courts to handle

...