SCOTUS Protects Eviction Moratorium But More Is Needed

The Supreme Court this week upheld the eviction moratorium that has been in place through most of the pandemic. While this is certainly good news, the moratorium itself isn't enough to prevent massive, localized economic crashes across the country. Rent must be forgiven, otherwise the country is just prolonging an inevitable crisis. Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

In a rather surprising vote this week five to four vote by the us Supreme court. They actually denied a request by, uh, trade associations, landlords and real estate companies to overturn the centers for disease controls, eviction moratorium that has been in place throughout most of the pandemic. Uh, this was good news for people who've been unable to pay their rent during the pandemic, obviously major blow to the people who own all the property in this country. But again, it was rather shocking that we did have a majority of this, you know, court, which is overwhelmingly conservative

Vote tool, uphold the eviction moratorium.

And the reason for that is because the moratorium is set to expire in July and, uh, justice, Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote the opinion basically said that, listen, due to the fact that this thing's about to expire all it. Yeah. We're just going to leave it in place for now. He did say that the centers for disease control overstep their authority in doing this.

And he actually wrote that

The public health service act of 1944, which is what the moratorium, uh, what basically gave the CDC, the authority to put this moratorium in place. He said, yeah, you know, the rules have changed the, the, the, whatever idiot Kavanaugh.

So here's the thing. It's great

That the moratorium has been upheld.

The ruling from the Supreme

Court says that they cannot continue the moratorium any longer after it's already set to expire. So that is a horrifying consequence here. So what needs to happen at this point? Well, I will explain that we have millions of people in this country that have been unable to pay their rent during this pandemic. You know, we saw obviously millions of people lose their jobs. The economy or jobs are coming back, I guess a little bit at a time, a little bit here, a little bit there. They're not paying enough. So people are still gonna run into the same problems, not to mention the fact that they don't just automatically start owing the rent that's due for that month. There's back rent. Okay. We've done nothing about the backlog and that's the problem. Even the moratorium, even if they extended it, it would still just be putting a bandaid on the entire problem facing millions of people. In fact, as the Supreme court estimated, uh, 30 to 40 million renters, okay. 30 to 40 million people, let's assume, obviously not all of them have been unable to pay the rent, but let's assume it's 10%. So you're talking about three to 4 million people suddenly, oh, maybe up to a year's worth of rent.

They don't have 30 grand

Just sitting in the bank that they've been holding on to like, all right, I guess I'll pay rent. Now. They don't have the means to pay this rent. So we could be looking at millions and millions of people kicked out of their homes out of their apartments, out of their condo in a month and a half, because there's no rent relief. So it's great that we have the eviction moratorium, but we have, you have to have the second component, which is the rent relief without the second component. The first component is basically meaningless. You're prolonging the inevitable. And that is a massive economic crash due to millions of people suddenly being kicked out on the streets. And I know the landlords are anxious to kick people out so they can get other people in to start making that money. But guess what, if we have millions, suddenly millions and millions of empty units across this country, more units available than people available to rent them out that causes a crash in that market as well. This whole thing has ripple effects throughout the entire United States economy. We are looking at this thing head on, we see the catastrophe coming, right. We know exactly what this is to do, and we're just whistling Dixie here, just letting it happen. So the simplest thing for the federal government to do is provide rent relief to every single individual so that all of their back rent is paid. The federal government needs to pick up that tab. And, oh my God, I know everybody's freaking out about that, but hear me out