Nothing in Gov. JB Pritzker’s emergency orders on COVID is more egregiously unjust, tyrannical and arbitrary than his moratorium on residential evictions.
Pritzker, in his sole discretion, has effectively forced landlords alone to pay the cost of a free housing program. It’s that simple. His eviction ban prevents even mom and pop landlords from collecting rent they need to pay their mortgages and property taxes, and often to provide income they live on.
The United States Supreme Court last week struck down a federal moratorium on residential evictions. The ruling was based on the absence any authorization for the moratorium by Congress, not on broader constitutional issues like property rights, contract rights or due process. Therefore, as a strict legal matter, the ruling does not apply to Pritzker’s own eviction moratorium. It’s based on Pritzker’s emergency powers, as he sees things.
So Pritzker has been free to extend his emergency order again, as he did last week. And he will probably do so for an indefinite period of time. With COVID breaking through vaccinations at a much faster pace than originally hoped, it’s clear that COVID will be with us indefinitely. That means Pritzker will claim his authoritarian emergency power also extends indefinitely.
But with just a few short questions in his written concurrence with last week’s ruling, Justice Brett Kavanaugh showed why eviction bans at any level, from any perspective, are so crassly dictatorial and irrational. If the Centers for Disease Control can, through a federal eviction ban, force landlords the pay for free housing, what can’t they do? Here’s how Kavanaugh put it:
Could the CDC, for example, mandate free grocery delivery to the homes of the sick or vulnerable?
Require manufacturers to provide free computers to enable people to work from home?
Order telecommunications companies to provide free high-speed Internet service to facilitate remote work?
Yes, they could – if you accept the absurd thinking behind eviction bans. Pritzker likewise could do the same things at the state level – and dictate countless similar actions – if you accept that thinking behind eviction bans.
Kavanaugh’s questions must be put to Pritzker by Illinois reporters. Please do so, reporters.
Put up your answers, Governor.
And, Governor, don’t say that property owners are being reimbursed by the relief programs for landlords and tenants. Those programs were designed and are being executed with incompetence exceeded only by America’s Afghanistan withdrawal.
Illinois’ program to help landlords has been botched from the start. It’s fundamentally flawed because it requires an application jointly made by the tenant and the landlord, which recalcitrant tenants won’t cooperate on. The program was “too little, too late,” as explained here. Most of the federal money supposedly available to help sits unused, as recently reported by NBC Chicago.
It’s not like the gush of federal cash shouldn’t be sufficient to take care of deserving tenants and landlords. Federal “pandemic relief” sent to Illinois now exceeds a mind-boggling $160 billion, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Some tenants need no help and are just thumbing their noses at landlords, but for those who need and deserve help, there’s no excuse for why some of that $160 billion hasn’t been made available to unpaid landlords. If deserving tenants are still in need of help, that’s just another indictment of the entire misdirection of federal assistance.
Most of the “pandemic relief” has ended up merely inflating financial assets – stocks, bonds, real estate funds, cryptocurrencies – everything that only people with means hold, and robbing working people through inflation. So-called progressives should be most disgusted with that result, but they are responsible.
Finally, don’t expect Illinois courts or the General Assembly to be of any help. Their wholesale abrogation of responsibility is the most frightening aspect of the whole affair. Legislators should have intervened and put some sense into how the pandemic is being addressed. Courts long ago should have struck down eviction bans as unconstitutional seizures of private property without just compensation or due process.
They have failed in their most essential roles.
*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.
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