LogFAQs > #957487393

masterplum posted...

Seriously, you guys complain about autocracy until its autocracy you like. The Supreme court said a month ago it was wildly unconstitutional but because it was going to end anyways it was fine I guess, and Biden brazenly extended it anyways and Congress did nothing even with a Democrat majority

There are a lot of rulings from the court to hate on, but this isnt one of them

Few technical points here since you're keeping to that kind of line.

SCOTUS did not say it was "wildly unconstitutional." A lower court had found the CDC had exceeded its authority in issuing the moratorium and the CDC appealed. They also filed for a stay (that the moratorium remain in place while the appeal took place) and were granted that.

The landlords responded with a motion of their own to have that stay overturned and thrown out. The DC Circuit of Appeals rejected this motion and left the stay intact - noting that while they didn't think HHS was likely to win this one, that there's more criteria than that to whether a stay ought to be granted and the public health concerns raised by the CDC along with a legal question raised were sufficient to allow the order be stayed pending appeal.

So having failed to get the stay thrown out in the Court of Appeals, the landlords went to the next and last place they could go to get the stay vacated - SCOTUS. SCOTUS rejected their argument as well. What happened was a 5-4 "decision" (I airquote this because it was SCOTUS deciding on an emergency motion, not hearing an actual case before it) and they similarly denied the landlord's attempts to have the moratorium thrown out even as the case on the merits was under appeal. It was only unique in that Kavanaugh went out of his way to specifically issue a concurrence to the order (because typically these are one sentence orders otherwise. Two if there's a note of which justices disagree. Even with Kavanaugh's paragraph here the order ends up being only one page long in its entirety) saying that while he agreed with the landlords on the merits, the fact that the moratorium was about to end anyway made the matter of vacating the stay irrelevant in his mind.

The actual matter of whether the moratorium was constitutional or not wasn't before the court on its merit at that point, they were issuing an order on procedural motions. Granted, reading into the 4 + Kavanaugh, the existence of 5 votes against the CDC on the merits is pretty clear but as a matter of law that's not what happened there.

What happened here was when the CDC put in place the modified moratorium, the landlords went back to the District Court and tried again to have the stay vacated. Again the lower courts declined their requests, though they noted that they probably would not have granted that original stay at this point in time - pointing to, among other things, Kavanaugh's concurrence from before chilling the idea. Nevertheless, they concluded that the law required them to hold to their position. So once again thwarted they returned to SCOTUS - the only difference is that this time SCOTUS switched sides and decided to vacate the stay.

In truth this could have been 5-4 (Liberals + Roberts) or 6-3 and it's just impossible to know because, again, SCOTUS decided to do this through an unsigned order in the emergency appeals process instead of the standard docket - where the case could be fully argued by both sides, which Breyer calls for in the dissent and his argument that SCOTUS was wrong to do this through the process they just chose is compelling. It's pretty hard IMO to read his dissent and not think this was just a pretty ideological decision made on the "shadow docket."

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This is a tl;dr shitpost version of that but basically when you say the Supreme Court already heard arguments on this (they didn't, really - again SCOTUS has only interacted with this in the form of emergency motions not the actual merits) and declared it "wildly unconstitutional" you're referring to an order in which SCOTUS rejected the request of the landlords' association. Which uh... don't think that says what you think it says.

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xp1337: Don't you wish there was a spell-checker that told you when you a word out?