It is hard not to notice the Biden administration’s clear demonstration of their disregard for Americans’ property rights and the Constitution. All one needs to do is read the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause while considering Biden’s extension of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) eviction moratorium.
Why? It did so despite admitting that despite trying everything they could to “discover” any plausible-sounding excuse that would meet constitutional muster, they were unable to do so.
An important reason for Biden’s failed search for enough legal mumbo-jumbo to justify the eviction moratorium is that the Supreme Court recently rejected their preferred story in advance. In June, four justices held that the moratorium was unconstitutional. The deciding vote, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, on the other hand, sided with the liberal justices not to overturn it. Importantly, his reason was not because the moratorium was constitutional, but because it would soon expire, and “those few weeks will allow for additional and more orderly distribution” of the funds Congress appropriated for pandemic rental assistance.
Crucial to the issue of the current moratorium extension, however, was Kavanaugh’s holding that despite his not voting to overturn the moratorium that would soon end anyway for practical, humanitarian reasons (and because the Biden administration had indicated to the court that they did not intend to extend the moratorium past July 31 before the decision was rendered), “clear and specific congressional authorization would be necessary for the CDC to extend the moratorium past July 31.” As Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) summarized it, “The eviction moratorium lacks both a legal basis and an economic justification.”
So Biden’s CDC extended the moratorium anyway. And the leading excuse was that even though it would almost certainly be ruled unconstitutional, it “would take a while for the court to strike it down.” In other words, they just ignored the court and the Constitution it was trying to defend, because slow-turning judicial wheels will let them get away with it, illustrating the well-worn adage, “Justice delayed is justice denied,” while violating John Adams’ defense of America as “being a nation of laws and not of men.”
For icing, the Biden administration’s action were also diametrically opposed to Biden’s promise of “aggressive action” to “maintain the rule of law and to bring integrity back to our justice system.”
Now the story has gotten more interesting. The Supreme Court just overturned part of New York’s eviction moratorium 6–3, even though it was going to expire at the end of this month. That certainly sends a marker that the fact that some constitutional violation is scheduled to expire in the near future (which history teaches us does not guarantee that it will expire) will no longer provide a “get out of jail free” card to administrative overreach.
As important as this issue is, I believe that focusing the public discussion around whether the moratorium extension was constitutional, as currently interpreted, acts to tone down the crucial importance of the principle being violated—private property—and therefore the width of the abyss between that long-established principle of defensible government action and what was done.
There is an excellent place to turn to highlight what is being hidden, however—Cato’s Letters. Three centuries ago, beginning November 5, 1720, those letters appeared in the London Journal. Cato—the pseudonym for John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon—set out “to maintain and expose the glorious principles of liberty, and to expose the arts of those who would darken or destroy them.” What makes Cato’s Letters so important is that, more than a half century before the Declaration of Independence, they became, in Clinton Rossiter’s words, “the most popular, quotable, esteemed source of political ideas in the colonial period.”
Ronald Hamowy reinforced the importance of Cato’s Letters to the creation of America:
From its first publication in the 1720s through the revolutionary era…. Its arguments against oppressive government and in support of the splendors of freedom were quoted constantly and its authors were regarded as the country’s most eloquent opponents of despotism … [and] frequently served as the basis of the American response to the whole range of depradations under which the colonies suffered.
In particular, Cato’s Letters’s defense of private property—the foundation of liberty—more strikingly is a reminder of how important property rights have been in America long before the United States was created, and hence how essential defending them is, than does the political back-and-forth about constitutionality now taking place.
Consider just some of Trenchard and Gordon’s words on defending private property to recognize what I mean:
- The sole end of men’s entering into political societies was mutual protection and defense; and whatever power does not contribute to those purposes is not government, but usurpation.
- The people … the security of their persons and property is their highest aim.
- Preservation of [property] is the principal business of government.
- If the people are suffered to keep their own, it is the most that they desire: But … they are frequently robbed by those whom they pay to protect them.
- As the preservation of property is the source of national happiness, whoever violates property, or lessens or endangers it … is an enemy.
- Every plowman knows a good government from a bad one … whether the fruits of his labor be his own, and whether he enjoy them in peace and security.
- Nor could any man … have a right to violate the property of another…. No man therefore could transfer to the magistrate that right which he had not himself.
- The fruits of a man’s honest industry are the just rewards … as is his title to use them in the manner which he thinks fit … no man living can divest him but by usurpation, or by his own consent.
- Every man is in nature and reason the judge and disposer of his own domestic affairs…. Government being intended to protect men from the injuries of one another, and not to direct them in their own affairs.
- Let people alone, and they will take care of themselves, and do it best … without the magistrate’s interposition and penalties.
- The privileges of … doing what we please, and of growing rich as we can, without any other restriction, other than that by all this we hurt not the public, nor one another, are the glorious privileges of liberty; and its effects, to live in freedom, plenty, and safety.
- The property of the poor will be as sacred as the privileges of the prince…. Every man’s honest industry and useful talents, while they are employed for the public, will be employed for himself.
- Where there is liberty … people labor for themselves, and no one can take from them the acquisitions which they make by their labor.
- To live securely, happily, and independently, is the end and effect of liberty … property is the best support of that independency.
- Chose whether you will be freemen or vassals; whether you will spend your own money and estates, or let others worse than you spend them for you.
- Dominion will always desire increase, and property always to preserve itself … by this struggle liberty is preserved.
- To prevent the unfair gains and depredations of one another … is indeed the business of the government; viz. to secure to every one his own.
- The first care which wise governors will always take is … to secure to [citizens] the possession of their property, upon which everything else depends.
The Biden administration’s flippant attitude toward not just obeying the Constitution, but toward core founding principles that were key to creating our country, tells us whether the fruits of our labor are our own, and whether we enjoy them in peace and security. Unfortunately the answer is no. And what is at stake is not merely an intellectual exercise or interparty dispute, but as Cato’s Letters make clear, it is at the heart of what defines America.
