Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told President Joe Biden’s White House to seek help from left-wing legal scholar Laurence Tribe in trying to find a way around the Supreme Court’s rejection of an eviction moratorium by the CDC.
According to the Washington Post, citing Punchbowl News, Pelosi advised the White House to seek Tribe’s help. Tribe also advised Democrats to delay delivering the articles of impeachment to the Senate against Trump in 2020, the better to gain leverage over the Republican-controlled Senate for procedural concessions. Tribe, who had pushed for Trump’s impeachment before he was inaugurated, provided legal advice to the Democrats throughout the failed impeachment.
In June, the Court narrowly left the CDC’s eviction moratorium in place, pending its expiration. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who cast the deciding vote, said that the CDC lacked the authority to act without congressional approval.
Last Monday, the White House sent presidential adviser Gene Sperling to the briefing room to tell journalists that there was no legal or constitutional way for the administration to extend the moratorium, which had expired on July 31.
But on Tuesday, President Biden reversed that position and the CDC imposed a new eviction moratorium. The gesture — a surrender to left-wing critics — echoed President Barack Obama’s endorsement of a broad amnesty for some illegal aliens, after stating dozens of times that he lacked the constitutional authority to do so without legislative approval.
Liberal constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, who has opposed abuses of executive power by presidents of either party, wrote that “Biden is not a first-time offender,” noting that he was vice president when Obama spent billions on Obamacare without congressional authorization. (Turley represented the House of Representatives in court, and won.)
Turley noted that Biden himself made the striking admission that the new CDC eviction moratorium was likely unconstitutional, but hoped to spend enough money by the time the Supreme Court intervened to strike it down.
Why is the eviction moratorium constitutional, I asked the president. Biden told me "I can't guarantee you the court won’t rule that we don't have that authority but at least we'll have the ability to, if we have to appeal, to keep this going for a month-at least. I hope longer." pic.twitter.com/sBTOLmbPDV
— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) August 5, 2021
In addition, Turley noted, Biden appeared to have violated his oath of office, as well as his campaign promise to obey the rule of law, which he said Trump had violated, though — like anti-Trump pundits with the same view — he offered no examples.
As Breitbart News noted in 2020, it was Obama, not Trump, who notoriously violated the Constitution on many occasions. Turley has also noted that Biden had been admonished by the courts often in his first six months.
Update: As Breitbart News has noted before, much of the existing rental assistance has gone undistributed, partly because people have found other ways to pay their rent, using other forms of relief already being provided.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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