Roughly 11 million Americans who fell behind on their rent during the pandemic are at risk of eviction if a federal moratorium is thrown out. Issued after millions of…
In late June, the US Supreme Court ruled the pandemic-related ban on evictions had to go at the end of July, but gave no official explanation as to why apart from that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had exceeded its statutory authority under the Public Health Service Act. On Monday, Judge Dabney Friedrich of the US District Court for the District of Columbia heard the group of Alabama and Georgia realtors behind the original challenge to the moratorium present their case for striking down the latest one, issued on August 3. The realtors asked Friedrich, a Trump appointee who was first to strike down the ban in May, to immediately vacate the most recent order. The US Department of Justice also argued that the US was in a different situation in early August than it was in June, when COVID-19 cases bottomed out and the economy seemed to be on a course for returning to some semblance of normality. The seven-day average of daily new COVID-19 cases in the US on Sunday was over 97,000, the highest it’s been since February, when the US was exiting its worst phase of the pandemic thus far.
