Levin: Biden's Defiance of Supreme Court Ruling, Open Border Policy Grounds for Impeachment
Conservative commentator Mark Levin argued Wednesday that President Joe Biden’s defiance of a Supreme Court ruling in reissuing an eviction moratorium and not enforcing the nation’s immigration laws are grounds enough for impeachment.
“Joe Biden is the most disastrous president in modern American history. I don’t care if it’s by design or by the fact that he’s dimwitted. It doesn’t much matter to me,” Levin said on Fox News’ “Hannity” segment.
“Moreover, he’s just defied a federal statute, a Supreme Court decision. He knows that the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] doesn’t have the power to extend these moratoriums on rent. He says, ‘We’re going to do it anyway,’ because he listens to this Harvard emeritus professor Lawrence Tribe.”
The CDC issued an order Tuesday extending a moratorium on evictions, which had expired July 31. The extension lasts for an additional 60 days in U.S. counties with “substantial or high levels of community transmission.”
Biden said Tuesday the new moratorium covers approximately 90 percent of renters, according to a White House transcript of his remarks.
The CARES Act first put a nationwide eviction moratorium in place on March 27, 2020, which ended on July 24, 2020. The CDC then issued its own moratorium, which took effect in September 2020 and has been extended multiple times since.
The 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in June kept the CDC moratorium in place until July 31.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined Chief Justice John Roberts and the three liberal members of the court in allowing the moratorium to stay in place; however, in a concurring opinion, he agreed with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett that it was unconstitutional and must cease.
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“Because the CDC plans to end the moratorium in only a few weeks, on July 31, and because those few weeks will allow for additional and more orderly distribution of the congressionally appropriated rental assistance funds,” the moratorium could remain in place, Kavanaugh wrote.
The CDC indicated at the time it had no plans for further extensions of the moratorium beyond July 31.
Biden admitted Tuesday his administration likely lacked the constitutional authority for the latest extension until October, in light of the Supreme Court ruling, but said it would buy time for the renters.
“The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster,” Biden told White House reporters. “But there are several key scholars who think that it may and it’s worth the effort. But the present — you could not — the Court has already ruled on the present eviction moratorium.”
“But, at a minimum, by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are, in fact, behind in the rent and don’t have the money,” he added. “That’s why it was passed in — in the act that we passed in the beginning of my administration, and it went to the states.”
Liberal Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman predicted in an Op-Ed for Bloomberg that Biden’s rebuff of the Supreme Court will backfire.
“Joe Biden may have humanitarian motives for extending the Centers for Disease Control eviction ban that the Supreme Court has already deemed unlawful,” Feldman wrote.
“But it is both bad constitutional law and bad constitutional politics to flout the court’s judgment — especially because Justice Brett Kavanaugh had already cast a compromise vote intended to allow the ban to stay in place until Congress could extend it,” the professor continued.
“The justices will rapidly reject the extension, and its enduring symbolism won’t be that of helping people but of alienating the court and its new swing justice, Brett Kavanaugh. If Donald Trump had done something like this, liberals would be justifiably worried that he was undermining the rule of law.”
Feldman believes the Supreme Court will likely strike down the extension in a matter of a few days.
In fact, a coalition of housing groups, with the same lead plaintiff from the June Supreme Court case, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C., challenging the new eviction moratorium, Fox Business reported.
“The judge in the D.C. District Court gave the Biden administration until 9 a.m. Friday to respond to the emergency motion,” according to the news outlet.
Beyond defying the Supreme Court, Levin also took Biden to task for his border policy.
“This man has the border wide open in violation of our immigration laws,” the Fox News personality said.
“This man is doing enormous damage to this country,” he added. “People with the virus — he knows they have the virus, his government knows they have the virus — they’re pushing them into the interior of the country.”
Fox News reported Wednesday that more than 7,000 known COVID positive migrants had been released into McAllen, Texas, alone since February, including 1,500 new cases in the past seven days.
“Now what kind of s president does that to his own people?” Levin asked. “If he’s not at least going to look out for the health and safety of the American people, then he needs to be removed.”
“That’s what impeachment is for. Not for the Democrats to chase every Republican president, but to get rid of this guy. He is a disaster.”
