The mainstream media is putting in zero effort when it comes to their defense of President Joe Biden. This latest example is in response to Biden's illegal actions in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on the eviction moratorium.
Democracy dies in broad daylight pic.twitter.com/872aiJUZCq
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 4, 2021
On Wednesday, The Washington Post published Aaron Blake's "Biden’s novel evictions defense: Maybe it’s illegal, but it’s worth it." Blake isn't a fringe op-ed contributor; he's a senior reporter there.
Blake begins his piece by referencing then President Barack Obama's action on DACA, which was also illegal, and, almost ten years later, is still being figured out through the court system.
He goes on to write:
The lessons of this apparently weren’t learned by his vice president, Joe Biden, and Biden’s new administration. Or, if they were, the lesson was apparently that it was a gambit worth repeating.
But it’s a heck of a way to do the country’s business. And Biden arguably took it even further than Obama.
...
What’s particularly remarkable about how this was rolled out was how Biden explained it later Tuesday. He didn’t try to say they had finally found a legal loophole for this to pass muster; he instead suggested that it was a stopgap — something they were doing so the moratorium could live on while the courts sort through the mess.
Asked about it passing legal muster, Biden said he didn’t know but conceded that “the bulk of the constitutional scholars say it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.”
And then he added: “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.”
In other words: It might not be legal, but even if it’s not, we’ll get some good done in the meantime. At least Obama tried to claim he hadn’t really flip-flopped, even though he had.
Blake closes his piece on a very disquieting note, which is that "yet again, we have a White House effectively doing something it suggested would probably be illegal, which is certainly a precedent to set."
Then there's CNN, which, unsurprisingly, has a pattern.
CNN doesn’t hide their hypocrisy. They embrace it.
— (((Jason Rantz))) on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) August 4, 2021
Biden knowingly breaking the law is heroic. Trump doing things they don’t like? An assault on democracy. https://t.co/xcHqVXvt3U pic.twitter.com/vhePbmJ3fR
The so-called analysis in question comes from Stephen Collinson in a Wednesday piece, "Biden shows he's ready to make drastic moves in Covid-19 fight -- even if he's not sure they're legal."
He begins his piece on this note, making it sound much more like an op-ed column from the start:
Even President Joe Biden doesn't know whether his new federal eviction moratorium for renters is legal and sustainable. But crushing humanitarian and political pressure left him no choice but to take a chance on an emergency move.
The new US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scheme was announced after the White House, hampered by a Supreme Court ruling and Congress' failure to act, had repeatedly argued it had no constitutional authority to extend the moratorium. Biden himself said on Tuesday that the new moratorium may not be constitutional, and is essentially an attempt to buy time to get backlogged funding out of state coffers and into the pockets of renters and landlords alike.
Collinson can tug on our heart strings all he wants, but it's a matter of constitutional authority, not human emotion.
Here's how Collinson feels about the president's actions:
To head off mass evictions, the White House came up with a classic Washington fudge -- not unfamiliar in an era of Capitol Hill gridlock -- in which presidents, especially Democrats, have improvised with executive power to shield constituencies from consequences of a malfunctioning political system....
Politically, the spectacle of potentially millions of Americans being turned out of their homes would be an impossible one for any White House, let alone a Democratic administration built on the principle of using government power to alleviate the plight of poorer Americans. So, Biden had to do something.
He makes the same point there as Blake's closing sentence does, which is to say creating a justification for such illegal action.
When it comes to his mention of DACA, Collinson references how Obama "helped to ease the human toll of a situation that a divided Congress had failed to fix," going on to claim "That Biden averted a humanitarian crisis is not in doubt."
Ultimately, the entire housing moratorium panic of course stemmed from legal reasoning by Kavanaugh, a justice installed as part of ex-President Donald Trump's fashioning of a conservative majority on the nation's top bench.
The sight of Democratic presidents struggling to deal with snares laid by a court specifically constructed to counter the aspirations of an activist liberal government could be repeated again and again in coming years.
As Katie reported on Thursday, landlords are already suing the administration for this illegal move.