By Spy Uganda Correspondent
The Supreme Court on Thursday issued an emergency order blocking a New York state law aimed at protecting renters from eviction during the coronavirus pandemic.
The move, which came at the request of landlords and over the dissent of the court’s three Democratic appointees, is another signal that virus-related eviction bans are in serious danger at the high court.
However, the new order’s significance for the ban President Joe Biden’s administration reimposed last week under intense pressure from liberal activists is unclear since the legal bases for the challenges differ.
The court’s majority signalled that the New York law was likely unconstitutional because landlords had no way to challenge a tenant’s claim to have been hard hit by the pandemic.
“If a tenant self-certifies financial hardship, [the law] generally precludes a landlord from contesting that certification and denies the landlord a hearing,” the high court’s order said. “This scheme violates the Court’s longstanding teaching that ordinarily ‘no man can be a judge in his own case’ consistent with the Due Process Clause.”
The justices in the majority also emphasized that the injunction applies only to the self-certification provision and not to another law that provides renters with numerous pandemic-related protections, the Tenant Safe Harbor Act. Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said in a dissenting opinion that they would have denied emergency relief to the landlords challenging the Empire State law.
New York lawmakers who pushed the moratorium, which was enacted last December, argued that allowing tenants to self-certify that they’ve experienced financial hardship was crucial to covering a sufficiently wide swath of struggling renters.
“Any process that purported to adjudicate which of those folks have a hardship and which do not, we concluded in the drafting of this bill would be ineffective,” state Sen. Brian Kavanagh, one of the prime sponsors of the legislation enacting the ban, said last December.
Landlord groups have continually charged that the lack of proof required in submitting these declarations would allow tenants to benefit even if they hadn’t lost jobs or income because of Covid-19.
Randy Mastro, the lead attorney representing the landlord plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement: “On behalf of New York’s small landlords, we are extremely grateful to the Supreme Court for re-affirming that, ‘even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten.’”
Housing advocates in New York called on Tuesday night for the state Legislature to reconvene and amend the law to allow for hearings on tenants’ hardship declarations, to comply with the emergency order.
“Since tenants in New York State have suffered immensely during COVID-19, they will have no trouble proving hardship and satisfying the supreme courts’ mandate,” the Legal Aid Society, one of the groups that pushed the law, said in a statement. “The state legislature can make this minor fix and prevent thousands of New York residents from losing their homes.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling emerged as a legal challenge to the new federal eviction ban that is awaiting an initial ruling from a District Court judge in Washington. U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich heard arguments on Monday on a request by two chapters of the National Association of Realtors to halt the new policy.
In that case, landlords are arguing that a Supreme Court ruling in June issued on a 5-4 vote turning down a request to block an earlier version of the federal ban effectively declared any future iterations of the ban illegal. The only member of the court to explain his or her vote was Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who agreed to let the ban in effect at the time run through the end of last month, although he signaled that he believed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exceeded its statutory authority in issuing the anti-eviction order.
That ban applied nationwide, but the new one effective through Oct. 3 tracks Covid-19 infection levels. Still, it currently covers about 80 per cent of the counties in the U.S. and 90 per cent of the population.
Whatever ruling Friedrich issues is expected to be quickly appealed by the losing side to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and then to the Supreme Court.
