First 100: CDC Moves to Extend Eviction Moratorium

Plus, Jeff Merkley on the Senate companion to HR1, the democracy reform bill.

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It’s March 19, 2021 and welcome to First 100. You can sign up to have First 100 delivered to your email by clicking here.

The Chief

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has proposed an extension of the public health order that places a moratorium on evictions. That order was set to expire on March 31.

The proposed extension was sent to the Office of Management and Budget for regulatory review on Thursday. Its status is now pending, but since it’s just an extension of the existing order, that review should clear rather quickly. There’s no way to tell from the entry at the OMB regulatory review site how long the extension would last. The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.

Just yesterday, when asked in a White House press briefing about the moratorium, newly installed Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge said that “the CDC is in the process of trying to determine what is the appropriate way forward.” A HUD order that pauses foreclosure operations on federally-owned mortgages is in place until the end of June.

The eviction moratorium is desperately in need of an extension, as potentially millions of renters sit in limbo, wondering whether landlords will be able to kick them out in a matter of weeks. In just the 5 states and 27 cities tracked by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, there have been 272,612 filings for evictions since the onset of COVID-19. Over 5,200 were filed last week, and over half have taken place since September, when the CDC order was first put in place. The Biden administration extended it from the original end date in January to the end of March.

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But the eviction moratorium has not prevented all evictions. Renters have to make certain attestations under penalty of perjury on income and inability to pay full rent to earn the protections, unpaid debt and interest on it still accrues, they still must make good-faith efforts to pay partial rent, and they still can be kicked out for anything other than non-payment of rent, like loud music or damage to the property or other violations of the lease.

The Biden administration merely extended the CDC order despite these flaws, rather than making improvements that tenant rights groups were asking for. As a result, the steady trickle of evictions seen before the Biden team’s first extension has continued. People are still being thrown out of their homes and onto the street or into a friend’s crowded apartment in the middle of a pandemic. This makes no sense at all; the CDC has relentlessly stated its guidelines that people must continue to practice social distancing and stay apart, while dispossessing people of shelter does the exact opposite.

It’s certainly true, however, that the extension of the order will prevent something much worse from happening. Bob Ivry visited eviction court in Philadelphia, a city with significant assistance and protections for renters, and still found cases moving through the system. (It’s a great piece about this topic; you should read it.) There are an additional 560 renters in Philadelphia’s “toss-out queue” for when the moratorium expires. That has been stayed—for now.

There have now been three separate prongs of rental assistance to catch up renters on what they owe; a $12.4 billion program in last year’s CARES Act, another $25 billion in the December relief bill, and the American Rescue Plan has another $22 billion. But these rental assistance programs have been cumbersome to access. There are significant documentation requests, differing ways the states administer them, and hesitation from landlords, who in the case of the December tranche of funds must sign off on taking the rental assistance.

Now that the moratorium is likely to be approved, the Biden team must figure out how to get rental assistance to as many needy people as possible, to wipe out the significant arrears that have left people vulnerable when the inevitable time comes that the extensions run out.

Jeff Merkley on Democracy Reform

I talked to Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) yesterday, and much of our time was spent discussing the filibuster. But Merkley is also the cosponsor of S.1, the Senate companion to HR1, the For the People Act, a comprehensive overhaul of elections, campaign finance, and ethics standards. 

HR1 passed the House of Representatives last week, and it’s seen as one of the bills that may trigger changes to the filibuster, because of its centrality to democracy itself. I read the Brennan Center’s annotated guide to the bill, and found it to be a bit oddly constructed.

For example, it nods at a public financing mechanism that includes a “democracy voucher” system like what’s in place in Seattle, where citizens get a $25 tax credit to donate to the candidate of their choice. But it’s only in HR1 as a pilot program in three states. A separate system of small-dollar matching funds is universal, but must be made voluntary, and at the presidential level, it’s unclear whether it would see the same fate as the old public financing system, which Obama opted out of in 2008, effectively ending it.

There are also “findings” related to expanding voter participation for young people and restoring preclearance from the Voting Rights Act and D.C. statehood, but nothing substantive on those matters is in the bill either. Those findings are areas where the House either couldn’t reach a deal, or they have separate legislation that will be folded in down the road.

What’s been largely unsaid is that S.1 doesn’t have 50 votes in the U.S. Senate, let alone 60, a fact Merkley did concede. “There will be additional work on it,” he told me, indicating that members of Congress are also working with Secretaries of State who control state and local elections, who are a bit hesitant to give up power. Merkley expressed three key buckets in the bill, which you could possibly see as his red lines: independent redistricting commissions and an end to gerrymandering, disclosure of dark money (elimination would require a Constitutional amendment), and access to the ballot. “The Republican strategy is to force people to vote only on Election Day,” Merkley said. “They have all these things to manipulate Election Day, creating obstacles to prevent communities of color and students from voting.”

There are a lot of other elements to S.1, however, and those are going to be subject to bargaining, provided there’s a process in place to pass any of it. Experts are already putting out their bargaining points for what they want in the bill. The uncertainty actually might make this the wrong test case bill for the filibuster, because the support is not fully realized. There’s a lot of work to be done before it becomes something Senate Democrats will unify around and fight for.

What Day of Biden’s Presidency Is It?

Day 59.

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