Biden's Rebuff to Supreme Court on Eviction Ban Will Backfire
It’s not only bad constitutional law. It’s bad constitutional politics to spurn Justice Kavanaugh’s sensible judgment.
He knows better.
Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images
Joe Biden may have humanitarian motives for extending the Centers for Disease Control eviction ban that the Supreme Court has already deemed unlawful. 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 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.