As the reality sunk in that neither the White House nor Congress was going to act to prevent a COVID-era eviction moratorium from expiring in the waning days of July, Rep. Cori Bush hit the gas. The Missouri congresswoman reverted to her activist roots—forged during the 2015 Ferguson protests—and staged a sit-in on the Capitol steps. As the crowd grew, so too did the pressure on Joe Biden’s administration to do something. Four days after Bush first grabbed her sleeping bag and staked out the spot, President Biden announced a new 60-day eviction moratorium, specifically in areas hit hard by the surging delta variant.
The turn of events marked a stunning win for progressives. “Everything that we sat for on those steps, it was for our communities; it was for the 11 million people that were at risk for eviction,” Bush said in an interview earlier this week. “There were progressives, there were moderates, there was leadership, there were House members, senators, there were local elected officials and then elected officials that came in from around the country…And then we had community members who flew in from around the country who were out there with us. And that showed the power of people.”
But Bush’s victory was short-lived. On Thursday night the divided Supreme Court ruled in favor of a group of landlords who’d sued over the new 60-day moratorium, with the three liberal justices on the bench dissenting. “It would be one thing if Congress had specifically authorized the action that the [Centers for Disease Control] has taken. But that has not happened,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion. “Instead, the CDC has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination. It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts.”
Bush was furious. She slammed the court’s decision in a statement, writing, “Tonight the Supreme Court failed to protect the 11 million households across our country from violent eviction in the middle of a deadly global pandemic. We are in an unprecedented and ongoing crisis that demands compassionate solutions that center the needs of the people and communities most in need of our help. We need to give our communities time to heal from this devastating pandemic. We already know who is going to bear the brunt of this disastrous decision—Black and brown communities, and especially Black women. We didn’t sleep on those steps just to give up now.” She went on to urge her colleagues to act and pass legislation that would extend the eviction moratorium, specifically a Maxine Waters–backed bill that would push the expiration to December 31, 2021.
Since the ruling, Bush herself has been actively engaged in conversations with leadership and her colleagues to see what can be done to prevent mass evictions. “When we legislate from a place of working class and middle class, we miss so many people, and I know that for a fact because I’m one of those people. I remember for years feeling like it seems no one is speaking for my situation,” Bush, who has been evicted multiple times, stressed to me. “It’s not just about this eviction moratorium. There are so many other issues that are happening with the pandemic, and even before the pandemic, that we’ve missed. And we’re here at this point in the pandemic because for decades and decades, the legislation was not reaching the people that need it the most.”
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