> If federal CDC has authority over state evictions
The authority for this order is somewhat dubious; the statute can be read that way, but it requires almost the maximal possible reading of the law.
And that's without considering the Constitutional parameters of the issue, though Commerce Clause jurisprudence may be broad enough to make this nonproblematic as far as federal authority, but there are also nondelegation concerns with unbounded delegation to the executive.
> does federal also have authority over state lockdowns, reopening and choice of essential business?
Probably, and a lot more (and not just during a global pandemic, either), again, if the eviction rule is valud. There's probably some limits even so (you have to be able to at least spin a tenable protection against communicable disease angle.)
The Commerce Clause I think is problematic. Rents are not interstate commerce - they're local. (That's not to say that the Commerce Clause hasn't been stretched to cover some pretty ridiculous things...)
> Rents are not interstate commerce - they're local.
Existing Commerce Clause jurisprudence gives the feds authority to act to control things which indirectly touch on interstate commerce, which pretty expressly includes the interstate movement of humans and the impacts therefrom.
Its not a big stretch to get acting to control communicable disease from that. It is well-established that if it is acting to manage something it is authorized to manage, the feds don't separately need independent positive authority for the mechanism (in this case, the eviction moratorium), just the absence of a negative regulation. So, I don't think (other than the risk of current courts seeing the Commerce Clause more narrowly than existing precedent, a real risk given the rightward movement of the courts) the Commerce Clause is insufficient for federal authority.
I do think that the nondelegation doctrine may be a problem for the broad interpretation of the statute necessary to read it as putting this federal legislative authority in the hands of the CDC through the existing statute (whether that would mean the statute itself is read more narrowly or facially invalid is another question.)
Ah, I was thinking of using the Commerce Clause to justify controlling rental property, not to justify controlling disease prevention. Yes, that might pass muster - depending on which side of the bed the Supreme Court woke up on that morning...
The surgeon general and the secretary of HHS, acting together, not the CDC, have broad powers to do pretty much anything under 46 USC 264.
The idea that you seem to entertain, that these powers would extend to forcing states to _not_ take anti-disease measures, seems like it would fail in court.
If they can force them to take the measures, they could just as easily argue that the measures (say, lockdown) actually worsen the problem and thus use the same logic to force people not to lockdown.
I’d rather live in a society where we can’t be forced to submit to any health mandates. But I’m definitely in the minority.
You're welcome to go live in rural areas where no one is going to bother what you do there.
But when you live in a society then there are certain rules on how to interact with said society. Individualism doesn't work when the pandemic is communal. Your freedom ends when your threat to my life begins.
Scale matters. 200,000 deaths and counting in 9 months is a different scale than we in the US have seen from other viral infections in the past century.
COVID is also much deadlier than usual seasonal flu. It has already killed far more people in the US than a typical flu season, despite having infected far fewer people.
YMMV depending on the US State you live in. According to State reported fatality rates, for the 4 month period from 3/27 to 7/27 (a typical flu season length according to the CDC) per capita death rates ranged over two orders of magnitude, from 1 Death in 562 for New Jersey to 1 Death in 54457 in Hawaii.
Considering one death in 5000 to be the definition of a bad flu season, again according to the CDC website for the 17-18 US flu season, you can partition the 50 States into five categories:
1. OMG, IT’S the PLAGUE! (1 in 400 to 1 in 1000): New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
2. That was WAY worse than a flu. (1 in 1000 to 1 in 2500): Louisiana, Rhode Island, Mississippi, Arizona, Michigan (mostly Detroit), Illinois, Maryland, Pennsylvania (mostly NJ-adjacent counties and Philadelphia), Indiana.
3. That was the worst flu in a long time. (1 in 2500 to 1 in 5000): Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Nevada, Iowa, New Mexico (mostly Navajo-adjacent counties), California (Southern more than Northern), Ohio, Virginia, Minnesota (mostly Twin Cities), Colorado, New Hampshire.
4. That definitely was a flu. (1 in 5000 to 1 in 10000): Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri (mostly St Louis), North Carolina, Washington State, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Kansas, North Dakota.
5. What’s everybody bothered about? (less than 1 in 10000): Idaho, West Virginia, Montana, Utah, Oregon, Maine, Vermont, Wyoming, Alaska, Hawaii.
When I say “mostly in a region”, the fatality per capita rates are > 3 times the rate in the rest of the State, sometimes 10 times higher as in Michigan and New Mexico.
Over the last couple months, Louisiana and Rhode Island has joined the plague category and the Southern tier has moved up a notch, but it also has been over four months.
Check the numbers for yourself. There was and is a peculiar avoidance in the media of reporting per capita deaths rates. Government sites are much better about providing usefully formatted data.
“Fun” fact: as late as early May, over 50% of the US fatalities were just in the Boston to DC corridor.
I feel like this ignores that the death rate is the result of three things interacting: the deadliness of the disease, the density of the population, and the preventative measures taken.
1. The places that are the least hit are the least urbanized. I would guess that the regular flu also hits them less.
2. These number are including a massive shutdown, and preventative measures, that don't usually occur during the flu season.
3. I'm not sure your numbers are accurate. For example, I just spot checked texas, which has 15,421 deaths: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/texas-coronaviru... That is a rate of 1 in 1880, which would put them in the "WAY worse than the flue" category, not "That was definitely a flu".
Historically, influenza/pneumonia is a little under 10% of all deaths in Hawaii.
The CDC and the Hawaii state department of health combine the causes. "Studies have suggested that P&I [pneumonia and influenza] is a good indicator of influenza-related deaths and therefore P&I is one method for influenza surveillance." This combination makes it difficult to determine how many deaths were due to the "flu" specifically.
Not mandatory everywhere, but it is in many places, especially for school-aged kids.
And if health-centred rules are too much to comprehend, then I suppose it's also your right to choose to drink and drive and you should be allowed to?
I mean, it's the same right to individualism that you are exercising. It's your right to not protect yourself and take risks in the process, but it's not your right to become a danger to others. We're not talking about opinions here, we're talking about the fact that viral infections do spread and kill and that without some measures, they will kill more, not less.
We can argue about what measures are effective for what population and up to what point we should enforce them, but there is -to me- no argument that there are some basic health measures that should be enforced, especially because some will make a point of not doing it and will endanger everyone else in the process.
Also, you can see that the current measures do have a pretty pronounced effect on lowering the flu[1]. So, protecting yourself lowers the transmission rate of viruses in general. Two birds with one stone!
> have broad powers to do pretty much anything under 46 USC 264.
If it really is "do pretty much anything", its probably also an unconstitutional delegation of Congressional lawmaking power, since one of the three required pieces of a Constitutional delegation ïs that the law must clearly specify "the boundaries of this delegated authority." Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361 (1989), and the rightward turn of the courst since Mistretta may work against the Administration here, because it is the conservative wing of the court that has historically had the most negative view of delegations (In Mistretta itself, which found the challenged act a valid delegation, Scalia was the lone dissenter and would have found it an unconstitutional delegation.)
