Biden's lawless eviction moratorium will come back to haunt Democrats

Openly exploiting delays in our judicial system invites future presidents to do much worse

President Biden.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

President Biden's decision to revive the federal eviction moratorium is bad policy. It helps renters at the expense of millions of small-scale landlords, most of whom own a single rental property and cannot absorb thousands of dollars of unpaid rent. Read the stories of these landlords — who are essentially small business owners and, in many cases, working-class immigrants — and it becomes obvious #CancelRent is not the simple demand of justice for the downtrodden it is often made out to be. Bankrupting small landlords out of the rental game won't mean no rent; it will mean the only landlords left are big corporations newly freed of independent competition.

Biden's call is likely bad politicking, too, as my colleague Jim Antle has argued. His attempt to please all constituencies may end up disappointing them all instead.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.