Code Games
… When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) banned residential evictions for non-payment of rent in 2020, property owners responded with a flurry of lawsuits, arguing that the federal government owed them compensation for what amounted to a physical taking of their property.
While those lawsuits were ongoing, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in August 2021 that the CDC moratorium was an illegal overstepping of the agency’s authority.
This armed the federal government with an audacious response to all those property owners’ claims for compensation: Because the CDC’s eviction moratorium was illegal and lacked federal authorization, the federal government wasn’t required to pay any compensation.
Incredibly, the Court of Federal Claims agreed with this argument—citing past cases that immunized the government from having to pay compensation for clearly illegal, unsanctioned acts of its agents—and dismissed a property owners’ lawsuit in the case of Darby Development Co. v. United States.
But this past week, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sided with property owners and reversed that dismal.
The appeals court ruled that the CDC eviction moratorium, while illegal, clearly did have the endorsement of both Congress and the executive branch.
“Taken to its logical conclusion, [the government’s] position is that government agents can physically occupy private property for public use, resist for months the owner’s legal attempts to make them leave, and then, when finally made to leave, say they need not pay for their stay because they had no business being there in the first place,” wrote Judge Armando O. Bonilla in an opinion issued earlier this month.
The case is now remanded back to the federal claims court.
“The government should not be able to hide behind its own illegality to avoid paying damages for that very illegality,” Greg Dolin, a senior litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance (which filed an amicus brief in the Darby case) told Reason…
August 20, 2024
Originally Published in Reason