Rob Natelson says Biden Rent Moratorium is Anti- Constitutional

Rob Natelson, Senior Constitutional Fellow with the Independence Institute in Denver was on Friday’s Talk Back show and was asked about the issue of homelessness currently being considered in Missoula.

Natelson, now a resident of Denver, stated that his city pursued the same path Missoula has chosen over a decade ago, and the quality of life there has declined.

“If you're perceived as being unduly welcoming to criminals or to vagrants or to drug users, your community will pay the price,” said Natelson. “You have to remember that that you had better pursue good policies, and that means tough policies as far as crime and drug use and vagrancy is concerned, or else your city will deteriorate very quickly, as Denver has.”

Natelson then spent a great deal of time discussing the issue of rent and mortgage moratoriums, and that the founding fathers would never have allowed it to even be considered, despite the pandemic.

“One of the reasons the Constitution was adopted, a fundamental reason, was to make sure that these laws never occurred in American society,” he said. “At the state level, the Constitution includes a provision. You can find it in article one section 10, which says that states shall not impair the obligation of contracts. That is directed at moratoria like this, as well as other kinds of overly sweeping debt relief measures at the federal level.”

Natelson said not only is the rent moratorium unconstitutional, it is actually anti-constitutional, as it deals with contracts between individuals.

“There is no way that the framers would have drafted any constitution that permitted this kind of legislation,” he said. “And if they had, there is no way that the people of the United States would have approved it. So again, this legislation is not only unconstitutional, it's profoundly anti constitutional. It strikes at the constitutional order. And it tries to override the very document, the Constitution of the United States, by which Joe Biden and other officials issuing these mandates claim their authority.”

Natelson further explained how damaging to the core of American justice such a decision actually is.

“The founders also consider this kind of legislation profoundly immoral,” he said. “I mean, a lot of people who live on rents are elderly people, just scraping by. The rents are what enabled them to live, right? And so what you're doing is you're hitting them with a loss of income. They are still required to maintain the property, they're still required to pay money on the property, but they're not recovering the rent. They're not collecting rents to do so. These are people who have struggled and have worked all their lives, just so they would have an ability not to be on public assistance during retirement. I think it's brutally cruel to those people to impose rent moratoria on them.”

Confronted with the argument that the pandemic forced the government to take such drastic measures, Natelson said ‘tyrants always say their policies are necessary ‘for the good of the people’.

Natelson has published an article on the subject in the Epoch Times.