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Congress Could Postpone the Electoral College To Prevent Election Chaos

It doesn’t sound like Spencer Cox is planning a victory party for November 3.

“I told my people, ‘We are not going to know who won this on election night,'” Cox, Utah’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, told The Atlantic‘s McCay Coppins.

Think about that for a second. Utah hasn’t elected a Democrat to be governor since 1984, and it has been voted Republican in every presidential election since 1964. If Cox thinks he might be waiting a long time for his race to be called this year, just imagine what that means for anyone waiting for the results of a more competitive election in a state with a lot more voters.

In Utah, those long waits have become the norm. It’s one of only a handful of states to rely primarily on mail-in voting—and while the system is safe and effective, it does take a bit longer to tally the results. When Cox won the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary earlier this year, for example, it took until the Monday after Election Day for the race to be called.

“That’s very common,” he says. “It’s just a paradigm shift that people have had to get used to.”

The rest of the country doesn’t have much time to get up to speed.

Thanks to both historical trends and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, more people are going to vote by mail this year than ever before. Political campaigns and media coverage have focused on how increased mail-in balloting will affect the run-up to Election Day, but the real challenge may come after November 3 has passed. Mailed ballots take longer to process than those cast in person—to prevent fraud, each ballot must be individually checked and recorded by election officials. Even with computers, that’s a time-consuming process. A large number of ballots will certainly remain uncounted when Election Day comes to a close.

“The problem is logistical,” says Yuval Levin, director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. He notes that some states took weeks to finish counting absentee and mailed-in ballots during this year’s primary season. “We should expect that we won’t have results on election night and that it will take some time. That doesn’t mean that the results are not legitimate.”

Instead of being a single, distinct event, Election Day 2020 will unspool from November 3 in both directions along our timeline at varying rates of speed. There will be a slow build-up as ballots will be mailed, filled out, and returned. That’s followed by the day itself, when many people will go to the polls more-or-less as usual, with those results reported that night. Then comes the crucial (and potentially agonizing) process of counting perhaps millions of mailed-in ballots. If nothing else, it will be appropriate for a year when time seems to have little meaning.

When it comes to the presidential race, there’s one very important post-election deadline that the states must meet: the planned December 14 gathering of the Electoral College. Six days before that date, each state must certify a winner in the presidential race so the appropriate electors can do the official business of choosing the next president.

That deadline played a key role in concluding the most controversial election in recent American history. The infamous recount of Florida’s votes in the 2000 presidential election was brought to a halt, in part, because the state ran up against a federal law that requires presidential electors to be determined six days before the Electoral College meets.

This year, if multiple states are still counting absentee ballots into the first week of December and the election’s winner is still unknown, things could get messy.

“If there are these logistical problems, states could just run out of time,” says Levin.

His preferred solution: Postpone the Electoral College’s meeting until the first week in January. The Electoral College itself is a constitutional requirement, but the day it meets to determine the election’s winner is set by federal law. A simple vote in Congress and a presidential signature could give states more time to finish counting votes.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) has already introduced a bill to do just that. His legislation would give states until the end of the year to finish counting and to certify electors, with the Electoral College meeting on January 2 instead of December 14.

“We cannot escape the pandemic-induced reality of increased mail-in voting, and the logistical challenges associated with it will be difficult for some states to resolve in the next couple of months,” Rubio wrote in a Medium post announcing his bill. He envisions a scenario in which one candidate leads in a key swing state by fewer than 100,000 votes on Election Day but the state has more than a million mail-in ballots yet to be counted. That’s a distinct possibility, particularly in the 15 states where officials aren’t allowed to start counting ballots until Election Day even if they arrive earlier.

“We should give states the flexibility to provide local election officials additional time to count each and every vote,” says Rubio.

“I think just by giving the states more time we could avoid one kind of disaster we might encounter,” Levin says, though he acknowledges that the time for Congress to act is quickly running out. As Election Day nears, any changes to the process will likely be seen as a political calculation intended to help or hurt one party or the other.

It maybe already be too late. President Donald Trump seems intent on spurring as much chaos as possible during the election season, and it seems unlikely that the White House would agree to give states more time to count absentee ballots when the president is also insisting that increased levels of voting by mail will hurt his chances at re-election. His campaign has also sued states for expanding mail-in voting.

In reality, there’s no reason to suspect that higher levels of voting by mail will advantage Democrats. Republicans like Rubio are trying to do the right thing by giving states more time to count votes, and Republicans like Cox are right to warn voters that election results will take more time than usual to process.

Americans are living through an election season unlike any other. At least the stakes aren’t too high.

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USC Suspended a Communications Professor for Saying a Chinese Word That Sounds Like a Racial Slur

Greg Patton is a professor of clinical business communication at the University of Southern California. During a recent virtual classroom session, he was discussing public speaking patterns and the filler words that people use to space out their ideas: um, er, etc. Patton mentioned that the Chinese often use a word that is pronounced like nega.

“In China the common word is ‘that, that that that,’ so in China it might be ‘nega, nega, nega, nega,'” Patton explained to his class. “So there’s different words you’ll hear in different cultures, but they’re vocal disfluencies.”

But because the Chinese word nega sounds like nigger, some students were offended and reported the matter to the administration. Patton is now suspended, according to Campus Reform:

On Tuesday evening, the USC Marshall School of Business provided Campus Reform with a statement, confirming that Patton is no longer teaching his course.

“Recently, a USC faculty member during class used a Chinese word that sounds similar to a racial slur in English. We acknowledge the historical, cultural and harmful impact of racist language,” the statement read.

Patton “agreed to take a short term pause while we are reviewing to better understand the situation and to take any appropriate next steps.”

Another instructor is temporarily teaching the class.

USC is now “offering supportive measures to any student, faculty, or staff member who requests assistance.” The school is “committed to building a culture of respect and dignity where all members of our community can feel safe, supported, and can thrive.”

This is ridiculous. It seems clear that Patton did not mean to harm anyone, and that the point he was making was perfectly valid. The resemblance between these two words is purely coincidental, and adults should be perfectly capable of hearing the Chinese version without fainting in front of their computer screens. Anyone who is this prepared to be bothered all the time needs to turn down their outrage dial.

“I’ll say this ten thousand times, but if anyone thinks they’re helping the cause of racial equality by engaging in absurd, over-the-top speech policing of innocent people, then they’re sadly mistaken,” wrote The Dispatch‘s David French.

There is nothing for the university to investigate: Patton should be restored to his teaching position immediately. If anything, the offended students should apologize to him for causing the inconvenience.

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Daniel Prude’s Brother Called 911 Because He Was Behaving Erratically. Prude Ended Up Dead.

Two months before the death of George Floyd launched a summer of protests, riots, and demands for police reform, officers in Rochester, New York, handcuffed Daniel T. Prude in the middle of the street, put a bag over his head, and pinned the naked man onto the street while he panicked. This continued until Prude stopped breathing. He ultimately died.

The general public is finding out about the incident this week because Prude’s family and local activists released police body-camera video of the incident on Wednesday.

According to reporting from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and The New York Times, police responded to a 911 call on March 23 from Prude’s brother. Prude, who had recently been taken to the hospital for mental health issues, had run out of his home and was behaving erratically.

When Rochester police responded to the call, they found him running in the street. Somebody else had in the meantime called 911 to say that a naked man had tried to break into a car. Police believe he also broke windows at a nearby business. According to the Democrat and Chronicle, Prude encountered several other people during his journey and even begged one to call 911 for him.

The body camera footage shows Prude clearly in a state of distress when the officers confront him. They order Prude to the ground with his hands behind his back, and he complies immediately. He never tries to get physical with them, but his behavior remains erratic: He yells at the officers, he starts spitting, and he claims to have the coronavirus. The officers then put him in what they call a “spit hood.” (The Times notes that these hoods have been involved in 70 deaths in the past decade and have been cited in police lawsuits.)

Prude yells “Gimme that gun!” at the officers and demands one officer’s Taser. Eventually they press Prude to the ground, pushing his head into the pavement. The time stamps on the video show he was held down for about 3 minutes. An emergency medical technician arrives, but the officers don’t mention that Prude isn’t moving. Three minutes later, the EMT asks the officers to roll Prude over, and that’s when they realize that he’s no longer breathing.

After that, Prude was given CPR and loaded into an ambulance. He was actually revived for a time, but he was declared brain dead due to the lack of oxygen. On March 30, he was removed from life support and died.

Here’s an edited version of the video from the Democrat and Chronicle:

A subsequent toxicology report showed low levels of PCP in Prude’s bloodstream, which could have explained some of his behavior. The autopsy report attributed Prude’s death to “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint due to excited delirium due to acute [PCP] intoxication.”

“Excited delirium” is a controversial diagnosis that is not actually recognized by the American Medical Association or the American Psychiatric Association; it seems to occur primarily—perhaps even exclusively—during encounters with law enforcement. (Read more here on the sordid history of the term and its use to justify violent interactions with people in a drug-induced or mental health crisis.)

In the video, one EMT and an officer on the scene affirm to each other that Prude was under the influence of “excited delirium.” The EMT assures the officer, “It’s not you guys’s fault.”

None of the officers involved have been disciplined, but the New York attorney general’s office is investigating the death. More than 100 protesters gathered Wednesday afternoon in Rochester, and nine were arrested and cited with misdemeanor charges in clashes with police.

Prude’s case is a prime example of what policing reform activists mean when they call for hanging the role of policing so that people with guns and Tasers are not the first responders to somebody having a mental health or drug crisis.

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USC Suspended a Communications Professor for Saying a Chinese Word That Sounds Like a Racial Slur

But because the Chinese word nega sounds like nigger, some students were offended and reported the matter to the administration. Patton is now suspended, according to Campus Reform:

On Tuesday evening, the USC Marshall School of Business provided Campus Reform with a statement, confirming that Patton is no longer teaching his course.

“Recently, a USC faculty member during class used a Chinese word that sounds similar to a racial slur in English. We acknowledge the historical, cultural and harmful impact of racist language,” the statement read.

Patton “agreed to take a short term pause while we are reviewing to better understand the situation and to take any appropriate next steps.”

Another instructor is temporarily teaching the class.

USC is now “offering supportive measures to any student, faculty, or staff member who requests assistance.” The school is “committed to building a culture of respect and dignity where all members of our community can feel safe, supported, and can thrive.”

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Daniel Prude’s Brother Called 911 Because He Was Behaving Erratically. Prude Ended Up Dead.

The general public is finding out about the incident this week because Prude’s family and local activists released police body-camera video of the incident on Wednesday.

Here’s an edited version of the video from the Democrat and Chronicle:

In the video, one EMT and an officer on the scene affirm to each other that Prude was under the influence of “excited delirium.” The EMT assures the officer, “It’s not you guys’s fault.”

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US Court Vindicates Snowden Leaks – Rules NSA Mass Surveillance “Illegal” & Officials Lied

US Court Vindicates Snowden Leaks – Rules NSA Mass Surveillance “Illegal” & Officials Lied

Tyler Durden

Thu, 09/03/2020 – 15:30

Though we doubt the broader public needed convincing, this is a significant milestone nonetheless, also after last month Trump shocked reporters by suggesting he could take a look at pardoning Edward Snowden:

Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful – and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.

*From the cover of September 2014 issue of Wired.*

From the start supporters of Snowden and the journalists who assisted in breaking the story internationally, such as Glen Greenwald, Laura Poitras and others, said the NSA program was a massive violation of citizens’ 4th Amendment protections.

National security state hawks, however, attempted to focus the story on Snowden himself, saying his ‘traitorous’ actions compromised American spies and assets abroad, and also that it was a boon to Washington’s enemies and rivals like Russia.

“I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them,” Snowden said on Twitter.

Seven years ago, as the news declared I was being charged as a criminal for speaking the truth, I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them.

And yet that day has arrived. https://t.co/FRdG2zUA4U

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 2, 2020

And the ACLU said “Today’s ruling is a victory for our privacy rights,” adding that it “makes plain that the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records violated the Constitution.”

Crucially, the three judge panel on the 9th Circuit specifically credited Edward Snowden for exposing it, as Politico notes:

Judge Marsha Berzon’s opinion, which contains a half-dozen references to the role of former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden in disclosing the NSA metadata program, concludes that the “bulk collection” of such data violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

If Trump were to move on pardoning Snowden, who is still a fugitive in Russia facing US espionage charges, this could actually help Trump make the argument politically, despite AG Barr recently saying he’d vehemently oppose such a pardon.

It was only a couple weeks ago that Trump said “I’m going to take a very good look at it” when asked about a possible Snowden pardon.

The president raised eyebrows and anxiety across the D.C. beltway with his unprecedented remarks: “There are a lot of people that think that he is not being treated fairly. I mean, I hear that.”

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3gTUzhp Tyler Durden

Evercore Analyst Explains Why TikTok Will “Go Dark” As A Sale Is Delayed Until After The Election

Evercore Analyst Explains Why TikTok Will “Go Dark” As A Sale Is Delayed Until After The Election

Tyler Durden

Thu, 09/03/2020 – 15:12

When CNBC and a handful of other media outlets reported that a deal to sell TikTok to an American suitor would be announced within days, if not hours, we almost immediately called bs. We reasoned that China’s decision to nudge its Department of Commerce to require ByteDance to obtain a license before it can sell TikTok’s core algorithm, a piece of technology that’s critical to the app’s appeal was deliberately done to push the deal past the Nov. 3 election, in an attempt to create political problems for President Trump.

Although they didn’t delve into the CCP’s motivation, one Wall Street analyst from Evercore ISI declared in a recent research note that TikTok would not be sold before the election, before walking readers through the steps that ByteDance must now take to receive a waiver from Beijing.

Evercore’s Donald Straszheim explained that negotiations have likely halted, as BD must jump through a series of carefully constructed hoops. While Straszheim doesn’t expect Beijing to scuttle the deal, he wouldn’t be surprised if the app “goes dark” in the US, like it did in India, as President Trump’s promised ban takes effect. An executive order handed down three weeks ago would force Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, among other restrictions.

As of Sept. 3, Straszheim said, TikTok negotiations appear to have hit pause, which is necessary so BD can follow through with the procedures outlined by Beijing and the Chinese Department of Commerce.

“ByteDance is preparing documents for Chinese authorities,” Evercore wrote. This is required to obtain a “letter of intent for export license” which the company must obtain before “substantive” talks can take place.

Straszheim expects ByteDance will file with Commerce Sept. 7. That in turn will kick off the “within 30 days” clock for approval or disapproval (this is 30 working days, so with with weekends and holidays off, the end is Oct. 27).

He added that Oct. 27 is the “latest possible day of ruling on ByteDance intention to sell”. While a decision could come earlier, Evercore doubts that very much.

Then, once an agreement is signed, the Dept. Commerce in China will still require a final ruling and review. That should take another 15 days, which would move us past the Nov. 3 election.

Teenagers beware: With Trump again insisting that Sept. 15 is a hard deadline for a sale, Straszheim fears that the app will “go dark” during the run-up to the election, forcing many influencers to migrate to Instagram.

But – fortunately for ByteDance – as the US deal talks stall in the US, a group of bidders is emerging to make an offer for ByteDance’s shuttered India business. India barred the app on national security grounds, one of more than 100 Chinese apps that have been barred by Narendra Modi’s nationalist government, as relations between the world’s two most populous countries deteriorate. Now, SoftBank, with its shares suddenly riding high again after the WeWork fiasco, is reportedly working on assembling a deal group to take a run at BD’s India business, according to Bloomberg.

Anybody who thinks Trump won’t ban the app should look at what’s happening in India, even as BD sues the administration in the US in a legal challenge that could let it off the hook.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3gUgd5q Tyler Durden

About Those Stellar Initial Claims…

About Those Stellar Initial Claims…

Tyler Durden

Thu, 09/03/2020 – 14:50

To much fanfare, the DOL this morning reported that in the week ended Aug 29, there were “only” 881K new initial jobless claims filed, better than the 950K expected, down from 1.01 million the week prior and the lowest since the covid lockdowns.

The Trump admin was quick to praise these numbers which coming just one day before the suddenly important payrolls report, suggest that August payrolls would be far better than whisper numbers.

There is just one problem: the latest claims report was nothing more than the latest goalseeked government propaganda, boosted this time by a brand new “seasonal adjustment.”

As Goldman explains, the DOL switched from a multiplicative to an additive seasonal factor in this release. If one had applied the historical, multiplicative, seasonal factor, the seasonally adjusted initial claims would have decreased by only 17k to 994k, 44k worse than expected.

Stripping away the seasonal adjustment factor entirely revealed an even uglier picture, as actual initial claims rose from 826K to 833K, a level that has been virtually unchanged for the past 4 weeks.

Furthermore, due to the unprecedented disruption from the covid shutdowns, it is bizarre why one would seek to “seasonally smooth” a historic outlier event which has no precedented in history, and certainly no recurring seasonal component.

And while a state-by-state drilldown showed a modest improvement, with claims decreasing by 12k in Florida, 6k in Georgia, and 5k in Michigan, they soared by 41k in California. These are real claims, not statistically smoothed for political purposes.

It gets worse: when looking at the initial applications under the separate federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program which targets the self-employed, gig workers and others who don’t typically qualify for state programs, here the number jumped by about 152,000 to 759,000, led almost entirely by an increase in California, and some 86% of the entire traditional Initial Claims print.

Meanwhile, on an NSA basis, continuing claims fell by 765k to 13,104k last week, yet applying a multiplicative seasonal adjustment (i.e., the one that was replaced) implies that seasonally adjusted continued claims increased by 368k to 14,860k.

Separately, when adjusting for biweekly filing schedules in Florida and California, Goldman estimates the level of continuing claims was also slightly higher at 13,389k, while for the week ended August 29, initial Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) claims increased by 152k to 759k.

Finally adding across all the various continuing jobless claims categories, where pandemic benefits have emerged as the biggest component with nearly 15 million in claims between Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and Pandemic Emergency Claims, the total number of persons claiming benefits across all programs rose by 2.2 million, from 27.0 million to 29.2 million. This number was unadjusted so there was no politically-biased jiggering that the DOL could apply to it, although we should note that figure has been likely inflated by states counting multiple retroactive weeks by one person instead as multiple people.

Putting it all together, Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at Maria Fiorini Ramirez said that “It’s very difficult to make any hard conclusions about what one particular week’s worth of data means” adding there’s “still quite a huge amount of people out there that are receiving benefits.”

Yes, 30 million certainly qualifies a “quite a huge” number.

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New Narrative Appears: Trump ‘Wins’ Big On Election Night, But Biden Will Eventually Win Due To Mail-In Ballots

New Narrative Appears: Trump ‘Wins’ Big On Election Night, But Biden Will Eventually Win Due To Mail-In Ballots

Tyler Durden

Thu, 09/03/2020 – 14:35

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

We are not going to know the winner of the presidential election on the night of November 3rd. Sadly, we almost certainly won’t know the winner the next day either.

In fact, it may be many weeks before a winner is formally declared.

Laws have been passed all over the country to make voting by mail much easier, and it is being very heavily promoted in many states. It is being projected that at least 83 percent of all U.S. voters will be eligible to vote by mail in November, and that is an astounding number. If all of those people actually did vote by mail, more than 190 million votes would go through our postal system. But of course many people will continue to show up in person and vote the old-fashioned way. We will get the results from those that vote in person on election day very rapidly like we normally do, but it may take a very long time before all of the mail-in votes are tallied.

As I will explain in this article, this has the potential to create some enormous problems.

It is being generally assumed by the political “experts” that Trump will do very well among those that show up in person to vote and that Biden will do very well among those that vote by mail.

If that assumption is true, some Democrats are warning that it could look like Trump will win the election based on the results that we are given on the night of November 3rd, but once all of the mail-in votes are counted Biden will actually be the true winner.

Specifically, this is a narrative that Democratic pollster Josh Mendelsohn is now pushing heavily. According to a “scenario” modeled by his firm, the results on election night could show Trump winning 408 electoral votes…

“We are sounding an alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump,” HawkFish CEO Josh Mendelsohn said in an interview with Axios on HBO.

One scenario modeled by Mendelsohn’s polling firm even shows Trump prevailing in the Electoral College on election night, winning 408 electoral votes compared to just 130 for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Could you imagine the euphoria of Trump supporters if this is what the numbers actually show on the night of November 3rd?

Everyone would be talking about a “Trump landslide” and there would be wild dancing in the streets in many red states.

But Mendelsohn is anticipating that only about 15 percent of all mail-in votes will be counted by election night, and he believes that once all of the mail-in votes are counted that Biden will be declared the true winner…

That scenario accounts for the idea that just 15 percent of mail-in votes will be counted by election night. In that event, the model suggests, Biden could prevail days later — if counting goes smoothly — by 334 electoral votes to 204 for Trump.

“When every legitimate vote is tallied and we get to that final day, which will be some day after Election Day, it will in fact show that what happened on election night was exactly that, a mirage,” Mendelsohn said.

I don’t even want to imagine the uproar that would be created if such a scenario actually played out.

Even if there was no vote fraud, and even if every single vote was counted accurately, tens of millions of people would still be absolutely convinced that the election was stolen from Trump.

And even Mendelsohn is admitting that the outcome he is projecting would “shake the losing side’s faith in the integrity of the election”.

Personally, I think that mail-in voting is such a bad idea no matter which party it favors. It opens up so many opportunities for potential vote fraud, and the delay in getting the results is very bad for our nation.

I believe that we will see some precincts in some swing states with a voter participation rate of more than 100 percent this year. In other words, I believe that in some precincts the number of votes cast will actually outnumber the true number of actual voters.

Let’s keep a close eye on the results as they come in throughout the month of November and see if I am actually correct. In my opinion there is going to be quite a bit of monkey business going on with mail-in ballots, and President Trump has been greatly concerned about mail-in ballots as well. In fact, on Wednesday he once again expressed his concern that the upcoming election could be rigged…

Wednesday: Trump retweeted an article from a conservative publication that raised questions about the impact of mail-in voting on the upcoming election and added his own editorial comment. “Rigged election?” he asked.

I have always believed that voters should be required to vote in person as much as possible and that paper ballots should always be used. Those two measures alone would certainly not completely fix our system, but they would definitely go a long way toward restoring integrity to the voting process.

As it stands now, we are heading into a nightmare election. We all know that it is exceedingly unlikely that Trump will concede on election night, and Hillary Clinton continues to insist that Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances…

In a rare joint interview with American Urban Radio Washington Bureau Chief April Ryan, Hillary Clinton added to her demands that Democrat Joe Biden not concede on election night, and Bill Clinton suggested that Trump will reinforce the White House to keep officials from pulling him out on Inauguration Day.

“Do not concede under any circumstance because I believe the other side is going to cheat and sneak and try everything they possibly can,” said Hillary Clinton in the “#COVID Conversations” interview broadcast via Instagram.

So we are probably going to have to wait for weeks before every vote is finally counted.

And then if it is still very close, there will probably be legal challenges which will have to work their way through the courts.

If things are tight enough, we may not have a formal winner until some time in 2021.

No matter who ends up being victorious, I believe that the election of 2020 is going to be a nightmare for America. It is likely that we will see vote fraud on a scale that we have never seen before, millions of those on the losing side will probably never accept the final result as legitimate, and the chaos caused by a contested outcome could result in even more violence in our streets.

We will see what happens, but right now I have a very, very bad feeling about what is going to happen in November.

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Pat Toomey on CDC Eviction Moratorium: ‘The Legal Authority Is a Real Stretch’

The Trump administration’s new nationwide moratorium on evictions is attracting heated opposition from some Republicans in Congress, who say it is legally shaky and sets a dangerous precedent for future administrations.

“I think the legal authority is a real stretch,” says Sen. Pat Toomey (R–Penn.). “I don’t know what the limiting principle is.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which issued the moratorium on Tuesday, cites its authority under the Public Health Services Act to issue regulations to stop the interstate spread of disease. That argument doesn’t impress Toomey.

“If the CDC has the authority to force landlords to effectively give away their product for free, I don’t know where that ends,” Toomey tells Reason. “Can General Motors be forced to give people cars unless they otherwise crowd into subways?”

Other congressional Republicans have raised similar concerns. Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) said on Twitter that the “CDC does not have the authority to do this. It’s dangerous precedent and bad policy.”

“Rental contracts are governed by state law. There is no federal authority to overturn them,” tweeted Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.). “The CDC order is an affront to the rule of law, and an emasculation of every legislator in this country—state and federal.”

In addition to the legal issues it raises, Toomey argues that the CDC’s eviction moratorium is bad policy.

“There’s not some mass wave of evictions going on,” he argues. “It is in the interest of landlords to work out agreements with tenants going through difficult circumstances.” A moratorium on evictions, he suggests, would encourage non-payment of rent and disincentivize deals between tenants and landlords.

According to data from Princeton University’s Eviction Lab—which tracks eviction filings in select cities—evictions are currently below historic averages in almost every city, including in places where local and state eviction moratoriums have expired. Thus far, rent payment rates have remained pretty steady during the coronavirus pandemic and are only slightly below where they were last year.

The federal eviction moratorium does nothing to relieve tenants of the responsibility to pay rent, instead only limiting landlords’ ability to evict tenants for non-payment. Housing advocates have argued that the moratorium is a half-measure that needs to be coupled with rental assistance to tenants. Not doing so, they argue, will leave renters vulnerable to eviction once months of back rent come do.

A $3.5 trillion relief package passed by the Democrat-controlled House in May included $100 billion in emergency rent relief.

Toomey thinks that assistance to renters isn’t warranted given the relief measures that Congress has already enacted, including the $1,200 stimulus checks and the federal $600 unemployment bonus.

“I think we have to ask ourselves how much expansion of the welfare state, how many different layers, how many different programs are we going to do. When is it enough?” the senator says.

Toomey says that he has expressed his concerns about the federal government’s eviction moratorium to senior administration officials. A legislative remedy isn’t practical, Toomey argues, given that House would never sign off on a bill repealing an eviction moratorium.

Meanwhile, he worries that the effort sets a dangerous precedent.

“What future administration, what future president, certainly what future Democratic president is going to want to be accused of being less generous than Donald Trump?” asks Toomey. “Are we to expect that the standard response of the government to an economic downturn is an eviction moratorium? We’ve never done that before.”

The CDC’s eviction moratorium goes into effect Friday.

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