Anyone looking for hints of thuggish hypocrisy will easily find it in virtually any government office, and they’ll never experience a surfeit of it if they study Congress. Case in point, hardcore collectivists Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who, among others, have co-sponsored a bill to prohibit landlords from collecting rent.
Because, of course, any aggressive breach of the Constitution and basic human ethics is justified by invoking the magic term “COVID.”
Not only are they hypocritical to take offices created by their vaunted Constitution even as they skirt its rules and write bills like this, they show incredible double-standards about the matter of rent-collection and their self-painted gloss of “social justice” against the “monied interests” who exploit people.
As Christian Britschgi reports for Reason:
Tlaib has also twice now co-sponsored a bill authored by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) that suspend the obligation of tenants to pay rent during the COVID-19 pandemic. The latest version of that bill, introduced in March 2021, would have canceled rent from March 2020 to April 2022.
Indeed. Tlaib and Pressley both made oodles of cash last year - as landlords - while they bemoaned the plight of renters.
Related: Oregon Bill Would Ban Landlords From Refusing To Rent to Certain Criminals - For Racial 'Equality'
Reportedly, neither of them canceled the rent obligations of those to whom they had let spaces.
Writes Britschgi:
Tlaib's 2020 financial disclosure report filed this past Friday show that she made between $15,001 and $50,000 off of a property in Detroit worth between $150,000 and $200,000. Fox News was the first to report the news.
And:
Tlaib is not the only landlord to co-sponsor Omar's rent cancelation bill. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.) also signed onto the legislation despite earning between $5,000 and $15,000 in income in 2020 from a rental unit adjoining her primary residence.
But, perhaps their “help renters” virtue-signaling actually is backed by their action. After all, now the lefties are pushing statutes that would block THEM from collecting rent, just like anyone else. Sure, they collected rent while bemoaning the plight of renters, and sure, they could have voluntarily stopped demanding rent. But, at least NOW, they’re putting their money where their mouths are.
Not really.
They’re putting YOUR money there.
Because, in fact, the bill they’re pushing DOES suspend rents and cancels old rent debts going back to 2020, but, well, it fully REIMBURSES landlords who can’t collect.
You read that correctly.
As Britschgi notes about the bill:
It suspends mortgage payments and creates an (unfunded) Landlord Relief Fund that would compensate property owners for the rent forgiven by the bill.
Phew! Thank goodness. For a moment, one might have thought these towering Marxist hypocrites had veered into an uncharacteristic moment of walking the proverbial walk.
As I noted in March for MRCTV, not only is this kind of interference in private contract unconstitutional, the CDC version of it, which has seen the federal agency suspend rent payments -- and has seen Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh acknowledge that such government action is unconstitutional, BUT THEN NOT CALL FOR IT TO END – that form of political interference messes up the market.
Leftists often depict landlords as unscrupulous, money-grabbing, avaricious devils, when, in fact, they help people, they offer and maintain living space, compete with others and, often, take great economic risks to acquire mortgages on said properties.
The Trump-Biden policy of having the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) prohibit landlord evictions of deadbeat tenants has inspired many tenants to -- shock -- become deadbeats, and placed many of these landlords in default, and is seeing big, government-tied, banks ready to acquire those assets.
And now, supposedly anti-private property Tlaib and Pressley stand atop their “holier-than-thou” political hills and preach, while they set themselves up to be protected and never engaged in any personal, market actions that matched their rhetoric.
Perfect examples of political hypocrisy.