The pandemic is over, it’s time for people to pay their rent
MINOT, N.D. — Of all the extraordinary (and often prudent and necessary) economic interventions made by the government during the COVID-19 pandemic, the various moratoriums on evictions made the least sense.
Gov. Doug Burgum never issued such a policy here in North Dakota, despite hot-headed calls from some activists and politicos.
The state Supreme Court did, for a short period, before apparently coming to their senses and realizing they are not the executive branch of government and had no business implementing that sort of policy.
(Their pause on eviction proceedings was supposedly about protecting the courts from the virus, an administrative decision well within the purview of the justices, but that justification was undermined by the fact that only residential evictions, and not commercial evictions or many other similar types of proceedings, were allowed to go forward.)
At the federal level, the Centers for Disease Control issued a moratorium on evictions in September 2021, but that order was successfully challenged in the courts and is now set to end on July 31.
