(CNN)Even President Joe Biden doesn't know whether his new federal eviction

moratorium for renters is legal and sustainable. But crushing humanitarian and
political pressure left him no choice but to take a chance on an emergency move.

The new US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scheme was announced after
the White House, hampered by a Supreme Court ruling and Congress' failure to act,
had repeatedly argued it had no constitutional authority to extend the moratorium.
Biden himself said on Tuesday that the new moratorium may not be constitutional,
and is essentially an attempt to buy time to get backlogged funding out of state
coffers and into the pockets of renters and landlords alike.
The conundrum threatened to force millions of Americans who lost incomes during the
pandemic out of their homes in an appalling twist to what has already been an
agonizing year. The problem was that the moratorium expired on July 31 at a moment
when much of the more than $40 billion in funds already provided by Congress to pay
landlords for back rent for tenants is still yet to be handed out by states and
local authorities.
To head off mass evictions, the White House came up with a classic Washington fudge
-- not unfamiliar in an era of Capitol Hill gridlock -- in which presidents,
especially Democrats, have improvised with executive power to shield constituencies
from consequences of a malfunctioning political system.
The Covid-19 data backing up CDC's change in guidance

The Covid-19 data backing up CDC's change in guidance 03:21

In essence, the CDC declared a new moratorium until the end of October that applies
to counties with substantial or high community spread of Covid-19. It reasoned that
the new threat posed by the highly infectious Delta variant constitutes new
circumstances and therefore merits an entirely fresh scheme.
"In the context of a pandemic, eviction moratoria -- like quarantine, isolation,
and social distancing -- can be an effective public health measure utilized to
prevent the spread of communicable disease," the CDC said in a statement.
"Eviction moratoria facilitate self-isolation and self-quarantine by people who
become ill or who are at risk of transmitting COVID-19 by keeping people out of
congregate settings and in their own homes," it added.
While the public health argument is sound, it is not clear whether this formula
will get around a ruling by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that stipulated
that the original moratorium could only be extended if Congress gave the CDC "clear
and specific" authorization to do so.
At first sight, this new CDC move appears to have ignored that requirement with a
semantic argument. Hastily cobbled together and legally questionable, the plan
appears highly vulnerable to new court challenges, meaning that the new moratorium
-- covering 90% of renters -- may only be a stopgap solution.
The President told reporters on Tuesday that he had sought advice from
constitutional scholars and still didn't have a complete picture about the chances
of the new moratorium passing muster in the courts.
"I can't tell you. I don't know. There are a few scholars who say it will and
others who say it's not likely to," the President said.
"But at a minimum, by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some
additional time while we're getting that $45 billion out to people who are in fact
behind in the rent and don't have the money."
'These are tears of joy'
In some ways, Biden's maneuvering on Tuesday recalls executive action taken by ex-
President Barack Obama to shield undocumented migrants brought to the US as
children from deportation after insisting he didn't have the power to do so.
The Deferred Action for Child Arrivals program created by Obama in 2012 set off an
extraordinary saga of legal and legislative battles that continue to this day but
alleviated political pressure on Obama, and helped to ease the human toll of a
situation that a divided Congress had failed to fix.
That Biden averted a humanitarian crisis is not in doubt.
In one small snapshot of the nightmare, CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront" on Monday
featured Las Vegas mom of three Dasha Kelly who sold or pawned much of her
furniture for cash after losing her job as a card dealer when casinos closed.
A day later Kelly had a double celebration. First, there was the moratorium
extension engineered by Biden, who she referred to as "our precious President." And
a GoFundMe page she set up raced past $170,000 after a return appearance on
Burnett's show.
"I am still in denial ... it's really overwhelming. These are tears of joy, trust
me," Kelly said.
The drama over the moratorium illustrated the treacherous political environment
that the Biden administration must confront.