The Supreme Court has voted to maintain the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium. The order was put in place as a response to the Coronavirus pandemic to ensure renters who couldn’t make payments due to the virus were not displaced. The court ruled 5-4 against an emergency request from landlords asking to end the moratorium which was recently extended through July.

The Hill reports:

The landlord group had asked the justices to lift the stay on a ruling by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that the moratorium amounted to an unlawful government overreach.

But Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined with the court’s three liberals to keep the stay in place.

“Because the CDC plans to end the moratorium in only a few weeks, on July 31, and because those few weeks will allow for additional and more orderly distribution of the congressionally appropriated rental assistance funds, I vote at this time to deny the application to vacate the District Court’s stay of its order,” Kavanaugh wrote in brief concurrence.

Yet Kavanaugh also said he agreed with the federal judge’s determination that the CDC had exceeded its authority in enacting the moratorium.

Justice Kavanaugh also noted in his concurrence that should the CDC wish to extend the moratorium past July 31 that Congress should need to pass new legislation.