President Joe Biden’s decision last week that the law a) doesn’t apply to him and his administration, or b) that it is merely a symbolic nuisance to be administratively nudged aside in the course of accomplishing a policy decree may not be entirely without precedent in this age of rule-by-executive-order, but one struggles to come up with a more brazen example of executive disregard for the constitutional structures vouchsafed us by the framers.

I’m referring, of course, to Biden’s decision to extend the nationwide eviction moratorium, even while acknowledging that the law which he is supposed to be upholding and defending explicitly does not permit him to do so.

Executive dismissiveness of the whole separation-of-powers thing is nothing new, and the previous two presidents in particular have proven especially prone to the intoxicating allure of the executive order. But at least previously there was some circumlocutive attempt to legitimize the decision – in this case, the president is quite blatant about the fact that he completely lacks any legal authority whatsoever to do what they did, and, moreover, is happy to game the courts in the meantime.

The CDC’s eviction ban has been embroiled in litigation ever since it was first issued under President Trump last September. In defending the ban, the government has cited the 1944 Public Health Service Act, which says that to retard the spread of an infectious disease the CDC may require “inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination… and other measures.” The administration latched on to “other measures” as legal justification, evidently seeing an inextricable link between fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, and eviction moratoriums.

The courts, for the most part, have failed to be impressed by that degree of elasticity, and all but a handful have repeatedly struck down the moratorium on the grounds that the CDC did not have the Congressional authority necessary to tell property owners they no longer had the right to evict people from their property who stopped paying rent. When it got to the Supreme Court, a majority again agreed that the CDC lacked any legal authority to ban evictions, although Justice Kavanaugh voted with the four dissenting members to leave the ban in place, arguing that what the hell, it was expiring in about a month’s time in any case.

Putting aside for a minute Justice Kavanaugh’s spurt of naivety, or lapse of reason, or whatever it was that convinced him that an illegal act can be allowed to stand as long as it is only for a few more weeks, the high Court was unequivocal on the legal question that in order to extend the ban Congress had to do something legislatively to allow it. Well, they didn’t, even as the president told them on several occasions that he couldn’t legally do it on his own. Those few weeks later, President Biden shrugged his shoulders and did it anyway.

He wasn’t very coy about it either. He knew, in no uncertain terms, that he lacked the authority. “The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster,” Biden said in a fit of understatement a few hours before his CDC issued the extension. After the fact, he was not shy about his motives: “I went ahead and did it,” the president boasted, “but here’s the deal: I can’t guarantee you the courts won’t rule if we don’t have the ability, if we have to appeal, to keep this going for a month at least – I hope longer than that.”

This is rather extraordinary, a president who openly recognizes that the law of the land does not grant him the authority to do something he wants, but does it anyway, with an expectation that he can use the court system – a system whose authority in the matter he has already ignored – to prolong his unlawful act as long as he can get away with it. This is banana-republic stuff.

There are practical questions, of course, of whether the eviction moratorium is even needed – numbers from the Colorado Apartment Association show that rent collections over the past year have remained around 97 percent, indicating that there is no impending crisis of homelessness once the moratorium is lifted. There are other considerations as well; not the least of which is the fact that the existence of the moratorium has made renting more expensive for those at the lower end of the credit scale, as property owners require higher rents and larger deposits to hedge against the likelihood of rental defaults against which they have no recourse. And of course there is the smaller property owner who relies on those rental payments to pay the mortgage on their property. Those people seem to be forgotten in the debate.

But the constitutional insult remains the most imperative and damaging issue, bringing into question the validity of our claim to responsible self-government.