Ilhan Omar Tries To Support Her Bill To Cancel Rent and Mortgages, Tweets Article That Blasts It
When a politician tweets out an article, you generally assume they read said article.
That doesn’t appear to be the case for Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who is currently sponsoring a House bill to cancel rent and mortgage payments in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
The bill, introduced back in April by Omar, has 27 cosponsors in the House — all of them Democrats.
On Wednesday, Omar tweeted out an article about her bill — but the article isn’t exactly in favor of the bill.
You can read about my bill here ⬇️https://t.co/CDtLWUbCSr
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) December 3, 2020
The article, from Market Realist, explains that the Rent and Mortgage Cancellation Act is intended to eliminate housing payments for many Americans retroactively from April 1, 2020, until the coronavirus pandemic is over. Failure to pay rent or other similar bills would not result in fines, eviction or a negatively-impacted credit score.
Unfortunately, the bill has been criticized for being confusing and vague.
One specific criticism outlined in the article is that there is no income threshold attached to the bill, so anyone can claim relief under the bill, even if the claimant isn’t actually struggling to pay his or her rent or mortgage.
In other words, the bill, as currently written, is ripe for abuse.
The bill provides for reimbursements from the government to affected landlords and lenders, but doesn’t ensure that those reimbursements will be made timely.
This could result in dire economic problems for landlords, who rely on rent payments for their own income.
If landlords can’t pay their own bills and mortgages, they can’t keep their buildings, which can create further problems for their tenants.
Omar’s goal is to keep people from being evicted as a result of the coronavirus, but the Market Realist article suggests that this bill won’t solve the problem — rather, it would just kick the problem down the road and could result in thousands of evictions when the pandemic is over and the bill’s relief expires.
In short, the article is far from supportive.
Instead, it lays out many of the key problems with the proposed Rent and Mortgage Cancellation Act.
Omar (or whoever writes tweets for her) either didn’t read the article beyond the first paragraph, or simply couldn’t find one that was more flattering.
Either way, it tells you everything you need to know about this disaster of a bill.
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