Bashing Congress isn’t exactly an original thing to do. For decades, the House and Senate together have been the public’s perennial go-to punching bag, blamed, fairly and not, for everything wrong in the country’s political system. Yet sometimes the body does something so breathtakingly disgraceful that it deserves all the scorn inevitably coming to it.

I’m talking about the eviction moratorium, which, after the Supreme Court threatened to block any further extensions of it at the end of June, finally expired on Saturday, putting millions at risk of being thrown out of their homes. The numbers are staggering: estimates of how many renters could end up on the street range from 4.2 million and more than 6 million, to as many as 11 million adults and 15 million people in total when the whole household is counted.

This is not only a human disaster, but a public health one. This great mass of people are in danger of losing not only shelter but also their ability to socially distance, just as the much faster spreading Delta variant of COVID-19 fills hospitals with record numbers of coronavirus patients and sends the hospitalization of children ticking up, also in record numbers in some parts of the country. By one analysis, 4.7 million people who face eviction live in counties where Delta is surging.