It’s great to be a Supreme Court justice in the United States. In theory, your job is to decide if government actions, whether laws passed or actions taken by executive order, are permitted by the bounds of existing law and the US Constitution. In reality, if you want, you can repeal, change, or even make government policy based on your own personal beliefs, provided you have enough like-minded colleagues to vote with you, and as long as you use your legal skills to creatively interpret a legal text in whatever way you need to justify your decision.

The tug-of-war over the federal eviction moratorium, finally settled Thursday in a 6-3 decision by the Supreme Court, is an ideal example. Here is the part of the 1944 Public Health Service Act that Donald Trump, and then Joe Biden, used to order a nationwide pause on evictions during the pandemic:

The [CDC], with the approval of the Secretary, is authorized to make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession. For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the [Secretary] may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.