Cite as: 535 U. S. 125 (2002)
Opinion of the Court
judicial restraint, would trench upon the legislative powers vested in Congress by Art. I, § 1, of the Constitution." United States v. Albertini, 472 U. S. 675, 680 (1985). There are, moreover, no "serious constitutional doubts" about Congress' affording local public housing authorities the discretion to conduct no-fault evictions for drug-related crime. Reno v. Flores, 507 U. S. 292, 314, n. 9 (1993) (emphasis deleted).
The en banc Court of Appeals held that HUD's interpretation "raise[s] serious questions under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment," because it permits "tenants to be deprived of their property interest without any relationship to individual wrongdoing." 237 F. 3d, at 1124-1125 (citing Scales v. United States, 367 U. S. 203, 224-225 (1961); Southwestern Telegraph & Telephone Co. v. Danaher, 238 U. S. 482 (1915)). But both of these cases deal with the acts of government as sovereign. In Scales, the United States criminally charged the defendant with knowing membership in an organization that advocated the overthrow of the United States Government. In Danaher, an Arkansas statute forbade discrimination among customers of a telephone company. The situation in the present cases is entirely different. The government is not attempting to criminally punish or civilly regulate respondents as members of the general populace. It is instead acting as a landlord of property that it owns, invoking a clause in a lease to which respondents have agreed and which Congress has expressly required. Scales and Danaher cast no constitutional doubt on such actions.
The Court of Appeals sought to bolster its discussion of constitutional doubt by pointing to the fact that respondents have a property interest in their leasehold interest, citing Greene v. Lindsey, 456 U. S. 444 (1982). This is undoubtedly true, and Greene held that an effort to deprive a tenant of such a right without proper notice violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But, in the present
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