The Supreme Court Is on the Verge of Criminalizing Homelessness
As more people end up experiencing homelessness, they’re also facing increasingly punitive and reactionary responses from local governments and their neighbors. Such policies could become legally codified in short order, with the high court having agreed to hear arguments in Grants Pass v. Johnson.
Originally brought in 2018, the case challenged the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, over an ordinance banning camping. Both a federal judge and, later, a panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck the law down, saying that Grants Pass did not have enough available shelter to offer homeless people. As such, the law was deemed to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment.
The ruling backed up the Ninth Circuit’s earlier ruling on the Martin v. City of Boise case, which said that punishing or arresting people for camping in public when there are no available shelter beds to take them to instead constituted a violation of the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in the Eighth Amendment. That applied to localities in the Ninth Circuit’s area of concern and has led to greater legal scrutiny even as cities and counties push for more punitive and restrictive anti-camping laws. In fact, Grants Pass pushed to get the Supreme Court to hear the case, and several nominally liberal cities and states on the West Coast are backing its argument. If the Supreme Court overturns the previous Grants Pass and Boise rulings, it would open the door for cities, states, and counties to essentially criminalize being unhoused on a massive scale.
So the Supreme Court is willing to force states to provide shelter and food to homeless people?
I didn't know the Supreme Court justices were socialists.
Oh, no no no, that would be protecting human rights, which conservatives really aren't about. They want to protect states' rights and local governments' rights to harass and brutalize humans. That's their idea of liberty.
It's THEIR liberty -- not yours. You can go get fucked.
How do you explain the liberal cities and states on the West Coast, then?
Liberals be like
Their market worshipping ideology is barely an improvement over conservatism imo. What we need is progressivism and socialism, but so long as conservatives are turning into fascists I feel compelled to suppprt the liberal douchebags Citizens United has left us with (at least as far as my voting goes, anyway).
No war but class war
Liberal does not mean progressive.
The term liberal was used to refer to fiscal policies, until Republicans in the Reagan era began misusing the word as a pejorative for Democrats. Most Democrats (especially leadership) are not progressives. Most elected Democrats are neo-liberals, even in blue cities. Neo-liberals are conservatives.
We do not have a viable progressive party in the U.S. We have a conservative party and a more conservative party.
Liberals are conservatives. That's how.
Much like doing genocide and supporting the police, there's a bipartisan consensus on inflicting violence on unhoused people.
"If they wanted their concerns to be taken seriously they should have made a donation to someone's campaign!"
Too many neolibs, not enough social Democrats and similar. A number of socialized programs would cut the homeless population. And we probably wouldn't have an opioid crisis if we had socialized healthcare (because pushing opioids was done for profits after all)
No see the idea is to force states to place homeless people in for profit prisons. Pure capitalism!
Landlords evicting people would also be liable since they directly caused a crime to be committed.
Yep. But you can't just give people handouts, so it'll be mandatory and come with a period of enslavement