Peter: one element of Grants Pass is that it’s not just about whether you can enforce anti-camping laws against the homeless. it’s about whether you can enforce those laws **even when you haven’t provided adequate shelter beds**

one element of Grants Pass is that it’s not just about whether you can enforce anti-camping laws against the homeless. it’s about whether you can enforce those laws **even when you haven’t provided adequate shelter beds**

First decision is Grants Pass. Gorsuch has the 6-3 opinion finding that the Eighth Amendment does not bar "generally applicable" laws banning public camping. Sotomayor writes the dissent. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23p...

www.supremecourt.gov

the 9th Circuit never said that you can’t, e.g., bust up homeless encampments. They just said that before you do, you need to provide shelter beds, otherwise you’re just being punitive and cruel. An extremely basic a call for decency, but many West Coast city leaders were outraged

San Francisco politicians, for instance, made a big stink of this. “The 9th Circuit is saying we have to let homeless people camp in public!” But that was never true, they were only saying you have to provide the people you displace with a place to sleep. A pretty basic requirement!

Peter why would we build shelters? The whole point is to just violently beat people up until they leave town! Stop saying it's cruel. It's not cruel.

Also as this piece outlines, SF was ignoring the ruling even while they were busy complaining about it missionlocal.org/2024/06/sfs-...

San Francisco's dishonest legal brief helped U.S. Supreme Court criminalize homelessnessmissionlocal.org The city's dishonest amicus brief provided succor to the Trump Supreme Court and will now enable a nationwide homeless crackdown.

the only thing many San Franciscans seem to hate more than a homeless person on the street is a homeless person taken _off_ the street to live in their neighborhood

Well then you have to spend money on the poor, so to them that’s what the 9th circuit was saying lol

There is simply a missing foundation of shared humanity that I find loathesome. I will never understand these people. It makes it hard for me to take even valid concerns seriously because they feel like a performative veneer over a politics of disgust.

I really think it goes back to the awful conservative “most of them want to be homeless actually” opinion. They absolve themselves of basic human empathy by believing homeless people choose to be homeless and should just stop being homeless.

This is an argument I try to deploy against voter ID requirements: the homeless get to vote the same as everyone else, how do you handle that? And of course the answer is "we wouldn't, we're already disenfranchising people who live on native reservations, having no address is even easier, rube."

It reminds me of Korematsu, where the Supreme Court looked at exclusionary zones in isolation, and ignored the part where Japanese-Americans were also not allowed to leave the exclusionary zone. That allowed SCOTUS to just pretend internment wasn't happening.

City leaders are outraged because they have to actually explain to their constituents that their constituents' desire to get rid of these folks without paying for a place for them to go is a them problem. You know. Actually lead their communities.

“we just want to round them up and dump them at the county line and say don’t come back now”

We really should be focusing on the true victims of this decision. The rich people under bridges.

And don't forget, the VAST majority of homeless populations are local, not people who "moved in to take advantage of the climate and better services." They had homes there. They still have a support system there. They are hardly ever migrants, short of having family there now.

Idk about the situation in Grants Pass specifically but other PNW smaller cities have been getting large groups of homeless people that were kicked out of Seattle and Portland. They get pushed to smaller cities then the people in charge panic and make laws to kick them out to the next town.

Grants Pass is on the southern end of the state. It's like Seattle exporting their homeless to Hermiston; it just won't happen and if they forcibly removed them, they'd make their way back to their support systems.

I live just in the other side of the bridge from hermiston in tri cities and we have lots of homeless people. Most of my job involves dealing with them and I see who is in the area they are allowed to be in on a daily basis. There are lots of new people, most were kicked out of the west side.

Which cities? Is this actually happening or do people just BELIEVE it's happening?

I live in tri cities, they shuffle people between kennewick and pasco.

It’s actually happening, lots of older people I talk to tell me they were run out of Seattle and tell me horror stories about the police here throwing all their shit away and telling them to go back to Seattle because we don’t have a homeless problem here. They don’t know where to go.

Same thing happens in Portland, they get run out of it (often losing their stuff in the process) set up camp in Washington County, get kicked out of there, etc etc. if they're lucky they have a vehicle so they don't lose their stuff but a lot aren't lucky

I got a gleeful email from one of my congressmen crowing about what a victory this is for Californians. Just revolting

This I don't understand. The founders understood camping. They camped all the time. Were there anti camping laws in 1746?

Interpretation for me, strict textualism for thee.

If there was a law requiring people to buy insurance but there was no insurance for sale and no government program to provide it, conservative justices would strike that down instantly. And they did!

SCOTUS has given local governments a pass to simply stop all spending on shelters and other services and through draconian policing force all homeless people out of the city, away from any resources or support networks. Like the late 19th Century when there were vagabond and vagrancy ordinances.

it's "homeless people don't have the right to live, but the government does have the right to oppress homeless people however it sees fit"

That ‘even when’ really feels like an ‘especially when’.

I did not know that. People in Grants Pass will die during the winter. That is for sure.

What is a jail cell but a shelter bed by another name?

Just like Jesus would do….

It’s cruelty for cruelty’s sake

That’s the kicker, alright.

Post