As the high court deliberates, policymakers are preparing for the possibility that they might solve a problem they created in the most punitive way.
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.
They’ll start to notice when there’s a downturn in their stock earnings due to imprisoning everyone. They have to feel it personally before they take issue with such problems. They don’t have a very far attention span.
Oh no the stock market will do just fine when we create different tiers of work camp prison with different suppliers. There'll just be less variety in stocks.
I hate to say this but they're going to find out the hard way that most of the homeless veterans are that way by choice and they remember how to fight in an organized manner. Our very own hometown militarized gangs! Yay!
We all knew that was part of the endgame, c'mon now. This will probably only surprise them, since, y'know, they don't know anyone who's ever served before.
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
Because gun control is a solution to another problem. The problem isn't that guns exist, but that people die because guns are too prevalent. My original comment explicitly made fun of "just make the systemic problem illegal", somthe real equivalency would be "too many shootings, so make killing illegal and call the problem solved". You falsely adopted this to express your disbelief that a proposed measure to curb gun violence is effective which is not the same but was described as the same by you.