|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
Whether you live in a city or a small town, you’re a winner because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, announced on Friday. The Supremes ruled 6-3 that municipalities can ban homeless encampments from sidewalks, parks and other public areas. Sleeping in the rough is not a constitutionally guaranteed right, said the court.
It’s likely no other Supreme Court ruling this year will positively impact more people. In cities plagued by street living, parents walking their children to school have to navigate around discarded needles and human waste. Store owners opening up in the morning have to deal with entrances blocked by cardboard shelters. People risk getting mugged walking by the encampments on their way to work.
The small town of Grants Pass, Oregon, banned sleeping under cardboard boxes, tents and blankets in public places. Homelessness advocates sued, citing a 2018 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling — Martin v. City of Boise. It said that fining or jailing people for sleeping in the rough was “cruel and unusual punishment,” a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Lawyers for Grants Pass asked the Supreme Court to overturn Martin, citing the incidence of “crime, fires, the reemergence of medieval diseases,” and “record levels of drug overdoses and deaths on public streets” wherever sleeping rough is tolerated.
In every one of the nine states affected by the Martin ruling — Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington — street living has soared since 2018, up 51% in Alaska, 46% in Idaho, and 46% in Oregon, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual homeless survey. Legalizing living rough encourages it.
Had the Supreme Court ruled against Grants Pass, all 50 states likely would be facing a surge in street living.
Stunningly, the three justices who dissented in Grants Pass — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — showed no interest in how homeless encampments harm quality of life for other residents. Sotomayor, who penned the dissent, sneered at the majority for framing the problem “as one involving drugs, diseases, and fires instead of one involving people trying to keep warm outside with a blanket.”
Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson want to legitimate sleeping rough, arguing that there are “myriad legitimate reasons people may lack or decline shelter.”
New York City’s far left City Council has the same misguided idea. It passed a “Homeless Bill of Rights” making street living a right. The average lifespan of someone living on the street is 48 years, compared with 78 for most people. Losing three decades of life is not a right. It’s a terrible wrong.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, cited data from many cities showing that most homeless are living on the street by choice, refusing offers of shelter in favor of easy access to illegal drugs and no shelter rules.
San Francisco attested to the court that it has “seen over half of its offers of shelter and services rejected by unhoused individuals who often cite” the Martin order “as their justification to permanently occupy and block public sidewalks.”
Finally, Gorsuch said judges should not be homelessness czars, dictating policy. It’s up to local lawmakers to decide how the homeless are cared for and how public resources are spent. The Grants Pass ruling is a bold denunciation of judges making decisions that should be left to locally elected leaders.
Are you listening, Mayor Eric Adams? New York City is a victim of this judicial activism.
For over four decades, New York City residents have been forced to foot an enormous bill — billions of dollars a year — because of a consent decree and subsequent court rulings that dictate the city’s homeless policies, down to details like meals served and square footage per person. The big winner is the homeless-advocacy-industrial complex that runs shelters, files lawsuits and profits off the exorbitant spending.
New York City is the only place compelled by the courts to guarantee shelter for all comers.
It will bankrupt New York. Tell Adams it’s time to challenge the consent decree and wrest control of homeless policy from judges. If little Grants Pass can do it, the Big Apple can too.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths.
Great decision. Really in the public interest!!
And allow for Homeowners to evict Squatters call the Police and take them to a Jail where they can get Three Meals a Day
How do people sleep in the streets, in Alaska, in winter, and not freeze to death? I’m sure a lot of them do. Does anyone remember an O. Henry story called :The Cop and the Anthem?”
ni but I do remember another story (Jack London?) called
to build a fire”.
Scary stuff.
It was Jack London. Scary is right. “The Cop and the Anthem” is about a homeless bum who spends a Fall eveming committing misdemeanors. He wants tp spend the winter in a nice, warm jail
I was wondering the same thing. I knew about the derelicts who sleep on beaches in Hawaii and that makes sense but Alaska? I don’t even know how they survive NYC Winters, much less Alaskan ones.
There are a lot of tents and derelicts here in San Jose, more than I’ve ever seen but nothing like the long rows of them like the videos and photos I’ve seen of San Francisco and especially LA.
” Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — showed no interest in how homeless encampments harm quality of life for other residents.”
I wonder if these pampered Leftist women have to deal with the squalor in their tony neighborhoods. These stupid women live in a bubble.
I wish somebody would buy a horde of derelicts tents and help them set them up in front of those three fake judges’ houses.
Some uses of the word “advocate” have always puzzled me. If one is an “advocate” for homelessness, does that mean one wants to see more of it? But the phrase “re-emergence of medieval diseases” nails it.
That’s a truly ignorant reading. Advocating for homeless people clearly means standing up for their rights. That gibber jabber about “re-emergence of medieval diseases” is just a snarl term to dehumanize people. The diseases they are alluding to are caused by extreme poverty. They aren’t consigned to the past because this country refuses to lift standards of living which would eliminate them.
Woke BS. Like the article says the vagrants often refuse shelter because the rules crimp their style
Better to be dehumanized with a snarl, than your existence completely forgotten and voided by the cold and soulless pimps for the nazi communist singularity.
They want to get bundles of money from the government and Churches by pretending to be advocates for derelicts. They’re like the money grubbing “Church” agencies that “advocate” for illegal aliens.
This is an incredibly bad faith reading of the problem. The SCOTUS has made sleeping outside illegal but has offered nothing to alleviate the problem of homelessness. The author is also too lazy to actually consider why unhoused people would refuse access to a shelter. These shelters are often dirty and dangerous to say nothing of being blazing hot in the summer.
Many shelters are run by religious groups that force the unhoused to be preached at before providing them with any assistance.
After a quick google search that Homeless Bill of Rights simply extended hate crime protections to the unhoused who are frequently attacked due to their vulnerability.
Since when is the Supreme Court responsible for alleviating the bane of homeless derelicts, the overwhelming majority of whom are insane, criminals, druggies or all three? Shelters are dirty and dangerous but so are derelicts and their tents. The derelicts are frequently the attackers of decent citizens and nearly ALWAYS the attackers of their fellow derelicts.
Like people often suggest, invite some of them to live in front of your home, NIMBY.
Nothing to alleviate vagrancy? Just in California the state has wasted $24 billion with little to show for it. The givernor has ordered an audit.
Stop the silly canards and childish, insane bending of reality Gunn. When writing your post you made no offer or solution to clean up the problems of how to protect citizens from the deprivations and dangers these encampments bring therefore your arguments and opinion are null and void. Nah,nah, boo,bo. See how that works?
All human rights stem from ownership. There are no human rights without ownership. To be a human right it has to be universal or at least be attempted to be applied universally. You can’t steal, trample or ignore the rights or ownership of another person and claim an issue is based on human rights and should be based on how you would like to narrowly frame something as a human rights issue when it clearly takes away someone’s ownership and their rights.
Dude you sound like a communist with all those silly hs nonsense platitudes they throw out to confuse the useful idiots.
Betsy McCaughey – EXCELLENT ARTICLE !!! You put this in such great perspective. “McCaughey for V.P.” !!!