Supreme Court Criminalizes Homelessness in Dark Ruling

The Supreme Court issued a ruling on Friday essentially criminalizing homelessness by ruling in favor of the city of Grants Pass, Oregon.

In a 6-3 decision that followed the usual ideological lines, the high court ruled that it is not “cruel and unusual punishment” for local governments to issue citations or jail people for sleeping outside even if there is nowhere for them to go.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorcuch quoted Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed to make the point that the 9th Circuit had previously overstepped and was limiting local governments from utilizing “full panoply of tools in the policy toolbox.”

The case is a major win for Grants Pass, which has no public homeless shelters, but effectively banned homelessness by imposing escalating fines starting at $180 on those who sleep outside. Previously, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that cities must be able to provide and offer shelter to homeless individuals before they can impose fines and criminalize individuals for the act of sleeping outside. The Justice Department also intervened to say that the Ninth Circuit was correct in saying that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the effective criminalization of homelessness.

This was the most significant homelessness case to come before the Supreme Court in nearly 40 years, and the high court’s ruling opens up a portal of callousness toward the homeless, as right-wing think tanks and politicians work to craft laws across the country punishing those sleeping outside.

“Where do we put them if every city, every village, every town lacks compassion and passes a law identical to this, where are they supposed to sleep?” asked Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a hearing on the case earlier this year. “Are they supposed to kill themselves not sleeping?”

She echoed those same points in a brutal dissent on Friday, noting, “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime. For some people, sleeping outside is their only option. The City of Grants Pass jails and fines those people for sleeping anywhere in public at any time, including in their cars, if they use as little as a blanket to keep warm or a rolled-up shirt as a pillow. For people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless. That is unconscionable and unconstitutional.”

The Grants Pass ruling is dark, but it also bears a reminder that it doesn’t stop cities and states from doing the right thing: creating affordable housing to address the root cause of homelessness.

During Thursday night’s astonishingly bad presidential debate, Trump sprinted through a cascade of lies, half-truths, and misinformation with no pushback from CNN debate moderators Jake Tapper or Dana Bash. In lieu of challenging Trump’s lies, Tapper and Bash instead stuck to keeping candidates within their time limits, only pushing back against an answer when a candidate (Trump) failed to answer the question at all.

“The absence of real-time fact checking is the biggest failure of this debate,” wrote NBC News and MSNBC contributor Anthony Coley, arguing that CNN was “not meeting the moment.”

“How are none of the moderators fact checking this post-birth abortion nonsense??” Kate Smith, senior director of news for Planned Parenthood, fumed in response to Trump’s disturbing spew of anti-abortion disinformation, according to The Washington Post (her account is now private).

CNN’s political director David Chalian defended the tactic ahead of the debate, telling The Washington Post, “The venue of a presidential debate between these two candidates is not the ideal venue for a live fact-checking exercise.”

Lawyer and civil rights activist Olayemi Olurin largely agreed with CNN’s assessment, pointing out that, “It’s actually not the moderator’s job to ‘pick up the slack’ for the candidate who’s not doing a good enough job responding to or checking their opponent in the debate. That’s not impartial or the role of a moderator because they’d then be a part of the debate.”

“It is a failure on CNN not to fact check Trump’s lies but the thing is…if Joe Biden were performing the way he’s supposed to in a debate, his answers would be the fact-check,” Olurin noted during the debate. “So 3 things are true: Trump is lying his ass off, the [moderator] isn’t doing their job & neither is Biden.”

Regardless, the lack of real-time fact-checking was a boon for Trump, who nonsensically asserted Nancy Pelosi claimed responsibility for the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, raged against “post-birth abortions,” which are not a thing, and blamed Biden for both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel as Biden fumbled to push back. The only time Biden really went toe-to-toe with Trump’s claims was when Trump challenged his golf handicap and the two derailed the debate to argue about golf.

CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale had earlier sent Trump supporters into a tizzy after posting that he’d be fact-checking the debate live, but that tizzy was soon quashed. Following the bungled debate, Dale reportedly got just three minutes out of all of CNN’s post-debate coverage to go over the mountain of lies Trump spewed.

In Thursday’s presidential debate, Donald Trump was asked three times by CNN moderators to say whether he’d accept the election results, regardless of who wins, and he finally sort of gave an answer—but couched it in complaints about fraud.

The first time, Trump went off on a tangent about how he wished Biden was a great president, because he would be “at one of my many places, enjoying myself” and “wouldn’t be under indictment.”

The second time, Trump went on and on about Ukraine, claiming that Putin would take the country and accusing Biden of making “stupid decisions.” “Russia would have never attacked” on his watch, Trump claimed, dodging the question yet again.

The third time, Trump conditioned his answer with concerns about fraud.

“If it’s a fair and legal and good election, absolutely. I would have much rather accepted these—but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous,” Trump said, ridiculously overlooking his supporters’ involvement in attempts to overturn the 2020 results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and elsewhere.

Watch his heavily caveated answer below:

The two presidential candidates took a quick detour from stumbling over their words on Thursday to trash talk each other on a topic completely unrelated to the election: golf.

“Look I’d be happy to have a driving contest with him. I’ll remind you I got my handicap when I was vice president down to a six,” President Joe Biden said. Trump laughed and shook his head.

“By the way, I’ve told you before I’m happy to play golf with you if you carry your own bag. Think you can do it?” Biden continued.

“That’s the biggest lie that he’s a six handicap, of all,” Trump said, adding “yup.”

“I was a eight handicap—eight …” Biden continued.

“I’ve seen your swing, I know how you swing,” Trump said.

“Two regular club championships,” Trump continued, bragging about his achievements in the game. “To do that you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way. And I do it. He doesn’t do it. He can’t hit a ball 50 yards. He challenged me to a golf match, he can’t hit a ball 50 yards.”

President Joe Biden had a chance to score easy points on immigration policy in his debate against Donald Trump Thursday, but he repeatedly dropped the ball.

Multiple times over the course of the 90-minute debate, Trump swerved his answers into complaints about Biden’s border policy. The former president repeatedly lamented his baseless claim that millions of people are coming into the country from the world’s “prisons, jails and mental institutions.” He lied a lot, and got away with it, because Biden failed to call him out on one important point.

Biden repeatedly neglected to mention Trump’s essential role in killing a bipartisan border security deal earlier this year, which would’ve granted $20 billion in emergency spending at the southern border, in the most restrictive border legislation pushed by a Democratic president in recent memory.

Trump urged Republican lawmakers to oppose Biden’s border security bill, and so they killed it. His allies in Congress made it clear they would rather help Trump fearmonger about immigration than actually do something about it.

Biden has since issued an executive order that will shut down the southern U.S. border if the average number of border encounters exceeds 2,500, which it already has, and only resume them once the number drops to below 1,500.

The new rule, implemented earlier this month, changed Title 8 immigration procedures, making those who illegally crossed the border no longer eligible for asylum (except in the event of “exceptionally compelling” circumstances) and further tightening the eligibility guidelines for deportees who fear returning to their home countries. The new rule inspired intense backlash from Democrats, and a lawsuit from the ACLU.

This wasn’t the only missed opportunity. Throughout the night, Biden uniformly neglected to fact-check Trump on his many more fantastical answers.