Sotomayor Blasts Supreme Court for Devastating Homelessness Ruling

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a scathing dissent Friday on her conservative colleagues’ decisions to essentially criminalize homelessness in its Grants Pass ruling. Sotomayor put the rest of the court on blast and layed out how the attack on the rights of homeless individuals is an attack on the rights of all Americans.

While the conservative majority argued that the high court must not impede local governments from criminalizing homelessness, Sotomayor wrote, “It is possible to acknowledge and balance the issues facing local governments, the humanity and dignity of homeless people, and our constitutional principles.”

“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,” Sotomayor wrote. “For people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless. That is unconscionable and unconstitutional. Punishing people for their status is ‘cruel and unusual’ under the Eighth Amendment.”

Going on to quote social science experts, Sotomayor explained how punishing people for sleeping outside without providing offers to housing and available beds is simply “a big game of whack-a-mole.”

While the conservative justices trumpeted tropes about unsheltered homeless people being service-resistant, or denying shelter when offered, Sotomayor noted studies have shown that “the vast majority of those who are unsheltered would move inside if safe and affordable options were available.” She went on to say that when people do resist being housed, it’s often because those beds that are available may have “restrictions based on gender, age, income, sexuality, religious practice, curfews that conflict with employment obligations, and time limits on stays.” For example, the only shelter in Grants Pass, which is charity-run, has strict religious and work requirements.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on this case will allow cities and states to avoid the offer of shelter entirely if they so choose and offers one solution to homelessness: punishment.

As Sotomayor wrote, imposing fines and jailing individuals is not a solution. In her dissent, which she read from the bench, the justice described a story of a homeless man in Nashville who was arrested 198 times and had over 250 citations, making it difficult for an outreach worker to find him housing. The outreach worker was eventually forced to make him a T-shirt that read, “Please do not arrest me, my outreach worker is working on my housing.” Once the man, who experienced homelessness for 20 years, was able to secure stable housing, he “had no further encounters with the police, no citations, and no arrests.”

If criminalizing someone for the mere act of sleeping outside with a blanket wasn’t frightening enough, as some experts feared, this case also opens up the door for justices to challenge a concurring opinion, Robinson v. California, which held it was unconstitutional to punish someone for being addicted to drugs—for their “status” of addiction. Justice Clarence Thomas’s entire concurring opinion lays the groundwork to overturn Robinson.

Despite the conservative majority disguising its stance as a “leave it to states” approach, this ruling, as Sotomayor laid out, is an infringement on homeless individuals’ constitutional rights, with troubling ripple effects for all of us. “This Court must safeguard those rights even when, and perhaps especially when, doing so is uncomfortable or unpopular,” wrote Sotomayor, Otherwise, “the words of the Constitution become little more than good advice.”

Sotomayor concluded her dissent by writing that she remains hopeful that we can address the crisis of homelessness through other means. “That responsibility is shared by those vulnerable populations, the States and cities in which they reside, and each and every one of us.”

The Supreme Court on Friday delivered a serious blow to administrative law and overruled the Chevron doctrine, a long-standing safeguard for clarifying ambiguous laws. In a 6–3 decision, with all liberal justices dissenting, the court overturned decades of precedent, stripping power from federal agencies and empowering the judiciary.

The Chevron doctrine, or Chevron deference, is a legal framework where courts traditionally defer the authority of interpreting an ambiguous federal statute to the federal agency in charge of overseeing that statute on the basis that the agency, not the courts, know best. Only when an agency’s recommended interpretation of a vague statute passed by Congress fails to be a “reasonable interpretation,” under Chevron, do courts get to alter the law.

Chevron’s survival was brought to the Supreme Court in two cases heard jointly. Both cases deal with a regulation from the National Marine Fisheries Service that requires professional observers on fishing boats, with a vague statute that seems to state the owner of the fishing boat has to pay for those required observers. The cases seek to clarify that statute and to overturn Chevron, after lower courts upheld the rule and determined it was a reasonable interpretation.

The Supreme Court during oral arguments seemed poised to throw out the Chevron doctrine or possibly limit its scope, which led tax experts to believe Chevron would get axed, according to the Journal of Accountancy. Speaking to the Journal, tax and technology attorney Andrew Leahey predicted the end of Chevron would prompt a sea of regulatory tax frameworks to “be put on hold and litigated,” with the added complications of expecting Congress to pass “incredibly specific” statutes, adding, “This will be difficult in the current political environment, as getting anything done in Congress is a chore.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that the interpretation of agency regulations varies “every four to eight years when a new administration comes in,” causing “shocks to the system.” In the decision delivered on Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts delivered a lengthy history of administrative law before arguing that federal agencies with specific expertise about the best way to implement unclear laws “have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”

Opposing the decision, Justice Elena Kagan issued a strong warning about the Supreme Court’s judicial overreach in overturning the Chevron doctrine.

“In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law,” wrote Kagan. “As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar. It defends that move as one (suddenly) required by the (nearly 80-year-old) Administrative Procedure Act. But the Act makes no such demand. Today’s decision is not one Congress directed. It is entirely the majority’s choice. And the majority cannot destroy one doctrine of judicial humility without making a laughing-stock of a second.”

As many politicians and pundits who watched Thursday’s presidential debate descended into a nervous frenzy over President Joe Biden’s supremely underwhelming performance, several Democratic lawmakers and media figures are choosing to stand by their man—even as that feels increasingly untenable.

In the spin room immediately after the debate, California Governor Gavin Newsom was already hard at work backing Biden, and wouldn’t entertain the topic on nearly everyone else’s mind—namely that it may be time to seriously consider switching candidates.

“I would never turn my back on President Biden’s record,” he said, according to The New York Times. “I would never turn my back on President Biden, and I don’t know a Democrat in my party who would do so, especially after tonight.”

Ever the Democratic Party’s contrarian, Senator John Fetterman likewise leaped to set himself apart from the scores of Democrats criticizing Biden’s debate performance.

“I refuse to join the Democratic vultures on Biden’s shoulder after the debate,” wrote the Pennsylvania Democrat on X. “No one knows more than me that a rough debate is not the sum total of the person and their record.”

Fetterman himself struggled to communicate clearly during a key televised debate against his opponent Mehmet Oz in 2022. Both Biden and Fetterman attempted to articulate their strong support for Roe v. Wade but were caught up in their own halting, awkward performances.

“Morning-after thermonuclear beat downs from my race from the debate and polling geniuses like 538 predicted l’d lose by 2. And what happened? The only seat to flip and won by a historic margin (+5),” Fetterman wrote Thursday night. “Chill the fuck out,” he advised.

Although some lawmakers and lobbyists have suggested that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries should, with other party leaders, attempt to reason with Biden to abandon the race, he responded succinctly when asked whether the president should drop out: “No.”

These Democrats weren’t the only ones to defend Biden; several journalists and campaign members voiced their support for the president, in sharp contrast to the wave of panic that overtook on-screen personalities on CNN.

Rachel Maddow noted that the Biden who appeared at a watch party minutes after the debate ended was clearer and more energized—a “world away from what we just heard on the debate stage.”

“That Joe Biden would’ve killed in the debate, but the Joe Biden that we saw on the debate stage was about 90 percent more soft spoken than that. And in a monotone when you could discern him,” she said, adding that he seemed to “warm up” over the course of the debate.

Across the board, nobody could say anything positive about Biden’s debate chops, instead drawing on other examples to argue that the president could still be a contender. In the early hours of the morning, Harry J. Sisson, one of several social media content creators who have been courted by the Biden campaign, tried to compliment the president for still being awake.

“Look at this. At 2 am in the morning, President Biden was greeting his supporters at RDU airport in North Carolina. This is just hours after debating Trump. This man does not stop working & moving. He’s fit to lead and I can’t wait to vote for him,” wrote Sisson in a post on X, formerly Twitter, with a picture of Biden on the tarmac. While influencers’ social media posts are meant to come off more organically, it’s hard to forget that Sisson has been posting unpaid pro-Biden content since the 2020 election.

In another post, Sisson lauded Biden for slamming Trump during a speech to his campaign’s watch party after the debate had ended—although the president conspicuously failed to effectively attack his opponent at any point during the 90-minute run time. “Biden has a cold,” Sisson wrote. “Trump has 34 felony convictions. This is the easiest choice we’ll ever have to make as a country.”

Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College and an expert on American political and economic history, wrote in the Friday morning edition of her newsletter that Biden’s bad performance could be explained by Trump’s “Gish gallop,” which she said was “a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them.”

Richardson argued that Trump had been “gaslighting” Biden, and took aim at media pundits who fell for the former president’s chicanery. “Of far more lasting importance than this one night is the clear evidence that stage performance has trumped substance in political coverage in our era. Nine years after Trump launched his first campaign, the media continues to let him call the shots,” she wrote, urging readers to take a longer view.

As of yet, it’s unclear which is the more shortsighted: backing a candidate whose chance of winning is slipping away before the world’s eyes, or rushing to replace him and sending the American politician landscape into chaos.

Following an abysmal debate performance against Donald Trump, Democrats are scrambling to replace President Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race. There’s just one hiccup: Biden himself doesn’t intend to step aside. So what are the options?

Per the Democratic National Committee’s rules, Biden cannot be stripped from the ticket by party leaders. But the convention can throw an open nominating process on the convention floor, opening the door for other candidates to take the front seat, reported Politico. That would necessitate a complicated gambit for power among the party’s 4,000 delegates, many of whom hold loyalties to the Biden administration for helping them get the position in the first place. Voting against him would effectively destroy that relationship.

Superdelegates, who previously held the power to vote for whomever they wanted within the party’s nominating process regardless of the desires of their localities, have also had a significant portion of that power stripped from them since the 2016 presidential election.

But, if Biden did agree to relinquish his run, Democratic strategists have already advanced a flurry of possible contenders to take his place. They include Vice President Kamala Harris, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Kentucky Governor Andy Besehar, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, among others.

Harris, who is already on the ballot, may be one of the most seamless options available, but her poll numbers have been anything but inspiring. A May Morning Consult poll found that, while Harris had higher favorability among African Americans, overall just one-third of voters thought she had the gumption to win in November. On top of that, the vice president has faced rounds of criticism for holding a relatively inactive profile since she took office in 2021.

But if she did take control of the reins, her own choice for vice president would set off a mad dash among the rising stars in her party. At the top of the possibilities would also be Newsom, though he’s not a beloved politician in California—something that could risk votes even inside a historically blue state. And, technically, unless either Harris or Newsom changed their place of residence, they wouldn’t be eligible for the state’s 54 electoral votes, according to Politico.

After Thursday night’s disastrous debate performance by President Joe Biden, Democrats are sounding the alarm on the incumbent’s chances of defeating Donald Trump in November.

Former U.S. senator Claire McCaskill gave a blistering assessment to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow of how Democrats are feeling right now.

“Joe Biden had one thing he had to do tonight, and he didn’t do it,” McCaskill said late Thursday, speaking about how her phone blew up with messages from surrogates, senators, and other Democratic leaders. “Based on what I’m hearing from a lot of people, and some of them are people that are in high elective offices in this country, and you might guess where they serve, there is more than hand-wringing tonight. I do think people feel like we are confronting a crisis.”

MSNBC’s Joy Reid said that she was on the phone with Democrats throughout the debate, and “the universal reaction was somewhere approaching panic.”

“It’s hard to argue that Biden should be our nominee,” one Democratic operative who’s worked on campaigns at all levels for over a decade told CNN.

It’s “time to talk about an open convention and a new Democratic nominee,” a Democratic lawmaker and Biden supporter told NBC News.

“If it gets Biden not to run, then it was very good,” a former Obama campaign aide texted to Semafor about the debate. “Otherwise it’s bad.”

“Our only hope is that he bows out, we have a brokered convention, or dies,” an adviser to Democratic donors said to Politico. “Otherwise we are fucking dead.”

As The New Republic’s Walter Shapiro wrote Thursday night, “Let us pray, after a debacle of a debate, that the president has enough realism to recognize that he cannot win in an election that the Democrats cannot lose.” The Republican Party, meanwhile, has several disturbing plans to implement should Trump take office in 2025.