The Republican-appointed justices have shown us what they are, and all that's left is billionaires haggling over the price. I'm sure putting it this way would offend Sam Alito and his missus, so to also keep this blog post brief, I will refrain from suggesting what else they can run up a flagpole if they don't like it.
I really shudder at conservative justices using their slapdash "textural" approach to the law as a "public service" to overrule agency decisions based on science. What this means for climate change, curbing pollution, food and drug regulation....
They also ruled that homeless people can't sleep outside. Not even in their cars. To put this in a way Clarence Thomas might appreciate, they can't even stay in a $267K RV in the Walmart parking lot.
However, while Thomas and his missus have the option of being away from homes, if they had no other, better options, they do have a home to go to. For people with no other choice and no room at the inn in any shelter, they can do--what?
One callous answer might be "Have they ever tried not being homeless?" Another would be what this amounts to--just don't let the sun set on your ass in a community that has such an ordinance, to use a phrase with some historic connotations.
I've tried to wrap my head around this being the response of the theocrats--are the poor not always with us? (Yes, apparently, but not so close.) Has the son of man nowhere to lay his head? (Prison, I guess.)
But for what it's worth, to keep this blog post brief, I'm pretty sure about what theocrats are, too.
5 comments:
Roland Freisler lives!
Grants Pass was/is a sundown town, Oregon is a shit-pit I'm ashamed to be from
There will be retribution ...
It is not hard to find a parallel--that these places deem homeless to be, as the Nazis might have called it [i]asozial[/i] or [i]arbeitsschau[/i]. Not a few of the homeless are also disabled or racial minorities. (Leben unwertes Leben.) But as our own history in the US of Jim Crow reminds us--the Nazis learned a lot of what they did from us--a thing that always makes me wary of the what the word "again" means when MAGA says Make America Great Again. Trump's fixation with mental hospitals and the pro-life right's war against IVF, and lack of concern about higher infant and maternal mortality give me some real concerns about their attitudes, also
So I presume making homelessness a crime is the justice's way of bringing the power of private enterprise to bear on this intractable problem. Jail houses for the homeless! Now the public can pay 50K a year to keep these failed people off the streets while lining the pockets of the Supreme Court's pals. What better use of public funds? Certainly better that regulating polluters or monitoring, well, anything.
I can't find the story at the moment, but somewhere out there is a private prison suing a (County?) because they fell below some amount of prisoners in their contract. Like they get paid "X" amount per prisoner, and crime went down, so they are salty they aren't getting paid. So--the cops better make up a quota of bodies?
Apparently, prisoners are a demand-side issue.
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