Right-wing Supreme Court majority seems ready to sanction arrest of homeless people for sleeping in publicThe Supreme Court majority indicated Monday during oral arguments in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson that it is likely to overturn a lower court injunction against a local ordinance that allows police to arrest people for sleeping in public, although they have nowhere else to go.
The six right-wing justices who dominate the high court, including the openly corrupt Clarence Thomas—recipient of a $250,000 recreational vehicle that allows him to sleep comfortably while outside his home—showed no empathy for the plight of people who literally cannot afford a roof over their head. Instead, these reactionaries appear willing to approve the arrest of the homeless under the guise of deferring to local officials in matters of “policy.”
The case has been closely watched, especially by local governmental entities, many of which filed “friend of the court” briefs complaining that allowing the injunction to stand would “tie their hands.” There are more than 650,000 unhoused people in the United States, according to a 2023 count by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The homeless population has increased by almost 15 percent since 2007, when HUD began collecting the data, with the growth of homelessness concentrated among older women and military veterans.
Provisions that criminalize extreme poverty harken back to an era of anti-vagrancy laws and debtors’ prisons. As the poet Anatole France famously wrote more than a century ago:
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.Grants Pass, Oregon, with a population 40,000, has a one percent housing vacancy rate, reflecting the severe shortage of affordable units afflicting much of the nation, and an estimated 600 homeless, many of whom are long-time Grants Pass residents. Initially, the city provided bus tickets to ship the homeless out of town, but most soon returned, in many cases with neighboring municipalities providing the return fare.
To force the homeless out of Grants Pass permanently, in 2013 the City Council announced it was enacting prohibitions against sleeping in public, including in cars, with any form of “bedding… for the purpose of maintaining a temporary place to live.” Penalties es
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