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Public parks belong to the public, right? A billionaire can't cordon off an acre of Golden Gate Park for his private party. But can a poor person — or anyone who claims they can't afford a home — take over public spaces where children play and families experience nature?
That is the question now before the Supreme Court case, Grants Pass v. Johnson. Before going into particulars, note that both Republican and Democratic politicians think the answer should be "no." That leaves activists who support the right of "the homeless" to take over public property. They want a "yes."
The case is a challenge to a ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in San Francisco, that cities cannot evict "homeless" campers if there are more of them than the local shelters can accommodate. It stems from an ordinance issued by Grants Pass, Oregon, that strictly limits the opportunity to erect a home on public spaces. It forbids even wrapping oneself in a blanket while sitting or lying in public.
A conservative Ninth Circuit judge, Daniel Bress, issued an angry response to the ruling that, critics say, has actually encouraged the sprawling tent encampments tormenting the nine Western states in the court's jurisdiction. It's been noted that in the four years since the decision, homelessness in the states the Ninth Circuit covers grew by about 25% while falling in the rest of the country.
Bress urged the judges to just look out the windows of their San Francisco courthouse. They will see, he said, "homelessness, drug addiction, barely concealed narcotics dealing, severe mental health impairment, the post-COVID hollowing out of our business districts."
Gavin Newsom, Democratic governor of California, joins in the criticism. The Grants Pass decision, he says, has "impeded not only the ability to enforce basic health and safety measures, but also the ability to move people into available shelter beds and temporary housing."
The debate over the rights of the "homeless" has always stumbled over an agreed definition of the homeless population. Some may be families unable to meet rising rents. Some are mentally ill. Some are addicts, while others are "drug tourists." Some reject the accommodations at shelters, preferring to sleep under the stars.
Is the solution to let any of these groups take over parks where children play? Is it to let them visit squalor on the very business districts cities need to pay for public services, including theirs?
The city of Los Angeles holds that homeless camps deny pedestrians and the disabled use of the streets. Cities in Arizona have argued that the law is simply unworkable. The enormous encampment in Phoenix has reportedly cost Arizona millions of dollars and years of litigation.
Drawing lines isn't always easy. Can a city criminalize public urination by someone who doesn't have access to a toilet? What about lighting a fire to cook on? Addiction is not a crime, though it is constitutional to punish someone for using illegal drugs.
It may be necessary to dust off a term coined by John Kenneth Galbraith in the 1950s, though in a way the economist did not intend. It's the existence in this country of what he called "private affluence, public squalor." While the urban rich may have five acres at their country house for their kids to play on, their housekeepers' children have only public parks as their green playground.
We don't pretend here to have an answer for the homeless problem. Because the population is diverse, the answers must also be diverse. But one answer can't be to strip away the public's right to use the public spaces that ultimately belong to them.
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
A series of polls released this week show Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s quixotic candidacy might attract more Republican-leaning voters in 2024 than Democrats. That may have been what prompted former President Donald Trump to release a three-post screed attacking him.
On Friday night, the 45th president of the United States set his sights on RFK Jr., insisting to his millions of followers that the independent presidential candidate is actually a "Radical Left Liberal" who was secretly working to help President Joe Biden's reelection campaign. He even attempted to assign Kennedy one of his patented nicknames: "Junior,'" notably with an unexplained apostrophe that he repeated throughout all three posts.
"A Vote for Junior' would essentially be a WASTED PROTEST VOTE, that could swing either way, but would only swing against the Democrats if Republicans knew the true story about him," Trump wrote.
"I lived with RFK Jr. in New York and watched him convince Governor Cuomo to make Environmental moves that were outright NASTY," he continued. "I’d even take Biden over Junior’, because our Country would last a year or two longer prior to collapse - But it would be dead either way."
"His Views on Vaccines are FAKE, as is everything else about his Candidacy," he added. "Let the Democrats have RFK Jr. They deserve him!"
The ex-president's rage toward RFK Jr. may be due to a new Quinnipiac poll that suggests his candidacy is more attractive to prospective Trump voters than Biden voters. That poll shows that while Trump is still slightly ahead of Biden in swing states, the two are in a dead heat nationally. And when RFK Jr. is thrown into the mix, Trump's vote share diminishes.
According to Axios, while Biden and Trump are tied in a head-to-head matchup with Kennedy on the ballot, Trump's share of votes is significantly larger when RFK Jr. isn't an option. This means that the independent's 2024 campaign could siphon off enough votes from Trump to push Biden over the edge in a close contest.
"That dynamic is consistent with two other polls — a Marist survey on Monday and a NBC News one on Sunday — that show Biden's margin increasing when RFK and other third party candidates are included," Axios reporter Hans Nichols wrote.
RFK Jr.'s appeal to Trump's base may be due to the conspiratorial tone of his campaign. Kennedy became well-known in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic as a vaccine skeptic. In the past, Kennedy has said he is personally "pro-vaccine" and that he's had all of his children vaccinated, but he sang a different tune on a 2021 podcast. CNN reported that in an episode of the "Health Freedom for Humanity" podcast, RFK Jr. encouraged parents to tell strangers to not vaccinate their kids.
"For many, many years, I think parents were so gaslighted, and they were scapegoated, and they were vilified and marginalized, so that even parents of kids who were very, very badly injured, knew what happened to their kid, but they were just reluctant to talk about it," he said. "And I think now those days are over."
Kennedy has also repeated Republican talking points about gun violence. In 2023, he told NewsNation that he viewed the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as reason to believe that gun control was a moot point, and added "I'm not going to take people's guns away."
"Anybody who tells you that they’re going to be able to reduce gun violence through gun control at this point I don’t think is being realistic," Kennedy said.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
