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.
Trump Denies Secret Service Meeting Over 2A Comments: Another Lie?
Yesterday, after an onslaught of criticism directed towards GOP nominee Donald Trump for his comments that “Second Amendment people” might be able to “do” something about Hillary Clinton, CNN began reporting that the Secret Service had met with the Trump campaign. According to the CNN website, a “U.S Secret Service official confirm[ed] to CNN that the the USSS has spoken to the Trump campaign regarding his Second Amendment comments.”
CNN claimed the official stated that there had been “more than one conversation” about the comments and that the campaign had responded that Trump had not intended to incite violence.
This came a day after the Secret Service itself Tweeted about its knowledge of the Trump comments:
Shortly after CNN’s piece was published, Trump himself jumped back into the controversy and Tweeted out the following:
CNN, for its part, did state, “the Secret Service’s communications director Cathy Milhoan has not confirmed the conversations between the campaign and the Secret Service, but said in a statement Tuesday that ‘the U.S. Secret Service is aware of Mr. Trump’s comments.'”
Shortly after Trump’s comment, Reuters released a report which seemed to contradict CNN: “A federal official on Wednesday said the U.S. Secret Service had not formally spoken with Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign regarding his suggestion a day earlier that gun rights activists could stop Democratic rival Hillary Clinton from curtailing their access to firearms.”
Trump then hit back at CNN again on Twitter, but mis-characterized the text of the Reuters article:
However, the Reuters article does not directly contradict CNN, nor was it written as characterized by Trump: It doesn’t state that no conversations ever happened, just that there had not been “formal” talks.
Interestingly, CNN added a clarifying line to their initial article about the events. An archive.org shot of the CNN piece shows it as it was first written. The current version of the article, however, includes the line, “But it’s unclear at what level in the campaign structure the conversations occurred.”
So did the Secret Service discuss the violent comments with Trump’s campaign? By all accounts, except Trump’s own, it seems likely that they did. Reuters only indicated that no formal discussions had taken place, not that no discussions had taken place at all. Further, CNN appears to be standing by their story with only a clarification that the structure of the communications and campaign was unclear.
This is also not the first time the GOP nominee would have lied about something critical to his public persona. Trump recently lied to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Despite acknowledging on numerous occasions they knew each other and had spoken, Trump claimed he had “no relationship” with the Russian leader, except that Putin had “said very nice things” about him. Politifact rated the claim to Stephanopoulos a “full flop.”
Trump also claimed at one time that he received a letter from the NFL complaining about the presidential debate schedule. The NFL completely denied Trump’s claim.
Trump’s lies are so famous that they have even been exhaustively cataloged, so it does not seem unlikely that he is lying about this, as well.
Photo: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks to the media during a news conference at the construction site of the Trump International Hotel at the Old Post Office Building in Washington, March 21, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Bourg