Choosing Cruelty

Who's worse: Gavin Newsom or the SCOTUS Justices? By Luke Pickrell

California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order this past Thursday instructing city officials to tear down homeless encampments across the state. With a menacing Highway Patrol officer standing next to him, Newsom declared, “It’s time to move with urgency at the local level to clean up these sites, to focus on public health and safety. There are no longer any excuses.” Encampments should be destroyed “with urgency and dignity.”

Newsom, a multi-millionaire, doesn’t need any help attacking Californians. Still, there’s no denying that “Gruesome Gavin” was emboldened by the Supreme Court’s “dystopian” decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that “prohibiting people who are homeless from using blankets, pillows, or cardboard boxes for protection from the elements while sleeping within the city limits” doesn’t violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Sara Rankin, a Seattle University law professor and director of the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project, called the decision “terrifying,” “dystopian,” and “quite possibly the most consequential decision in history up until this point relating to homeless rights.” 

In The New Republic, Paige Oamek said Newsom has “chosen cruelty, emboldened by the conservative Supreme Court” and that the order is “exactly what homeless advocates and unhoused people feared would happen following the Supreme Court’s ruling.” Scout Katovich, an ACLU lawyer, called the order “ineffective and potentially cruel” and declared that Newsom is “taking the conservative Supreme Court up on its invitation to make homelessness a crime.” Newsom even said it himself: “We have now no excuse with the Supreme Court decision. This executive order is about pushing that paradigm further and getting the sense of urgency that’s required of local government to do their job.”

Chris Herring, an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, said Newsom could have called for the destruction of encampments before SCOTUS’s ruling, but only now are authorities “free to confine and arrest people even when there is no shelter available.”

A dozen years ago, one-third of Americans were one paycheck away from homelessness. Two years ago, a study revealed that at least 18,000 people experiencing homelessness died between 2016 and 2020. In California, people making $20.65 an hour have to sleep in their cars. Believe it or not, destroying people’s homes and stealing their stuff doesn’t solve homelessness. Helping people who are homeless or stopping more people from becoming homeless, clarifies Conor Galleghan, “would actually require resources and/or taking on powerful interests like the private equity-dominated real estate rental market, the healthcare industry that bankrupts people, major corporations that pay poverty wages, etc. Let’s remember that  40-50 percent of people experiencing homelessness are employed. Instead, these laws are simply designed to remove from view the people our society has chewed up.”

Though I’m critical of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s attempt to use articles of impeachment against Justices Alito and Thomas, she’s correct that the Supreme Court threatens people’s lives. So does Gavin Newsom, who is using SCOTUS’s ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson to score political points for himself and the Democratic Party in an election year. As a result, many lives will be further damaged.