13 June 23
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Nations go to war over the ideologies, religions, racism, social classes or economic policies. Trump represents nothing other than his own grievance
In a Saturday speech to the Georgia Republican party, Trump characterized the entire American justice system as deployed to prevent him from winning the 2024 election.
“These people don’t stop and they’re bad and we have to get rid of them. These criminals cannot be rewarded. They must be defeated.”
Once again, Trump is demanding that Americans choose sides. But in his deranged mind, this “final battle” is not just against his normal cast of ill-defined villains. It is between those who glorify him and those who detest him.
It will be a final battle over … himself.
“SEE YOU IN MIAMI ON TUESDAY!!!” he told his followers on Friday night in a Truth Social post, referring to his Tuesday arraignment.
It was chilling reminder of his 19 December 2020, tweet, “Be there, will be wild!” – which inspired extremist groups to disrupt the January 6 certification.
At the Georgia Republican party convention on Friday night, the Arizona Republican Kari Lake – who will go to Miami to “support” Trump – suggested violence.
“If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me,” Lake exclaimed to roaring cheers and a standing ovation. “Most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA,” the National Rifle Association gun lobby. “That’s not a threat, that’s a public service announcement.”
Most Republicans in Congress are once again siding with Trump rather than standing for the rule of law.
A few are openly fomenting violence. The Louisiana representative Clay Higgins suggested guerrilla warfare: “This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS [a reference to the real president of the United States] has this. Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm.”
Most other prominent Republicans – even those seeking the Republican presidential nomination – are criticizing Biden, Merrick Garland and the special counsel Jack Smith for “weaponizing” the justice department.
All this advances Trump’s goal of forcing Americans to choose sides over him.
Violence is possible, but there will be no civil war.
Nations don’t go to war over whether they like or hate specific leaders. They go to war over the ideologies, religions, racism, social classes or economic policies these leaders represent.
But Trump represents nothing other than his own grievance with a system that refused him a second term and is now beginning to hold him accountable for violating the law.
In addition, the guardrails that protected American democracy after the 2020 election – the courts, state election officials, the military, and the justice department – are stronger than before Trump tested them the first time.
Many of those who stormed the Capitol have been tried and convicted. Election-denying candidates were largely defeated in the 2022 midterms. The courts have adamantly backed federal prosecutors.
Third, Trump’s advocates are having difficulty defending the charges in the unsealed indictment – that Trump threatened America’s security by illegally holding (and in some cases sharing) documents concerning “United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack”, and then shared a “plan of attack” against Iran.
Republicans consider national security the highest and most sacred goal of the republic. A large number have served in the armed forces.
Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, said on Fox News Sunday that he was “shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were, frankly … If even half of it is true, then he’s toast. I mean, it’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning. And this idea of presenting Trump as a victim here, a victim of a witch-hunt, is ridiculous.”
None of this is cause for complacency. Trump is as loony and dangerous as ever. He has inspired violence before, and he could do it again.
But I believe that many who supported him in 2020 are catching on to his lunacy.
Trump wants Americans to engage in a “final battle” over his own narcissistic cravings. Instead, he will get a squalid and humiliating last act.
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Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Jessica McGowan)
Under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the court had a nearly unbroken record of weakening the protections of the landmark Voting Rights Act. But Roberts’s majority opinion Thursday maintained the court’s precedents regarding states’ obligations to create electoral districts in which minority voters have a shot at electing candidates of their choice.
With the Roberts court, the status quo was considered a win by civil rights groups who had braced for another setback. That’s because under Roberts, the court has consistently sided with states in saying even the threat of election fraud can justify voting restrictions that often fall heavier on minority voters.
And the justices had already taken two big swings at the Voting Rights Act.
In one, they ruled that state and localities that discriminated against minority voters in the past no longer must have election laws cleared by federal officials.
And in the other, the court said the threat of election fraud can justify voting restrictions that could fall heavier on minority voters. Such decisions have favored conservative states with Republican majorities, while civil rights organizations have been the losers.
Additionally, Roberts said federal courts have no constitutional role in policing partisan gerrymandering. While both parties benefit, it has been Republicans who have said courts should stay out.
Thursday’s decision in Allen v. Milligan, by contrast, will favor Democrats, who benefit from the creation of “majority-minority” districts.
The opinion was particularly significant because it was authored by Roberts, whose aversion to race-based political remedies is well-known.
At his confirmation hearings in 2005, senators questioned memos that Roberts wrote as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration objecting to racial considerations and arguing that it should not become “too easy to prove” certain violations of the Voting Rights Act.
Just months later, in a congressional redistricting case, the new chief justice offered a partial dissent that included what remains one of his most quoted assertions.
“It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” Roberts wrote in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry.
Justice Clarence Thomas recalled the quote in his dissent from Thursday’s decision, which lamented a lost chance to junk the court’s precedents about the Voting Rights Act and how it relates to drawing electoral maps. Thomas seemed to wonder what had changed for the chief justice.
“By making it clear that there are political dividends to be gained in the discovery of new ways to sort voters along racial lines,” Thomas wrote, “we prolong immeasurably the day when the ‘sordid business’ of ‘divvying us up by race’ is no more.”
Here is a look at some of the most consequential decisions that the Roberts court has made on voting rights over the past 15 years:
1. Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 2008
Issue: Indiana’s strict voter identification requirement
Decision: The court said states can require voters to show photo identification before voting, upholding Indiana’s ID requirement, which the Republican-led legislature said was needed to combat voter fraud. Democrats had challenged the law, saying many poor and elderly people were less likely to have the necessary ID, and that the law was designed to discourage voters who lean Democratic.
Majority: The lead opinion in the 6-3 ruling was written by liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, who was joined by Roberts and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in finding that the law did not violate the Constitution. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Antonin Scalia agreed with the outcome but would have made it more difficult to challenge similar laws in the future.
Dissent: Liberal Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. Souter wrote that the law threatens to impose “nontrivial burdens on the voting rights of tens of thousands of the state’s citizens and a significant percentage of those individuals are likely to be deterred from voting.”
Worth noting: After his retirement in 2010, Stevens referred to the ruling as a “fairly unfortunate decision,” and expressed doubt about whether he had all the information he needed to decide the case.
2. Shelby County v. Holder, 2013
Issue: Shelby County, Ala., argued that Sections 5 and 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act were unconstitutional. Section 5 required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to have any election law changes approved in advance by either the Justice Department or federal judges. Section 4(b) was the formula designed by Congress to decide which jurisdictions were covered by what is called preclearance.
Decision: The court struck down Section 4(b) as offensive to the “equal sovereignty” of the states and based on “40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.” The court did not rule on the constitutionality of Section 5, but without a list of covered jurisdictions, it became unenforceable.
“Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions,” Roberts wrote.
Majority: Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito
Dissenters: Ginsburg, Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor (who replaced Souter when he retired in 2009), and Elena Kagan (who replaced Stevens when he retired in 2010). The dissent said the reason conditions have improved is because the preclearance process stopped discriminatory election laws before they could be implemented. “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” Ginsburg wrote.
3. Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute 2018
Issue: Purging voter rolls
Decision: The court upheld Ohio’s method of purging infrequent voters from the rolls, a process that challengers said disproportionately affects poor and minority voters.
Majority: Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, Neil M. Gorsuch (who joined the court in 2017, filling the vacancy created by Scalia’s death the previous year). Federal law prohibits removing voters simply because they failed to vote. But it also calls on states to keep accurate rolls and allows them to come up with their own systems for removing voters believed to have moved or died.
“We have no authority to second-guess Congress or to decide whether Ohio’s [law] is the ideal method for keeping its voting rolls up to date,” Alito wrote. “The only question before us is whether it violates federal law. It does not.”
Dissent: Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan. They said Ohio’s practice violated the prohibition against removing voters because they did not vote.
“Communities that are disproportionately affected by unnecessarily harsh registration laws should not tolerate efforts to marginalize their influence in the political process, nor should allies who recognize blatant unfairness stand idly by,” Sotomayor wrote in a separate dissent.
4. Abbott v. Perez 2018
Issue: Did the Texas legislature discriminate against Black and Latino voters in drawing electoral maps.
Decision: The court largely upheld Texas congressional and legislative maps that a lower court said were drawn to discriminate.
Majority: Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch. Although they sided with challengers over one of the legislative districts, the justices said the lower court did not give enough credit to the legislature.
“When all the relevant evidence in the record is taken into account, it is plainly insufficient to prove that the 2013 Legislature acted in bad faith and engaged in intentional discrimination,” Alito wrote.
Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, would have gone further, because of his view that the Voting Rights Act does not apply to redistricting.
Dissent: Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan. Sotomayor wrote that the decision “does great damage to the right of equal opportunity.”
“After years of litigation and undeniable proof of intentional discrimination, minority voters in Texas — despite constituting a majority of the population within the state — will continue to be underrepresented in the political process,” she wrote.
5. Rucho v. Common Cause 2018
Issue: Whether the Constitution bars partisan gerrymandering, in which politicians draw electoral districts to preserve or expand their party’s power.
Decision: No, it does not, and federal courts have no role to play in challenges based on partisan gerrymandering.
Majority: Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh (who replaced Kennedy when he retired). “We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” Roberts wrote. “Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions.”
Dissent: Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan. Kagan wrote that partisan gerrymanders “imperil our system of government. Part of the court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.”
6. Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee 2021
Issue: Do certain Arizona election law provisions violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which forbids discrimination in state and local elections laws?
Decision: No. The justices concluded that the two provisions were directed at preventing election fraud and not at minority voters.
Majority: Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett (who replaced Ginsburg after she died). Fraud can “undermine public confidence in the fairness of elections and the perceived legitimacy of the announced outcome,” Alito wrote. His decision set out multiple factors for evaluating election laws, including the burden on voting created by the rule in question and how much it impacts minority voters as opposed to all in the electorate.
Dissent: Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan. Kagan again wrote a slashing dissent, saying the new rules had no basis in the text of the law, and further diminished the protections of the Voting Rights Act. “What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses,” she wrote. “What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about the end of discrimination in voting.”
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A fighter jet taking off from an air base in Jagel, Germany, on Monday during the exercises. (photo: Gregor Fischer/DPA/AP)
More than 200 planes from 25 countries gathered in Germany for the largest-scale war games in decades, held with an eye on the war in Ukraine.
The war games have been long in the works, but took on added urgency after the invasion of Ukraine, which alarmed NATO members that lie in the shadow of Russia and jolted the military alliance into reinventing itself after years of torpor.
“Air power is the first response in a crisis,” Lt. Gen. Ingo Gerhartz, chief of the German Air Force, said in an interview at the close of Monday’s exercises — the first of 12 days unfolding at six bases across the country. “We can really react fast, as first responders.”
More than 250 aircraft from across Europe and the United States are taking part in the exercises, which are not being coordinated by NATO, though all but two of the 25 participating nations are members of the alliance. They include its newest member, Finland, and Sweden, which is seeking admission. Japan attended as an observer.
The exercises, called Air Defender 2023, have been planned since 2018, well before Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began last year, but their roots do lie in Russian aggression: the illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. General Gerhartz, who organized the war games, described that as a “wake-up call.”
After 30 years of shrinking military budgets, air power had become a vulnerability for NATO, but that began changing after the Russian invasion, with leaders in Kyiv billing their country as Europe’s first line of defense against Moscow. The United States eventually agreed to let Ukrainian pilots train on American-made F-16 fighter jets as part of a broader campaign among some NATO states to supply Ukraine with warplanes — not just for the current conflict, but to deter Russia for years to come.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, NATO has shifted from what the military calls deterrence by retaliation to deterrence by denial. Now, if Russia attacks a NATO member, no longer will allied forces come to its aid and retaliate once they can get there. Instead, more NATO forces will be stationed closer to Russia.
Where it might take weeks for warships to sail from the United States, or days to mobilize ground troops in Europe, fighter jets can be scrambled within minutes.
Monday’s flights included a pit stop at an air base in Lithuania, a former Soviet Republic where fear of Russia looms large, specifically to show how quickly warplanes taking off from Germany would arrive. Similar stops will be made in other countries that were once under Moscow’s thumb — Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic.
“In the end, it’s all about credible deterrence,” General Gerhartz said. “We don’t want to be too aggressive, but to show that we are strong.”
In preparation for the war games, the United States sent more than 110 planes and thousands of service members, mostly from National Guard units, over the last two weeks.
“It’s pretty much unprecedented, the amount of aircraft and people that we’ve moved over here in such a short period of time,” said Maj. Will Dyke, a pilot with Kentucky’s Air National Guard.
He declined to describe how the drills might ever be deployed against Russia except to say: “The way we train is to be ready at a moment’s notice.”
Wunstorf Air Base, where the air show took place on Monday, hosts one Germany’s largest military transport units. Cargo and refueling planes — two aircraft workhorses — make up the bulk of its fleet. Fighter jets, the show horses of the sky, are stationed at other bases.
“If you think about a real war, this could be a place where German transport planes would start,” said Maj. Peter Poehlmann, a German officer who oversaw the construction of a new refueling station for jets that could burn though as much as one million liters of fuel each day during the exercises.
Douglas Barrie, a military aerospace expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said such exercises must test whether aircraft from so many nations can communicate directly with each other.
General Gerhartz agreed that this remains a big challenge, but recounted a real-life demonstration of coordination between Germany and NATO commanders that took place just days earlier.
Over the course of a week, NATO warplanes had been scrambled 15 times to intercept Russian jets that had strayed close to Baltics states’ airspace, in what Lithuania’s Defense Ministry on Monday said was likely Moscow’s response to the exercises in Germany.
Then this past weekend, German forces tracking a plane from Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania, quickly handed off command to NATO officials, who deployed fighter jets. Hours later, a commercial airliner over Germany lost radio contact with air traffic controllers, putting General Gerhartz’s forces back in control of what was deemed a domestic alert.
The military exercises come at a turning point for Germany, which has for years fallen short of spending 2 percent of its G.D.P. on defense, the threshold NATO states are supposed to commit. Late last year, the government in Berlin said it expected to meet the 2 percent target by 2025.
But some allies of Ukraine remain skeptical, citing Germany’s lagging weapons deliveries to the country despite Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s sweeping talk of a new era following Russia’s invasion in February 2022. Mr. Scholz has committed 100 billion euros, or $113 billion, to bolster Germany’s armed forces, which have been repeatedly warned about major deficiencies in the state and readiness of its equipment and weapon systems.
If the multinational training drills taking place now are successful, they will show that Germany is willing to take a leadership role in NATO, said Thomas Wiegold, a respected German military blogger.
Stephan Weil, president of the Lower Saxony region of Germany — where the Wunstorf Air Base is located — called the exercise “necessary.”
“That is certainly much clearer today than when it was first planned,” Mr. Weil said. “Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we know that the European security architecture, as we have assumed it for decades, no longer functions, and that national defense must therefore have a much greater significance.”
At core, however, the Air Defender drills appear intended to show President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia the risks of pushing NATO too far.
”I’d be very surprised, shall we say, if the alliance wasn’t kind of looking at this as part of its overall messaging strategy,” said Mr. Barrie, the analyst in London.
The American ambassador to Germany, Amy Gutmann, predicted that leaders around the world would most likely be paying attention — and “that includes Mr. Putin.”
Many of the skills that will be tested over the coming days in Germany have been honed by Western pilots and air support crews over the past 20 years, especially in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Col. Rusty Ballard, commander of the Air National Guard’s 182nd Airlift Wing, based in Peoria, Ill.
But at some points on Monday, a three-layered formation of fighter jets, bombers and cargo planes was flying more than 10,000 feet off the ground, and even some of the seasoned pilots found the coordination a little daunting. “Mental gymnastics” was how Flt. Lt. Mark Jenkins of the British Royal Air Force put it.
Lieutenant Jenkins flew a massive A400-M Atlas cargo plane at the center of the wedge-shaped formation, trailed by American and German fighter jets and a U.S. bomber. Two other formations flew above him, at 15,000 feet and 20,000 feet, over more than an hour of maneuvers, air-to-air refueling drills and mid-flight photo ops. Surrounding planes captured images of his cargo jet, which for the occasion sported a tail painted in the colors of the German and U.S. flags.
“I’ve never done anything quite like today,” Lieutenant Jenkins said in an interview later, sitting in the cockpit of the plane. “Having so many other aircraft working together is really unusual.”
He declined to discuss events in Ukraine, but said he was “of course” following the conflict.
“We are practicing a demanding environment,” Lieutenant Jenkins said. “The mantra is, train hard; fight easy.”
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Medgar Evers. (photo: PBS)
He stepped out of his Oldsmobile carrying shirts that read "Jim Crow Must Go."
Then, in a vacant lot about 40 yards away, a sniper fired a single shot from a high-powered rifle at Evers' silhouette.
Evers' wife, Myrlie, rushed outside to find him bleeding in the driveway. He was taken to University Hospital in Jackson and died in the ER. He was 37.
Only a few hours earlier, President John F. Kennedy had addressed the Civil Rights Movement on TV. Now one of its most prominent figures was gone — murdered by a member of the Ku Klux Klan who wouldn't be brought to justice for more than 30 years.
Fighting for freedom at home
While civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. pushed for equality across the U.S., Evers focused his efforts on his native Mississippi. He worked as the NAACP's first field secretary in the state.
Evers led boycotts of white-owned businesses that refused business to Black customers and held voter registration drives for Mississippi's Black population. He also fought to overturn segregation in public spaces.
One of Evers' most famous moments of activism came when he applied to law school at the all-white University of Mississippi. After the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, Evers partnered with the NAACP to see if the new law was being enforced.
It wasn't. Evers was rejected because of the color of his skin. But he carried out a long campaign to integrate the university, paving the way for future generations of Black students.
Always in danger
Evers' growing stature as a Black leader attracted hostility from white supremacists.
"Medgar became No. 1 on the Mississippi to-kill list," his widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, told NPR in 2013. "And we never knew from one day to the next what would happen. I lived in fear of losing him. He lived being constantly aware that he could be killed at any time."
Despite receiving violent threats, Evers often spoke of his affection for home. In 1958, he wrote a magazine article titled "Why I Live in Mississippi."
"It may sound funny, but I love the South," Evers wrote. "I don't choose to live anywhere else. ... There is room here for my children to play and grow and become good citizens if the white man will let them."
After his younger brother's death, Charles Evers carried on Medgar's legacy. Himself a civil rights activist, Charles Evers helped transform Mississippi politics, becoming the state's first Black mayor of a biracial town in 1969.
"Medgar and I said many years ago: If it ever ends, the violent racism in this state, it'd be the greatest state in the world to live in," he told NPR in 2003. "And now, Medgar, I know you're gone, but I'm telling you, son, it's come to pass."
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Donald Trump. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT/Redux)
Trump's Last-Minute Scramble to Find a Florida Lawyer Fails: Report
Dan Ladden-Hall, The Daily Beast
Ladden-Hall writes: "Donald Trump's 11th-hour attempt at finding a local Florida lawyer to join his defense team ahead of his arraignment Tuesday didn't work out, according to a report."
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Downtown Los Angeles. (photo: Monica Almeida/NYT)
Is there a right to sleep outside?
The 2018 decision in Martin v. Boise did not create the homelessness crisis, which researchers attribute primarily to the lack of affordable housing. The number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness — meaning those sleeping on the streets, in parks, in abandoned buildings or train stations, or anywhere not meant for humans to live — was rising before the decision.
But as the number of unsheltered homeless people continued to grow over the past half-decade, the Martin decision has become a pivotal factor in shaping how cities respond to the very visible problem of tent encampments, particularly on the West Coast. While the case never gained huge name recognition, it undergirds the policy and politics of homelessness in 2023. So much of the fight about how to address homelessness today is, at this point, a fight about Martin.
The case dates back to 2009, when Robert Martin and a group of fellow homeless residents in Boise, Idaho, sued, arguing that police citations they received for breaking local camping bans violated their constitutional rights. In 2018, the Ninth Circuit agreed that prosecuting people for sleeping or camping on public property when they have no home or shelter to go to violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
“The government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter,” the court declared.
States, cities, and counties urged the US Supreme Court to take up the case, arguing the Ninth Circuit had created “a de facto” right to live on sidewalks and in parks that would “cripple” local leaders’ ability to safely govern their communities. But in 2019, the court declined, baffling some experts, though others suspect it’s because there were no conflicting circuit decisions at the time. Since then, Martin has shaped cities’ response — or lack thereof — to the growing challenge of homeless tent encampments.
While the decision only formally applies in areas under the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, the ruling has reverberated nationally, as local governments consider how to address unsheltered homelessness in ways that could avoid costly constitutional legal battles. There have already been dozens of court cases citing Martin, including in the Fourth Circuit in Virginia, and federal lower courts in Ohio, Missouri, Florida, Texas, New York, and Hawaii.
For now, though, Martin’s impact can be seen most clearly out West. Just before Christmas 2022, for example, a district judge cited Martin when she ruled that San Francisco can no longer enforce encampment sweeps — meaning clear out homeless individuals and their property from an outdoor area — since the city lacks enough shelter beds for those experiencing homelessness to move into. San Francisco appealed the decision, arguing it’s “unnecessarily broad and has put the City in an impossible situation.”
In Phoenix, Arizona, residents and business owners filed a lawsuit last summer against the city for allowing a downtown homeless encampment to grow with nearly 1,000 people, but a federal judge — echoing Martin — barred Phoenix in December from conducting sweeps if there are more homeless people than shelter beds available. A competing decision issued in March by a state judge ordered Phoenix officials to clean up the “public nuisance” at the encampment by July 10, arguing the city has “erroneously” applied Martin to date.
In Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, officials have scrambled to revise their local camping ordinance to be a “daytime” camping ban from 8 am to 8 pm instead, in recognition that any total camping ban is likely illegal under Martin.
Supporters of a more “get tough” approach to encampments say the social and political costs of allowing tent cities to proliferate are too high, and that waiting for cities to build enough new housing before acting is untenable, both morally and politically. Some think officials are getting complacent in relying on Martin as an excuse to maintain the status quo.
Advocates for those experiencing homelessness say politicians are squandering an important opportunity by fighting for the right to conduct encampment sweeps — which can be both cruel and counterproductive to the larger goal of ending homelessness. Instead of looking for legal loopholes to Martin like daytime camping bans and sanctioned encampment sites, advocates say leaders should be investing more in solutions like affordable housing and shelter options that afford people more privacy.
“Our end goal is not to create a right for people to sleep on the streets. That’s the limited remedy we’ve been given under our Constitution,” said Eric Tars, the legal director for the National Homelessness Law Center. “They’re missing the point of Martin if they’re just trying to continue a criminalization approach in a more constitutional way.”
Cities are scrambling to comply with — and find loopholes in — Martin v. Boise
Unsheltered homelessness has risen sharply over the last seven years, and at a faster rate than homelessness overall. Unsheltered homeless people now account for 40 percent of all homeless people in the country, up from 31 percent in 2015.
Political pressure has mounted to respond to this growing problem of people sleeping in alleys, parks, and train stations. While it’s not clear this would be legal under Martin, a number of cities have turned to the idea of so-called sanctioned encampments, or legalized campsites. These are effectively designated areas where unhoused individuals can live outside, and some come with varying degrees of public services, like bathrooms, power outlets, medical care, and on-site case management.
In Portland, Oregon, lawmakers voted in November to create several large sanctioned campsites for homeless individuals, and ban the more than 700 other encampments spread across the city. Austin, Texas, has operated one sanctioned encampment of so-called “tiny homes” since 2019, on a seven-acre plot of asphalt near the airport. Denver, Colorado, is also moving to make its so-called “managed campsites” from the pandemic a permanent homelessness response tool.
The trade-off for legalized campsites, however, is that sleeping outside anywhere else in a city would then be illegal. This helps alleviate leaders’ political problem of having tents pitched all over a city, but activists worry it’s just a way to steer the sight of homelessness out of public view, and criminalize people who refuse to go. Some cities are considering sanctioned encampments with a six-month residency limit, even if there’s no permanent affordable housing option for those experiencing homelessness to go to after that point.
Some advocates have taken a firm stance against the idea; they see sanctioned encampments as a means to segregate and criminalize unhoused people and effectively kick the can down the road by not finding them permanent housing.
They’re not wrong that sanctioned encampments can require a great deal of money, staff time, and effort. In 2018, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness warned that “creating these environments may make it look and feel like the community is taking action to end homelessness on the surface — but, by themselves, they have little impact on reducing homelessness.”
For these reasons, some cities — like Houston — have rejected the idea. “We can do better as a society. We shouldn’t tolerate it and say that’s okay,” Marc Eichenbaum, the special assistant to Houston’s mayor on homeless initiatives, told NPR.
But other cities with fewer available housing options say sanctioned encampments represent a decent interim solution, and maybe even better for unhoused residents compared to scattered campsites if cities can more effectively target social services to those corralled together.
Legalized campsites can also have a lower barrier to entry than many existing shelters, so supporters are framing them as a harm-reduction approach to homelessness. Groups like the National Homelessness Law Center, which used to firmly oppose sanctioned encampments, have recently softened their stance to say they should be considered on a case-by-case basis.
“The only time that we would see a role for that approach is if you had an exit plan,” said Tars, who pointed to some models in Seattle and Gainesville, Florida, that he thought were more positive. “Otherwise you are just creating a permanent shanty town.”
Meanwhile, Republican-governed states are exploring more punitive models. In at least half a dozen states, lawmakers have pushed sanctioned encampment bills based on templates from the Cicero Institute, an Austin-based conservative think tank. The bills propose to penalize cities that permit tent encampments, to put time limits on sanctioned encampment sites, and to divert funding from permanent supportive housing into things like mandatory drug treatment.
In 2022, Tennessee became the first state to pass a bill that would make camping on local public land a felony. Missouri’s version will allow the state’s attorney general to sue local governments that don’t enforce encampment bans. Activists say Cicero’s aggressive opposition to housing-first will lead invariably to more homeless people in jail.
Looming ultimately above all these various sanctioned encampment models is the Martin decision, which says a city-wide camping ban would be unconstitutional if the city lacks sufficient shelter options. Leaders recognize they probably can’t ban camping everywhere under Martin, but they want to see if they can ban it in most places instead. Yet whether any bans could exist if a city lacks enough shelter beds remains an open Eighth Amendment question.
Tars, of the National Homelessness Law Center, thinks the answer is no. “Martin is very clear when it’s talking about ‘adequate’ [housing] alternatives it’s talking about indoor shelter beds, and legalized encampments are not shelter beds,” he said, pointing to a 2021 federal court decision that found a sanctioned encampment site in Chico, California, was inadequate “shelter” under Martin. A federal judge described Chico’s encampment as “open space with what amounts to a large umbrella for some shade” that “affords no real cover or protection to anyone.”
Tars acknowledged, though, there’s a “legal gray area” in the Martin decision, as one footnote suggests cities could create some “time/manner/place” restrictions for camping.
Earlier this year, when a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ordered Phoenix officials to clear its notoriously large downtown encampment, he urged the city to consider “the creation of controlled, outdoor camping spaces on vacant City property” if there were not enough shelter beds to move people into.
As in Houston, Phoenix officials have rejected the sanctioned encampment approach to date, saying resources should be invested into housing solutions with air conditioning: Over 80 percent of Maricopa County’s 425 heat-related deaths in 2022 occurred outside. Local officials estimate unsheltered homeless people are at “200 to 300 times higher risk” of heat-related deaths than the rest of the population.
Still, even if Phoenix leaders embraced sanctioned encampments, it’s not clear the idea would hold up under Martin. Resolving some of these questions will realistically require the Supreme Court, but that’s unlikely to happen until there’s competing circuit court decisions to pressure it to take the issue up.
Homelessness policy is at a crossroads
There are court rulings, and then there’s enforcement of those rulings. Homeless advocates say it seems as though too many cities are failing to comply with rulings that bar unconstitutional sweeps.
For example, lawyers say little has changed in San Francisco since a federal judge ruled against sweeps six months ago, and that homeless residents continue to be displaced under the guise of street cleaning.
“What we’ve seen has been a really aggressive media campaign led by the city to suggest we are pro-open-air drug markets and anti-accessibility for sidewalks,” said Zal Shroff, an attorney with Lawyer’s Committee For Civil Rights representing the homeless plaintiffs.
“You’re allowed to clear genuine public safety hazards, but when you do that and throw their laptops and cellphones into dumpsters, that’s not a cleaning — that’s a seizure of someone’s belongings without due process,” he added. In late May, Shroff’s team filed a court motion, calling for increased monitoring.
Jen Kwart, a spokesperson for San Francisco’s city attorney, told Vox they’re “complying with the preliminary injunction while simultaneously expending hundreds of millions of dollars annually to provide shelter and services to unhoused people.”
In Phoenix, while the city is working to clear out its large homeless encampment by July 10, per the Maricopa County Superior Court, the ACLU has been arguing the city’s clearings have violated the rights of unhoused people.
“Even if you’re unsheltered, you have due process rights to your belongings under the Fourth and 14th Amendments,” said Benjamin Rundall, an attorney with ACLU of Arizona. “You can’t violate someone’s constitutional rights in order to vindicate someone’s private property rights.”
It’s not clear at all where the estimated 700 unhoused people living in the downtown Phoenix encampment are supposed to go. There are not enough available shelter beds in the city; the four largest ones were at 97 percent capacity as of April.
A spokesperson for Phoenix’s Mayor Kate Gallego did not return requests for comment, but an April city press release said they were exploring hotel options and expected 800 new shelter beds to come online before the end of 2024.
Some conservative legal advocates see the Maricopa County Superior Court ruling as offering a blueprint for other cities and states to clear out their tent encampments. “For too long, liberal leaders have used the Martin ruling as an excuse to allow rampant crime and homelessness to take over neighborhoods,” argued Austin Vanderheyden, a liaison at the Goldwater Institute, in the Orange County Register. “But no longer.”
“Our lawsuit was never about solving homelessness,” wrote Ilan Wurman, who represented the Phoenix business and property owners. “It was about solving the humanitarian crisis that these encampments create.”
Meanwhile, as pandemic eviction aid dries up, homeless advocates are bracing for more people to lose their housing in the coming months. Washington, DC, recently reported an 11.6 percent increase in homelessness from 2022. While the nation has been increasing its shelter bed capacity over the last few years, fewer people are choosing to stay in them. Many have decided sleeping outdoors is preferable to the rules and conditions of congregate shelters.
Figuring out where cities go next will be shaped in no small part by how leaders and courts land on interpreting Martin.
“It really feels like we’re at a tipping point,” said Tars. “Things could either get much better or much worse.”
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Thousands of dead fish were found washed ashore along beaches near Freeport, Texas. (photo: Karri McKim/mySA)
Quintana Beach County Park announced on Friday that dead fish were washing up by the thousands. The department warned the public to stay clear of the local beaches until all the fish had been cleared, due to risk of being exposed to bacteria and sharp fins.
Crews are continuing to clear the carcasses of dead fish, which park officials described as "shredded skeletons." The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's Kills and Spills Team responded to the situation and determined the cause of the massive die-off was a "low dissolved oxygen event," meaning fish essentially suffocated.
Here is what to know about what happened:
What caused the Texas fish kill
When asked what contributed to the fish deaths, Quintana Beach County Park officials said it was a "perfect storm" of factors.
First, warm water is not ideal for fish. It tends to hold less oxygen. That is especially true in shallow water, which heats up quicker. So, a school of fish likely found themselves deprived of oxygen as they swam though shallow waters in the summertime.
Another problem was that seas near county beaches were quite calm over the past few weeks, meaning there were few waves and winds to help redistribute oxygen in the water.
Over the past few days, the skies above the the beaches were cloudy. That is an issue for phytoplankton, which help produce oxygen in the water by using photosynthesis. That process is driven by sunlight. So, the less they are exposed to the sun by way of overcast, the less oxygen phytoplankton produce.
Why these dead fish aren't necessarily a bad thing
Most of the fish found dead were Gulf menhaden. They travel in large schools, which can explain how thousands washed ashore at the same time.
Over 32 different predators feast on the tiny fish, including sea birds, sharks and even some fish like mackerel and sea trout, according to the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. They provide predators with nutrients. Gulf menhaden also serve as filter feeders, meaning they consume impurities in the water.
Because this species is a popular snack for sea animals, there are potential benefits to the massive die-off, according to Katie St. Clair, the manager of the sea life facility at Texas A…M University at Galveston.
"The flipside is that with this die-off of fish, there is a huge nutrient pulse into our environment," she said. "It's kind of a circle of life."
How climate change plays a role in fish kill
Fish kills are common in the warmer months, like summer time. But oceans at large are heating up because of human-caused climate change.
"Water can only hold so much oxygen at certain temperatures, and certainly we know that seawater temperatures are rising," Clair said. "It is concerning and something that needs to be monitored."
Warmer oceans trigger a cascade of other changes to the ecosystem and the economy. One study from the SeaDoc Society at the University of California, Davis found that starfish were more susceptible to disease because of warm water anomalies. The Environmental Protection Agency also found that fish species are leaving their natural habitat in search for cooler waters, disrupting the fishing industry.
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