Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast.

After the recent Supreme Court ruling that allowed governments to constitutionally purge unhoused people from public spaces, we are getting immediate

lesson in the difference between addressing systemic problems with solutions and using the

police to clean up after governments that fail to act.

Sources providing our top takes in about 45 minutes today includes today explained,

the majority report, Democracy Now, citations needed, factually with Adam Conover, Morning Joe, and the Tom Hartman program.

Then in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there will be more on four topics

section A the Supreme Court section B demonization section C the digitalization of

renting and section D solutions.

The decision is called City of Grants Pass versus Johnson.

And Grants Pass is a city in Oregon of about 38,000 people,

about 600 of whom are homeless on any given day.

The city of Grants Pass claims it does not have enough space and shelters for their homeless population.

At the same time, its laws impose civil penalties,

including fines on people sleeping outside on public property. If the fines are not

paid, they can become criminal charges.

So some homeless people filed a lawsuit saying this is unconstitutional and it is a violation of the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments.

You're punishing us as homeless people, you're punishing homelessness, which under a decision in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals from a few years back,

was determined to be unconstitutional.

Just the largest of the circuits in the federal appellate court

system. And so this is a decision that applied to all the Western states, which

happened to be the states that have among the worst homelessness crises in the country.

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