Today the court announced that cities and states can enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outdoors.  How will they do that?  By sending them to jail?  Homeless people usually have no money, so they can’t pay fines.  This ultra-conservative court likes to boast that it is inspired by “originalism” –- that is, reinforcing opinions in the original Constitution of 1789.  I’ve written elsewhere about how I believe this approach contradicts that of the men who wrote the Constitution.  They included the power to amend, since they knew that they couldn’t predict the future.  They also stated in the Ninth Amendment that all powers not mentioned in the Constitution belonged to the people.

     What this infamous court has done is bring back policies in effect until the early 19th century: debtor’s prisons.  Legal policy then believed in locking up people who couldn’t pay their bills.  Eventually, it was realized that this law was counter-productive: how could prisoners ever pay back money they owed?  One the many 19th-century critics who worked to abolish this heartless policy was Charles Dickens, whose own father had been in debtor’s prison.  This policy was considered heartless two hundred years ago.  Today it is inexplicably and needlessly cruel as well as useless.

     The second dreadful decision that came down this morning reversed 40 years of established environmental and healthcare policy, which allowed the government to intervene in unclear or questionable circumstances.  For the second time in recent years this supposedly “conservative” court reversed the established legal doctrine of “stare decisis” – i.e. “let the previous decision stand” unless there is an overwhelming need to reverse it.  The first time was two years ago when this court overturned Roe v. Wade, established for fifty years.  Shame on the six justices who voted for these dreadful decisions!