++Itâs a small state that can make a massive impact on the political world. Hereâs how that happens. +
++Polls show Donald Trump as the clear favorite to win the GOP Iowa caucuses on Monday, January 15. But the true stakes of the contest are about more than just who comes in first. The political world will be watching Iowaâs results closely in an attempt to get a sense of where the GOP race is going. +
++The caucus results will give one early indication of whether Trump really will romp to the nomination or face a closer fight than expected. Theyâll basically determine whether Ron DeSantis can stay in the race. Yet for Nikki Haley, they may not mean all that much â expectations are low for her in Iowa, since she has a better opportunity to break through in the next contest, the New Hampshire primary on January 23. +
++It may seem somewhat strange that Iowaâs results would need decoding like this. But thatâs key to how Iowaâs influence works. It isnât about the paltry number of delegates at stake. Rather, Iowa matters because of how it affects the perceptions of the political world. +
++Media, party insiders, activists, the candidates themselves, and even voters in other states think the caucus results reveal a great deal about which candidates can win elsewhere. The contest for Iowa isnât really a contest for delegates; itâs a contest to look good. +
++This year, all this lofty import only applies to the Republican caucuses â Democrats stripped Iowa of its first-on-the-calendar status, substituting South Carolina instead, for various reasons: a 2020 vote-counting debacle, concern that Iowa is too white for a party increasingly emphasizing diversity, and Joe Bidenâs political interests. +
++But in whatâs generally been a stagnant, undramatic Republican race, Iowa presents the first real opportunity for voters to weigh in, defy polls, and shake up the contest. Of course, they could â and probably will â simply affirm Trumpâs overwhelming lead. But if polls were perfectly reliable, we wouldnât need the voters at all, would we? +
++What are the Iowa caucuses? +
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Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty
++The Iowa caucuses are the first time actual voters across any US state get up and go vote on whom they want to be president â though, this year, only Republicans will be doing that. +
++These voters literally have to âget up and goâ â to an in-person event, held at a specific time in the evening, at one of more than a thousand precincts across the state. Absentee voting is not permitted, except for a small number of military and overseas voters. +
++Now, you may have an image in your head of the Iowa caucuses looking like participatory democracy in action â people gathering in their local precincts, sitting or standing with a group of their presidential candidateâs supporters, and going through multiple rounds of voting where candidates are eliminated and voters can change their minds. +
++None of that is true anymore. +
++For Republicans, thatâs never how the caucuses worked. Since 1980, the first year the caucuses were a big deal in the presidential nomination contest, Republicans have made their choices through a simple secret ballot written vote. Thatâs how it will work this year, too. +
++Iowa Democrats had long tried to do things differently, using the lively process described above â they wanted public debate and deliberation. But over the years, criticism mounted over the caucusesâ complexity, lack of transparency, and barriers to participation (the old caucus gatherings could last for hours, which can be a challenge for people who have child care or work, or donât want to drive late at night). +
++Democratsâ attempts to address those criticisms with a new voting process in 2020 ended in a disastrously delayed and flawed vote count. The Democratic National Committee then stripped Iowa (and New Hampshire) of special permission to hold early contests. So this year, Iowa Democrats will vote on the presidential choice by mail instead, as just one of many states that will announce results on Super Tuesday in early March. +
++Why do the Iowa caucuses matter? +
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Michael Reynolds via Bloomberg
++To win the nomination contest, a candidate needs to win a majority of the delegates at stake in state primaries and caucuses across the country. The day after the Iowa caucuses, hardly any of those delegates will have been locked down, and in theory the contest would still be totally wide open. Yet in practice, Iowaâs results often make a dramatic impact on the race, dooming certain candidates while boosting others. +
++Thatâs for a few reasons. Itâs the first actual contest after a long year or so of campaigning. In theory, itâs a place where an underdog can make a splash â itâs a small state that purportedly privileges shoe leather and on-the-ground campaigning over big ad spending. +
++Plus thereâs history: Iowa has been the launching pad for two men who did not initially lead national polls but went on to become president of the United States: Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. For both, the caucus results generated tons of positive media coverage and a national surge in polls (though both faced long contests ahead before locking down the nomination). +
++Even when the Iowa winner doesnât end up winning the nomination (as with Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz, the three most recent GOP winners in contested caucuses), results can shake up the race by elevating them, rather than other candidates, to prominence in the contest. +
++But itâs important to understand that not every candidate is affected equally by the caucuses. Iowa matters primarily because of how it changes the perceptions of the political world. And candidates are, in large part, judged by whether their caucus performance meets the expectations of the media and political elites. +
++For instance, in the 2008 GOP caucuses, Mitt Romney came in second and John McCain came in fourth. Yet Romney was portrayed as a big loser, since he had been campaigning hard in Iowa and had once seemed the favorite to win. McCain, meanwhile, hadnât really been trying to win Iowa and was focusing instead on doing well in New Hampshire, so his fourth place finish wasnât interpreted as a stunning setback for him. +
++âEvery candidate in Iowa has the same opponent, and that opponentâs name is âexpected,ââ Dennis Goldford, a political science professor at Drake University, told me back in 2016. âThe caucuses are about who exceeds expectations and who fails to. And who sets expectations? You and I do.â +
++But how does Iowaâs influence actually work? +
++The political world is obsessed with the question of who can actually win in each presidential nomination race. And a large part of that world has come to believe that the caucus outcomes help shed some important light on that question. +
++Itâs pretty weird: Essentially, the Iowa caucuses are important because the media, the candidates, and the political world more broadly treat their results as greatly important in determining who can win. And this plays out in several interacting ways: +
+-
+
- +The media hypes up the Iowa results, branding candidates as winners and losers based on how they performed there. So the winners get tons of excited coverage, but the losers become afterthoughts. And, particularly in multicandidate fields, winning media coverage is hugely important. + +
- +Donors and activists, too, look at the Iowa results to judge whether the candidates theyâre supporting are still viable. A poor Iowa performance will likely mean fewer campaign donations and endorsements, which makes it more difficult for a candidate to stay in the race. (Iâm looking at you, Ron DeSantis.) + +
- +Voters in other states â especially those trying to make sense of complex, multicandidate fields â can take the Iowa results (and the media coverage of those results) as cues about which contenders can actually win. Accordingly, poll results in other states can change quickly after the Iowa results sink in. + +
- +The candidates naturally take all this into account, and so many of them have invested huge amounts of time and money to try to do well in Iowa. And when the results come in, candidates who do poorly often take the hint and quit the race (spurred by donors who will no longer fund their campaigns, media outlets that no longer cover them, and subsequent polls showing theyâre performing poorly elsewhere). This shrinking of the field is a process known as winnowing. + +
- +And all of these factors amplify each other: This behavior from candidates further assures the media that the caucus results are really important, which justifies even more coverage of Iowa. + +
+All of these dynamics, it should be noted, also apply to New Hampshire (and, to a decreasing degree, to other states as the process continues). The media, the candidates, political elites, and, to a certain extent, voters in other states all act on the signals they believe Iowa and New Hampshire are sending them. And thatâs how these early state contests dramatically reshape the nomination landscape long before the vast majority of the American people get to weigh in. +
++What are the expectations for this yearâs Iowa caucuses? +
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Win McNamee/Getty
++Three significant candidates â and one hanger-on â remain in the Republican race, and each faces a different set of expectations in Iowa against which their performance will be judged. +
++Donald Trump has long been the overwhelming frontrunner nationally and in Iowa. So the political world will be watching his Iowa results to discern if there is even the slightest indication that he is not, in fact, invincible. +
++Trump has been polling around 50 percent in Iowa, so if he gets about that vote share or higher, that would seemingly confirm his dominance over the party â with the caveat that everyone understands New Hampshire is next and weird things can happen there. +
++If Trump wins Iowa but underperforms his polls â getting significantly below 50 percent â he will look âweaker than expectedâ and there will be chatter about whether he is more vulnerable than commonly believed. And if he somehow loses Iowa, that would be taken as a stunning catastrophe â though it likely wouldnât be fatal, since everyone understands itâs Iowa and weird things can also happen there. +
++Nikki Haley has been battling with DeSantis for second in Iowa polls, hovering around 15 to 20 percent of the vote â but the expectations for her in the caucuses arenât so high, since political observers agree that New Hampshire is a more promising opportunity for her. +
++If Haley dramatically underperforms her polls, eyebrows will be raised, but sheâll still get to take her shot in the Granite State. But if she over-performs and gets a strong second place (ahead of DeSantis, closer than expected to Trump), sheâll be perceived as the âtrue winnerâ of the Iowa caucuses. Even though she didnât, you know, win them. +
++A question of minor intrigue is whether Haley will finish second or third (behind DeSantis). I donât think too much hinges on that, but, of course, a better finish for her would be more helpful. +
++Ron DeSantis has spent much of the past year declining in the polls and losing donors, and heâs bet everything on Iowa as his one shot for a comeback. A third place finish behind Haley would almost certainly end his campaign, losing him his last remaining support from GOP donors. He could decide to push onward with a second place finish, but itâs difficult to envision what his next opportunity for success would be. To revitalize his chances in the race, DeSantis really needs to over-perform his polls quite dramatically. +
++Then thereâs Vivek Ramaswamy, who is more of a wild card. After a brief burst of attention several months ago, media and GOP voter attention have largely moved on from Ramaswamy, whoâs been stuck at single digits in polls. He has been campaigning very intensely in Iowa, so an unimpressive performance there would likely suggest he wonât do too well anywhere else, either. However, Ramaswamy is largely self-funding his campaign and could theoretically stay in as long as he wants, since donors wonât be able to force his hand by stopping payment of his staffersâ salaries. +
++To summarize, hereâs what it would take for each candidate to be a caucus âwinnerâ: Trump needs a commanding first place with about 50 percent of the vote or more, Haley needs a decent second place, DeSantis needs a very strong second place, and Ramaswamy, who knows. +
++Isnât democracy beautiful? +
++Portions of this article were originally published in 2016 and 2020. +
++The aggrieved billionaire is gunning for Harvard, Business Insider, and anyone who talks about his wife. +
++Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman has a lot of opinions, and heâs going to make sure you hear them. +
++How Ackman came to be a main character at the center of not one but two academic plagiarism scandals is a messy tale indeed. It started with Ackman amplifying allegations of academic dishonesty leveled against Harvard University president Claudine Gay by right-wing activists; Gay resigned from her post in early January due to the controversy. Ackman, who is Jewish, first set his sights on Gay after she failed, in his view, to adequately condemn pro-Palestinian student protests in which chants such as âfrom the river to the seaâ were repeated. +
++But Ackmanâs accusations came back to bite him after similar charges of plagiarism were made against his wife, former MIT professor Neri Oxman. Two Business Insider reports made the claim that Oxman âstole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing.â Oxman wrote on X that she regretted some of the errors, while saying that in other instances she couldnât confirm Business Insiderâs claims. Her husband has since launched a fresh offensive â this time against Business Insider. +
++Ackman isnât a celebrity (unless you spend too much time online), or an academic, or even someone who has shown previous zeal for the cause of rooting out plagiarism. But he is worth $4 billion, and that can buy you a lot of attention. +
++Who is Bill Ackman? +
++Ackman was born to a wealthy family in Chappaqua, New York, and later attended Harvard University. He married Oxman (who was once rumored to be dating Brad Pitt) in 2019. +
++Since the â90s, the founder of famed hedge fund Pershing Square has been well-known in finance circles as an activist investor â meaning he aggressively pushes for changes at the companies he buys stakes in. Another renowned activist investor Carl Icahn once said of Ackman, âHeâs the quintessential example of if you want a friend on Wall Street, get a dog.â Talking to the New York Times in 2007, Ackman said of himself, âIf I think Iâm right, I can be the most persistent and most relentless person in America.â +
++Pershing holds stock in just a handful of companies; among them are Google, Chipotle, Hilton Hotels, Lowes, and RBI, a fast food multinational that owns popular chains like Burger King, Popeyes, and Tim Hortons. Much of Ackmanâs fortune comes from a few incredibly lucrative bets, like shorting an insurer of mortgage-backed bonds right around the subprime mortgage crisis, and wagering tens of millions of dollars that the pandemic would cause absolute market chaos. +
++Not all of his bets have panned out. Throughout the 2010s, he lost a billion dollars shorting Herbalife, a multilevel marketing company selling supplements and meal replacements. The billionaire also made a misstep in trying to put the juice back into struggling retailer J.C. Penney, and took a huge loss on a pharmaceutical company called Valeant, with his fund losing almost $4 billion in two years. In 2017, Ackmanâs Pershing and Valeant reached an agreement to pay $290 million to settle a lawsuit alleging insider trading. +
++The billionaire is a signatory of the Giving Pledge, a popular promise taken up by the ultra-rich to give away at least half of their total wealth. His philanthropic foundation has doled out hundreds of millions of dollars since 2006, often toward social justice issues such as poverty and criminal justice reform, and also scholarship funds for immigrants. +
++On X, he said he had âinvested millions in helping promote Palestinian economic development and peaceful coexistence,â but that he would do more if only he had confidence that âthe funds would be used productively.â Fran McGill, head of communications at Ackmanâs hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, told Vox that Ackman declined to provide any additional comment beyond what heâs posted on X, including any details on what these pro-Palestinian investments were. +
++But that history of giving is at odds with Ackmanâs latest activist turn, in which Ackman has emerged as a firm opponent to diversity and inclusion initiatives that he says he once supported. He wrote on X that he believes not just in diversity of race and religion but âdiversity of viewpointsâ and politics. He accused DEI of being ânot about diversity in its purest formâ but rather a âpolitical advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEIâs own methodology.â +
++In his view, DEI unfairly paints any âmerit-based program, system, or organizationâ as racist because there are disproportionate outcomes. Itâs worth noting that Ackmanâs father got his MBA from Harvard, where applicants are given preference if they have alumni family members. +
++Billionaires are used to getting their way because of more than just money (but mostly money) +
++Wading into the culture wars is new for Ackman, who mostly stayed in his finance lane before the pandemic. But like many of his ultra-rich peers, he hasnât had much trouble commandeering attention thanks to a heady mix of wealth, connections, and access to a large social media audience â nor much hesitation in waltzing into new conversations with an air of authority. In the past week, he has been making novel-length X posts (some over 4,000 words long) interpreting the intricacies of MITâs plagiarism rules and journalistic âdue processâ with the explicit goal of discrediting the plagiarism allegations detailed in Business Insiderâs reporting. +
++He insists that heâs fighting to uphold the integrity of American institutions â including whether they sufficiently respect meritocracy â not just airing his grievances. Claudine Gay, in Ackmanâs view, committed plagiarism. His wife didnât; the book paragraphs and Wikipedia pages she allegedly lifted without citation were âinadvertent omissionsâ and âclerical errors of punctuation.â Ackman has not explained why, exactly, the examples used against Gay, which likewise involve copying phrasing and sentences without quotation marks or attribution, shouldnât also count as a light omission. He has only said that his real goal was âto help her address the rise of antisemitism on campusâ all along and that he had trusted plagiarism experts who called Gayâs academic record into question. But when it comes to his wife (who left MIT years ago), Ackman has not only launched a furious defense of why allegedly copying language isnât plagiarism, but has acted as though others even knowing these allegations exist causes catastrophic emotional and reputational harm and counts as a matter of public injustice. +
++To right this perceived wrong, Ackman has tried his best to get the Business Insider article removed, decrying it as an example of journalistic malpractice. Not long after the story was published, he spoke privately with executives at both Business Insider and its parent company Axel Springer, informing them that he was disputing the plagiarism claims and that Insider would need to âwithdraw the story.â +
++After these calls, Axel Springer said it would review the âprocess leading up to the reportingâ on Oxman, but reiterated that âthe facts of the reports have not been disputed.â +
++If the facts arenât in dispute, itâs hard to see the move as anything but assuaging a powerful manâs displeasure â and a way to protect themselves legally against litigious, well-resourced billionaires. Gawker is a cautionary tale â a beloved outlet whose initial closure came on the heels of an expensive lawsuit funded by venture capitalist Peter Thiel. An Axel Springer spokesperson declined to comment further on the review of Business Insiderâs reporting. +
++Ackman is far from the first rich guy to try to control the kinds of stories the media publishes, as well as how theyâre framed. Heâs joining the ranks of Thiel and Elon Musk, who famously bought X, a social media site used by many journalists, because he was confident he could create a better media landscape. (Musk even advised Ackman to sue Business Insider on X, where Ackman is waging his campaign; Ackman thanked him for his support.) Thatâs not to mention the many billionaires who own newspapers and media empires, whether itâs the Hearsts, the Sulzbergers, or Jeff Bezos. There was even a critically beloved TV show about it. +
++The way Ackmanâs crusades against Harvard and Business Insider have played out are almost parodic demonstrations of a billionaireâs disproportionate sway on society; they are especially difficult to square with his supposed respect for meritocracy. Both at Harvard â a school his father attended and to which he has donated tens of millions of dollars â and Business Insider, Ackmanâs money and network have given him a direct line to decision-makers that most of us donât have access to. Ackman wrote on December 11 that two reporters had told him that Harvard resisted firing Gay in part because âthey were concerned it would look like they were kowtowing to me.â Itâs not an unwarranted concern. He also has a friend on the Harvard board â a former board director of Pershing Square Holdings â who had privately questioned whether Gay could stay on as president. +
++The perks of knowing the right people canât be overstated. Ackman has given us an inside look at how he has escalated his contention with the allegations against Oxman: He quickly got on the phone with multiple executives at Business Insider and Axel Springer, growing irate when one didnât call him back in an hour as promised. He contacted Axel Springerâs billionaire CEO Mathias Döpfner (you may remember him offering to run Twitter for Elon Musk when Musk was gearing up to buy it), and even reached out to Joseph Bae, one of the CEOs of KKR, Axel Springerâs biggest shareholder, as well as KKR co-founder and Axel board member Henry Kravis. As the days passed and the media company refused to remove the articles or say that theyâd gotten the facts wrong, Ackman went even further, accusing the above men of being âresponsible and profiting from Business Insiderâs illegal and unethical journalism.â +
++This isnât the first time Ackmanâs connections likely greased the wheels for him. A few years ago, Ackman became involved in the fight to pressure Pornhub to remove alleged child sexual abuse material â the story goes that he sent a text to his friend, the then-CEO of Mastercard, which was also a payment processor on the site. Mastercard, in turn, pressured Pornhub to remove the videos. +
++Nor is this the first time Ackman has used his power to protect his wifeâs reputation and influence the media narrative around her. In 2019, Oxmanâs research lab at MIT garnered press attention for receiving $125,000 from Jeffrey Epstein after a 2015 meeting, when he was already a convicted sex offender. According to emails obtained by the Boston Globe, Ackman advised then-director of the MIT Media Lab Joi Ito not to mention his wife in any statements to the media so that she wouldnât have to issue her own statement on the scandal. A few days after the Globe piece revealed these behind-the-scenes details, Oxman issued an apology. +
++The wealthy have always held this kind of quiet influence, but social media has allowed them to use that influence â or attempt to use it â explicitly in public view. Ackman has become much more active on X, which he has said is his only social media account, in the past few years â before the outbreak of the pandemic, he tweeted sparsely. He went from 24,000 followers in January 2019 to over a million by January 2024. His recent social media activism hasnât had much of a financial impact on his publicly traded investment fund, whose stock price has risen since October 2023. But that doesnât mean there arenât pitfalls to using your influence to name yourself a commanding officer in the culture war â as Ackman and Oxman have learned. +
++Ackmanâs fit of temper isnât over yet. An Axel Springer spokesperson reportedly told Puck News journalist Dylan Byers that âmost people had underestimated the way that Bill Ackman is completely losing it.â But maybe Ackman is making a bet â something heâs very used to doing â that in this fight, too, the billionaire will come out on top. +
++An Oregon case will clarify whether officials can jail or fine homeless people for sleeping outside. +
++The Supreme Court announced on Friday it would hear a pivotal case that could transform homelessness policy in the United States. The case is the most significant legal challenge to the rights of homeless people in decades, and how the Court rules in a decision expected later this year will shape how cities respond to tent encampments. +
++Four years ago, the Court declined to hear a similar challenge. But since then, the crisis of unsheltered homelessness in America has grown more severe, municipal backlash to court rulings that have limited citiesâ response to the crisis has grown more organized, and what to do about people living in tents has become one of the most urgent issues in American politics. +
++The case in question â Grants Pass, OR v. Johnson, Gloria, et al â is a challenge to a 2018 federal class action lawsuit filed by three people who argued that the city of Grants Passâs laws and customs illegally punished them for being involuntarily homeless. Attorneys representing the plaintiffs noted the dearth of affordable housing and homeless shelters in the city, and blasted Grants Passâs arguments that unhoused people could simply leave and go elsewhere. +
++In 2022, a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the homeless plaintiffs. This wasnât a total surprise; the same appellate court had issued a landmark ruling four years earlier that said people without housing canât be punished for sleeping or camping outside on public property if there are no adequate shelter alternatives available. +
++That pivotal decision, Martin v. Boise, has fundamentally shaped citiesâ response to the homelessness crisis, especially in the nine Western states under the Ninth Circuitâs jurisdiction, where some 42 percent of the countryâs homeless population now lives. +
++Leaders from dozens of cities and states â both liberal and conservative â have been hoping the US Supreme Court would overturn the Martin and Grants Pass decisions, which they claim were incorrectly decided and leave governments ill-equipped to safely manage their communities. Many groups representing the rights of homeless people, in turn, have said thereâs no reason for the US Supreme Court to reconsider the rulings as thereâs no clear disagreement among circuit courts to resolve. In the half-decade since Martin came down, there have been dozens of cases affirming it, including in the Fourth Circuit in Virginia. +
++Some in the court system, though, have also signaled theyâd like to see Martin overruled. Last summer, when the full Ninth Circuit declined to review the Grants Pass decision, 16 judges dissented, arguing both homeless cases were incorrectly decided. âMartin handcuffed local jurisdictions as they tried to respond to the homelessness crisis; Grants Pass now places them in a straitjacket,â one dissent read. In 2023, an Arizona state judge also urged the Supreme Court to take up the matter, arguing Martin and Grants Pass both âtie the hands of cities that seek in good faith to address the growing homeless encampment epidemic.â +
++On Friday afternoon, Ed Johnson, the lead attorney for the homeless plaintiffs, issued a statement defending the Grants Pass decision, describing it as ânarrowâ and âconsistent with decades of Supreme Court precedent.â +
++The Supreme Court will decide if itâs a violation of the Eighth Amendment to fine or arrest people experiencing homelessness +
++The lead original plaintiff for the Grants Pass case was Debra Blake, who had experienced homelessness for roughly a decade and in that time racked up hundreds of dollars in fines and fees for sleeping outside and allegedly trespassing. By 2020, Blake owed over $5,000 in penalties for living outside. Blake died a year later at 62 and the case was renamed for another homeless plaintiff, Gloria Johnson. +
++Supporters of the Grants Pass decision say the Ninth Circuit merely affirmed and clarified its prior decision in Martin, which found that punishing homeless people with no other place to go violates the Eighth Amendmentâs prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. But opponents say that by describing civil penalties against unhoused people as unconstitutional, as opposed to just criminal penalties, Grants Pass actually represents a radical expansion of the Martin holding. +
++By taking this case, the US Supreme Court is likely to resolve a key question underlying this debate: Is it a violation of the Eighth Amendment to issue penalties â whether jail time or tickets and fines â against people experiencing homelessness if they have no adequate shelter alternatives? +
++Lawyers representing Grants Pass say no, itâs not. They argue that enforcing local regulations should simply not be considered cruel and unusual punishments. +
++âI think the entire idea that it could constitute cruel and unusual punishment to arrest someone for sleeping on the street is incorrect,â Timothy Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, told me in October. The Goldwater Institute is a conservative legal advocacy group that filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to take the case. Sandefur told me that âitâs trueâ that arresting someone for a status like being homeless is wrong, but he argued it would be at most a violation of due process, not of the Eighth Amendment. +
++Homeless advocates in support of both Martin and Grants Pass say ticketing, fining, and arresting unhoused people if they have nowhere else to go certainly violates the Eighth Amendment. In a brief filed to the Ninth Circuit in support of the unhoused plaintiffs, lawyers with the Fines and Fees Justice Center argued that civil penalties frequently trap unhoused people in cycles of poverty and homelessness, ensnaring them in debt that prevents them from securing housing at all. +
++Overturning Martin and Grants Pass would give cities more power to clear tent encampments +
++If the Supreme Court overturns these decisions, cities will have an easier time clearing tent encampments and prosecuting those who violate anti-camping laws. +
++Proponents of overturning the decisions say theyâre not endorsing the idea of simply throwing unhoused people into jail. In a Supreme Court brief filed by the California State Sheriffsâ Association and the California Police Chiefs Association, the groups wrote âthey, by no means, argue for the criminalization of the homelessâ and are committed to âimproving the outcomesâ for unhoused people. +
++But given the political pressure many leaders face to crack down on tent encampments and the slow pace at which cities are producing more affordable housing, advocates are not wrong to worry that increased criminalization could be an inevitable outcome if these cases are overturned. âIf politicians were truly focused on ending homelessness, they would focus on proven solutions like housing and services,â said Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center, in a statement on Friday afternoon. +
++Overturning the decisions may also have implications for sending homeless people involuntarily to substance use or psychiatric treatment programs, by removing a legal check on governments tasked with implementing new forced treatment statutes. +