#localordinance | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

usnewsper-politics · 8 months

Text

Supreme Court Case Could Change How Homeless People Sleep in Public: Protecting Constitutional Rights and Finding Compassionate Solutions #affordablehousing #compassionateapproach #comprehensivesolutions #constitutionalrights #criminalizinghomelessness #homelessindividuals #homelesspopulation #Homelessness #housingcosts #localordinance #Martinv.Boise #mentalhealthservices #NationalLawCenteronHomelessnessandPoverty #precedent #Publichealth #publicsafety #risinghomelessness #sleepinginpublicspaces #SupremeCourtcase #vulnerablepopulations

0 notes

meret118 · 1 month

Text

The system red states are constructing works by empowering extreme ideologues and partisans to impose their will on their communities, whatever level of popular support they happen to enjoy. Dissenters get the right to set public health and educational policy, overriding the judgment of elected school boards and expert regulators. Anti-abortion vigilantes and anti-LGBTQ+ extremists are empowered to surveil their neighbors and rewarded for bringing legal proceedings against them. Lax open-carry laws, immunity from criminal prosecution, promises of kid-glove treatment from police and prosecutors, and pardons when “leftist” prosecutors try to crack down on right-wing thuggery signal to militias and other reactionary radicals that they can engage in political violence with near impunity.

Examples abound. This year, Indiana’s Republican attorney general, Todd Rokita, launched a website with the Orwellian name “Eyes on Education.” The website invites informants to report on teachers who share “objectionable curricula, policies, or programs”; it also posts personally identifying information that can easily be used to dox or harass educators. Among the “objectionable” materials reported through the site is an email from a superintendent who vowed to “address societal injustice in our classrooms” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. After Florida enacted its Safety in Private Spaces Act, banning transgender people from using state-owned bathrooms that match their gender identity, transgender and cisgender residents alike have reported being assaulted by bystanders claiming that they “don’t belong” in public restrooms. Localordinances designed by Jonathan Mitchell, the lawyer behind Texas’ anti-abortion bounty-hunter scheme, use vigilantes to target individuals who cross state lines to secure abortions. Georgia is implementing changes to its electoral rules that practically invite hardcore partisans to disrupt the certification of election results, a strategy with origins in the 2000 presidential election that MAGA leaders returned to in 2020 and 2022.

. . .

one of the most widely reported proposals in Project 2025 is its threatened “campaign to enforce the criminal prohibitions” of the Comstock Act “against providers and distributors of abortion pills.” That law, enacted in 1873 amid a sexual-purity crusade, purports to make it illegal to mail any “article or thing … intended for producing abortion.” For decades, federal agencies under both Republican and Democratic administrations interpreted the Comstock Act narrowly, to apply only when the person mailing an article or thing intended that it be used unlawfully. Reversing this long-standing position would trigger not only a wave of federal criminal prosecutions, as speakers at the Democratic National Convention stressed. It would also kick off a surge of vigilante lawsuits under local laws that authorize ordinary citizens to enforce federal abortion restrictions.