Emma Pettit
speaker
457 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard yesterday
Emma Pettit’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So Grants Pass, it's a city in Oregon.
It had a set of laws on the books that said you couldn't sleep outside in public with so much as a blanket or a pillow.
And the city had been blocked from enforcing those laws because it didn't have enough shelter beds for its homeless population.
You know, without a bed to offer someone, punishing them for sleeping outside is cruel and unusual.
The Martin logic.
Yeah, yeah, it's really similar.
But from the city's perspective, this was leaving them with really no way to control their public spaces and no way to actually compel anyone into shelter.
And by this point, other cities around the country felt like that, too.
this constitutional right that shielded homeless people from cruel and unusual punishment from their perspective it had led to sprawling massive tent encampments to piles of discarded needles and trash and human waste
ground to encampment fires every other night so those cities many of them led by democrats they did something that might surprise you they asked the supreme court for help they said you gotta undo what the ninth circuit did to us
So the Supreme Court agrees to look at the case.
That's Neil Gorsuch maybe being a bit cheeky and asking essentially how much human need is protected by the Constitution?
And in the end, the court majority sides with the city.
They write that homelessness is a thorny problem and local governments should be the ones trusted to sort it out, which means that as of 2024, that right to sleep outside under the Eighth Amendment is no more.
Exactly.
And so with the restrictions lifted, now enter the camp that is having the most public fight in opposition with the Housing First advocates.
And they are a group that I'll call Enforcement Now.
And this year, this Enforcement Now camp found essentially a national spokesman in a former reality television show star and also brief L.A.
mayoral candidate, Spencer Pratt.
And it was also this spring, thanks to Spencer Pratt, that this whole debate that we've been unpacking, it finally found its way onto an actual debate stage.
Showing 161–180 of 457 · page 9 of 23
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