It’s been a while since I wrote about Grants Pass, the Supreme Court decision that essentially told cities that they don’t have to provide shelter to homeless people in order to compel them to leave illegal encampments. But it’s time to revisit this topic, because what Oakland is doing is exactly what Dr. King denounced in his I Have a Dream speech.
Dr. King was referring to the then-governor of Alabama in 1963 when he spoke of “lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification.” Those two terms occur when a State declares a federal law null and void, because the State disagrees with the ruling. The Supreme Court’s decision theoretically is the law of the land, meaning that States (or, in this case, a city) are not free to disregard it. But this is precisely what Oakland is doing: stating, in effect, that it will do nothing to evict campers from our public spaces, including parks, even though it has the right to—and some would say the obligation, since encampments in places such as Lakeside Park are blatant violations of various ordinances and laws.
My understanding is that the city has received hundreds of complaints about encampments in Lakeside Park yet has responded to none of them. Tents have proliferated throughout the park, to the extent that the situation there is worse than it’s ever been. (Trust me, I know. I’ve watched for years.) We thus have a situation where the two supervisors whose districts include the park—Nikki Bas and Carroll Fife—are deliberately allowing an illegal activity to occur on public lands under their control, and are deliberately ghosting their constituents who properly complain. Two officials, in other words, who do not honor the oath of office they swore to and are thus guilty of perjury—for which offense the penalty is years in jail.
Of course, it would be Bas and Fife, the two most radicalized members of the City Council, the two most guilty of running Oakland into the ground, bankrupting it, and dividing our community along racial lines. We won’t have to worry about Bas much longer—on the Board of Supervisors, her ability to damage Oakland will be limited. Fife is a different story. Tragically, she was re-elected, and now has four more years in which to inflict her race grievances on our city.
Both Bas and Fife pretend that the welfare of homeless people is their highest concern. But as elected officials, their highest priority should be the health and welfare of their constituents, the voters and taxpayers and their families. Bas and Fife, in blowing off their constituents’ concerns, have proven that they don’t care about those concerns. Instead, they’ve adopted homeless people as their most cherished constituents (and the homeless people living in Districts 2 and 3 are exceedingly unlikely to have voted for either of them). I personally don’t believe Bas or Fife care about anyone except themselves. They found an issue that appeals to the dummies who voted for them—sympathy for the homeless—and they’ve been riding that horse to electoral victory for years now. So even if they have to break the law, they continue to protect encampments, no matter how inappropriate or dirty they are. It’s mindblowing to see public officials completely disregarding the law, but I guess in this age of Trump, they can get away with it as long as their base is loyal. And Bas and Fife, apparently, have loyal, if misguided, bases. The result is Bas’s and Fife’s lips, dripping with interposition and nullification. We should all be outraged.
Steve Heimoff