Umm isn’t everyone who living in the apt screwed if they get evicted? So then isn’t it EVERYONE’S responsibility they stay away from drugs so they continue to have a place to live?
Its not the sole responsibility of the person who has the lease… its everyone at risk of being homeless that should curb in the drug habits of those putting their home at risk.
Seems to me that if they were so worried about living with muggers, murderers, and theives they could have written up leases that allowed for the eviction of muggers, murderers, and theives. Rather, they choose to further demonize drug users and these elderly people are the ones paying the price. How insane is it that if Pearlie Rucker’s disabled daughter had killed a neighbor instead of just smoking some crack, Pearlie would still be safe and sound in her home?
bella
They do that on occasion, but this isn’t going to be one of them, I’m afraid. Congress passed a law that called for these draconian measures. The plaintiffs wanted the courts to apply a nonsensical interpretation of the statute and the Supreme Court wisely decided not to.
I think the law sucks, but that is an issue for Congress to address, not unelected judges.
The law is a crock of shit but I think the idea that the judiciary should legislate is a larger crock of shit. If the Supreme Court was composed of nine Justices that exactly mirrored my views (fat chance of that) I still wouldn’t want the Court “[finding] away to overturn laws.” That’s not their constitutional role. And anyway, they found a way to return Dred Scott to his owners so the Justices as legislators deal isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
It’s simply not up to the judiciary to “correct” the legislature. Congress is far from perfect, but they’re far more accountable than the Supreme Court. What are you going to do if the Supreme Court starts legislating willy-nilly and you don’t like their results?
They’re not saying that at all. If the government punishes you for the actions of your brother, it is acting in its role as sovereign. But when it evicts you it’s acting as a landlord enforcing the terms of the lease. Criminal prosecution and eviction are entirely different things.
I totally agree Zoff. The Supremes are not deciding whether the law is good or bad, they are deciding whether it is constitutional or not. Responsibility for bad laws rests with the legislators who enacted them.
Both of them are forms of punishment, however, which is what I was getting at. The Feds are punishing people by evicting them when someone else commits a specific crime (not just a crime in general). And while the other members of the household might not be criminally prosecuted, they are no doubt “blacklisted” from other public housing, which means that they could end up being homeless. Putting them in jail would be more humane. At least there they’d have a roof over their heads and three squares a day.
You’re heartless.
How would you like to be placed under such a superhuman burden of responsibility yourself, to be responsible for the actions of another person 100% of the time? Any parent knows that you can’t control the behavior of a child who’s reached double-digit age 100% of the time, even in the best of circumstances. There has to be a level of trust between parent and child. If the child breaks that trust, let it be up to the parent to correct the kid, and if a law has been broken let the kid answer to the charges in court. I don’t have any problem with that. But I don’t believe in evicting anyone for the crime of another. I’m sorry for those who don’t like to see their tax dollars being misspent, but it all seems to be another case of the typical conservative view on drug abuse. That view seems to be that if we kick people out of their homes, fire them from their jobs, and kick them out of school because they were caught with drugs, or because a relative or guest in their home was caught holding, what a wonderful message that sends out to the world, that we don’t stand for drugs in this society.
But what happens to those people then…? Do they just go away, vanish? Or do they become even more at risk because what little structure and support they had is pulled out from under them?
The difference is that we all have a right to not be arbitrarily jailed by the government. We don’t have a right to live in government-subsidized housing.
Again, I’m not saying the law is necessarily a great idea. But subsidized housing comes with conditions (e.g., income below a certain level, no drug use, etc.) This law simply puts another condition on getting subsidized housing. The condition might be stupid, but it’s not unconstitutional and the Supreme Court shouldn’t be in the business of re-writing or invalidating unwise statutes.
And if we’re not vigilant, we’ll lose the right not to be arbitrarily jailed by the government. That’s what’s dangerous about this ruling. It could very well be the beginnings of that slippery slope which takes us to hell.
Again, I disagree. What about the Fourth Amendment?
Seems to me that it’s rather difficult to be secure in your person if you have to worry that someone you live with might get you evicted because they broke an arbitrary rule.
If the Supreme Court isn’t supposed to be in the business of invalidating unwise statues, who should be? Isn’t that their job? Isn’t that the reason we have courts to begin with?
The slipperiest slope of all is the slippery-slope argument. Civil law and criminal law are not related in this manner. The decision of the Supreme Court to uphold this law has, and cannot have, any effect on our constitutional right to criminal due process.
Even if the Fourth Amendment had any relevance to this discussion (which it doesn’t - search warrants and evictions for violations of the terms of the lease are apples and dolphins), the Fourth Amendment merely requires due process of law before a search warrant is issued - a showing of probable cause to a judge. Here, the evicted tenants had due process - civil due process, but due process nonetheless.
It is most emphatically not the job of the courts to invalidate unwise statutes. First, who says that judges are any wiser than legislators? You are asking judges to substitute their opinion for Congress’ - there is no guarantee that that their opinion is the better one.
Second, if you want a slippery slope, you have presented a real one. Judges are unelected. If judges legislate, then what we would have is the end of democracy - by definition.
As for whose job it is to invalidate unwise statutes, that burden falls to you and me. If our representative votes for an unwise (but constitutional) statute, the solution is to toss the bum out and elect someone who would vote to rescind the unwise law.
Sua
No, but it can have an effect nearly as bad. Suppose the anti-abortionists decide that since they can’t get abortion banned, they’ll work on getting the zoning laws changed in such a manner that it makes it nearly impossible for anyone to open an abortion clinic. Wouldn’t you agree that this has nearly the same effect as banning abortion? If you allow an unjust civil law to stand, people will begin to use those to foist their agenda’s upon people when their efforts at changing the criminal law fail.
How can one say that a person’s been given “due process” when the law is unjust? There is such a thing as the “spirit of the law” which differs from the letter of the law. To me, the spirit of due process means that the person is treated according to just laws, if a person is punished (and eviction is punishment) under an unjust law, then there can be no due process.
And yet, the very reason we have elected officials is so that the rest of us can go out and live productive lives, without having to spend all our time on governing. While power is ultimately supposed to rest with the people, it is better if bad legislation is caught by the government. In general, a lot of damage has to be done to society before the people get riled up enough to do anything about it. Look at the civil rights movement, it took nearly a hundred years for African-Americans to gain the rights they were promised after the Civil War.
Actually, in this case the USSC found that it was indeed the intent of Congress when writing this law to allow this sort of scenario. That is, what happened was perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the law.
As for due process, it matters not what it means to you. The Constitution does not guarantee justice, and most decidedly does not guarantee that the government will not offend your sensibilities. It would be nice if I could dispense justice from on high like King Solomon, but that’s not the way democracy works. And, as is often said about democracy, it’s a horrible form of government, and only used because every other form is somewhat more horrible.
In a democractic republic, the people, through their elected representatives, get to decide what the laws are, and the judges then use those laws to decide cases. As was pointed out, having the laws made, in effect, by judges on their own prerogative is not democratic. One of the side effects of democracy is that no one is allowed to tell the people that they are wrong, even if they are.
I guess that the idea of a Constitution that can only be changed through a lengthy process involving super-majorities in the legislature and among the several states isn’t democratic, but it seems to be pretty popular here.
No. This ruling merely reinforces the concept of living under the rule of law. To decide that an unelected body of judges sitting for life terms can dispense justice at will without regard for the laws that the legislature has enacted would be more likely to lead to arbitrary imprisonment.
I think some people here are missing some pretty basic stuff like the separation of powers, the checks and balances etc. If a branch of the government decides to overstep its powers just because it believes another branch is not doing the right thing… well, what you have is a third world dictatorship because in the end the military are the ones who have the force.
So it is the job of the Judiciary to overturn laws you consider unjust? How about the legislative enacts a law that you like and the judiciary decides to overturn it? Should the Executive refuse to comply with laws it doesn’t like too? And, as a last resort, should the military refuse orders they consider harmful and take the initiative themselves? Unfortunately too many people are so shortsighted they believe the ends justify the means and in the end what you have is something like Afghanistan where nobody obeys anything. They just go by what each one of them consider the best thing to do.
And this is different from what goes on in the rest of the world, how? We all do what we think is best thing to do, legal or not. The whole basis of civil disobedience is that the individual has decided that a law is morally wrong and acts in a non-violent manner to oppose it.
Last time I checked, I had the right to be pissed off about it. Like I am about the ruling that inspired the OP.
It has. Ever hear of Watergate? Iran/Contra? There’s other examples, but none of them are coming to mind at the moment.
At the Nuremberg War Trials, the defense of “only following orders” was tossed out. The tribunal stated that soldiers have a moral obligation to disobey a lawful order when it means that obeying it would cause the death of innocents for no justifiable reason. Saying that, “Well, it’s the law and we have to obey it even though we think its wrong.” is a cop-out, IMHO.
Despite what people may like to claim, all branches over government over step their power at some point. Power eventually corrupts all who come in contact with it.
Which has fuckall to do with anything in this thread.
Unless I’m mistaken, this doctrine was only applied in the case of crimes against humanity. It’s also wholly inapropriate here.
Look, you have to choose what you want in a system of government. You can either have a system where judges act of their own accord to achieve justice as best they can. Or you can have a system where they enforce the laws enacted through democratic means, even if they think the laws are unjust. You can’t have both.
Don’t be pissed at the decision. Be pissed at the law, and the legislators who passed it, and at the executive agency that enforced it in the manner that was done. The solution to this problem is a legislative, not a judicial one.
It has fuckin’ everything to do with this thread. The claims that this decision was somehow a great outcome since it followed the rule of law and proves that the system works is a crock. I don’t have the source handy, but in The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase he quotes a former Supreme Court Justice who says that basically the judge makes up his mind about a case and then goes and looks up previous rulings to support it. IOW, much of the talk about carefully weighing of the legal merits of a case are so much bullshit.
Why not? Because it would lead to chaos? To blindly obey a law which one thinks is unjust is morally and ethically wrong. It leads to a nation of sheep who follow whatever rules their government hands down to them. At that point, I’d have to say that democracy ended and tyranny began, no matter how those in power came to hold it.
Look, people such as myself has absolutely no tolerance to illegal drug use in their presence, no matter how much you like to light up. And we especially don’t tolerate using federally subsidized housing to continue the habit or the dealing.The laws are strict, but should put people on notice. Yes, I think the Bushes should get out of the federally subsudized White house if their daughters are caught doing drugs. So continue getting high, but not in my house.
It wasn’t a great outcome. It was, in fact, a bad outcome. However, it was the correct outcome. Our government does, in fact, have the legal right to evict people from government owned housing for reasons that are patently absurd.
No, it leads to a nation that pesters the legislators to change the law. Just because the courts can’t throw away stupid laws doesn’t mean that no one can. For some reason you seem to think that because the Supreme Court can’t legislate, the people have no say. That is simply ridiculous. The correct recourse in this situation is to the legislature, the people who can simply repeal the law in question.
This is all pretty basic high school civics type stuff here. The legislature makes laws, the executive branch enforces the laws, and the judiciary interprets the laws. In this case, the law was a dumb law, but correctly interpreted.
And, in case you want to know, the law in question is 42 USC 1437 (section d is the relevant part, I believe). The particular changes that are involved in this case were part of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which I haven’t found online yet. The HUD regulations that implement this law are found in 56 Fed. Reg. 51560, 51567 (1991), which also doesn’t seem to be online. And, as these regulations merely allow local housing authorities to require such lease conditions, the local housing authorities involved also chose to require these terms.
Congress, the HUD, and the local housing authorities are all legitimate entities to complain to. The Supreme Court is not.
water2j, stop making sense in the Pit.
How much did anyone care when this law is passed? Did anyone even know about it before the Supreme Court decided to hear the case? How much does anyone know about any laws being voted on today? Our representatives voted ‘yes’, gave a quick soundbite about being tough on crime, then left to meet up with their interns (now that’s a tasteless Pit joke).
But, when the Supreme Court does its job the way it is supposed to, then it’s the SC’s fault.
This segues into another major peeve concerning our government: Blaming the IRS for our taxes. While the IRS has at times been a trifle zealous in carrying out their duties, they don’t write the tax law. They have to interpret tax law, to make sense of tax law, and to collect taxes. However, they don’t make tax law.
Same point - complain to the people who know damn well that when the shit hits the fan, it will spray on someone else: your elected officials.
Finally, someone points out the salient issue here.
Don’t like the law? Write your congressperson. They can quite easily repeal this law. Don’t harrangue the Supremes for reading a clearly worded statute passed by the legislature and not saying a) “well, it doesn’t mean what it says” or b) “I don’t care with Congress says, this law is just unfair to certain particular people, so we are going to rewrite it.” 'Cuz that is even worse than the problem it would solve. Government by 9 elderly lawyers with lifetime appointments and no mandatory retirement.
I know it can suck for the old people who get kicked out of their homes because of what people beyond their control who are living under their roof are doing, but it can make things suck a lot more for everybody when nothing is done about this. I have seen the damage that can be done to a community when some nice old grandma lets her criminal grandchildren live with her, probably because nobody else in the family wants them. The grandparent is being victimized, but by their family members, not the government. The fault lies with someone who will take advantage of their families while continuing to do things that they know will endanger them. The risk is something you have to deal with when you take on responsibility for other people’s actions, and letting someone live with you is just that. I’m not on housing, but my landlord would be totally justified evicting my parents, my wife, my stepdaughter, and me if one of us did something that violated the lease, no matter how bad it would suck for us.