We had Mike Carbassi on the show last night to talk about the City of Fresno homeless Ordinance, which was supported unanimously left, right and center by the city Council from you know, Miguel Arius on the left to Gary Brettefeld on the right, and everyone in between seven and nothing on the city council in favor of the no Camping ordinance, basically making it misdemeanor to camp on public property, whether that's sidewalk, street, public parks, et cetera.
Now, I think this is likely a good idea.
I think the way that it's being framed and the way that it's going to be enforced, or the way that the city is saying that they want to enforce it makes sense. The idea is that the goal here is not necessarily to punish people. It's to offer people interventional services. And if you get interventional services, then you don't go to jail and you don't.
Pay a fine.
There are some people for whom, though, that stick might be necessary. I guess one of the things though, that I didn't quite understand, Now, why did it take until now for the city to pass this. Well, the city did pass something like this in twenty seventeen. The problem was that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the federal circuit court that hears all of the appeals for all federal lawsuits that happen in California, Washington State, Oregon, Hawaii, Alaska, Nevada, Arizona, and.
Idaho, and I think Montana, but Idaho.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling a couple of years ago about a similar ordinance passed by the city of Boise, Idaho, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said that this violates that such ordinances banning camping and penalizing homeless camping violate the US Constitution, that they violate the Eighth Amendment and its prohibition against cruel
and unusual punishment. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal said it was cruel and unusual punishment to penalize someone for homeless camping when the city does not have enough homeless enough beds to shelter the homeless. Now, the Supreme Court just this year overturned that Ninth Circuit decision. It was just a couple of months ago, and actually just a month ago.
And.
On the heels of that Supreme Court decision saying, no, these kinds of laws are not unconstitutional. They aren't cruel and unusual punishment that violates the Constitution. You might think that they are wise or unwise, good policy or bad policy, but they don't violate the Constitution. So, as a result, all of a sudden, Gavin Newsom's issuing issuing executive orders saying that we should impose those kinds of encampment rules.
And you've got the City of Fresno passing this encampment ordinance. The County of Fresno looks like it's going to try to introduce a similar ordinance. And I my instinct, I haven't studied the issue really in depth as a constitutional question, but my instinct is likely that, yeah, I'm guessing that these kinds of ordinances don't violate the Eighth Amendment. I don't think this is the kind of thing for which
the Eighth Amendment was devised. I think the Eighth Amendment was devised so that no one would be hung, drawn and quartered, you know, the traditional British I think it was probably a punishment in other countries too, but the British punishment where you were halfway hung to death, and then they took you down, and then they ripped out your intestine, and then they chopped you into four bits.
And it's a horrible torturous form of death. So I think elaborate torture is the kind of thing that the Eighth Amendment forbids, and so I was very supportive of this homeless I was supportive for the most part of this homeless ordinance on the grounds of, well, the city is saying we have these resources available and people aren't availing themselves of it, so we're tired of Basically, you had, you know, very moderate It wasn't fire breathing conservatives saying this.
It was people like Tyler Maxwell, you know, saying stuff like, you know, we're running out of patients with the homeless community that we have all these we're offering these resources. They're not availing themselves of it. They're disrupting businesses, you know, we are we need to have this as a tool in order to ensure that homeless people take advantage of
these resources. Okay, now, I will admit ninety you know, I'm going to acknowledge a decent opinion or a compelling case when I see it, no matter the source, and Marrick Worzowski, who, in spite of the fact that he's a very liberal guy, much more liberal than Night, has an interesting column about this question in the be Today. Camping and Fresno will soon be illegal. Where are homeless
people supposed to go? And it gets to this question that was at the core of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals case as well as the Supreme Court case. It gets to this question of well, can a city really is it legitimate for a city to penalize homelessness when you don't have enough beds to house the homeless? Now, I don't know that we need a perfect one to one ratio of the Are this many homeless people in Fresno and there have to be this many beds before
you can outlaw camping. I think realistically, enforcement of a measure like this is not like all two thousand, I don't know the exact number of In fact, I don't think anyone knows the exact number of homeless people in Fresno. There are various estimates from around three thousand to some pro homeless activists say that it's approaching ten thousand. But let's say there're three thousand people.
I don't know that.
You necessarily if you have three thousand homeless people, I don't know that you need three thousand beds. It's not like all three thousand people are going to be arrested at the same time and put in a shelter on the same day. But you need to have some capacity for people. And I commend Warzowski for actually giving his readers and me about to read this the actual numbers of what space is actually available. So he writes, the
homeless crisis in Fresno must be out of hand. Hundreds of millions in state and federal dollars over the last five years didn't solve the problem, not even close. So the next step, shortly after our elected leaders received the Supreme Court and Governor Gavin Newsom's blessing, is cracking down on people who sleep or camp outside on public property.
First an inadequate carrot, followed by the unnecessary stick. Right now, I'm not agreeing with all of his rhetoric here, all of the kind of argumentative way in which he's fashioning this, but let's stick with it. D My question today, Warzowski's question remains the same as it did in twenty seventeen, when the Fresno City Council approved a Brandow sponsored no
camping ordinance that was subsequently shelved by the courts. Where are the people living in tents on sidewalks, vacant lots at canal banks, strip malls, and all those in between spaces? Where are they supposed to go? One place they won't be headed is a home shelter because there isn't room. The City of Fresno funds eight hundred and forty one beds for individuals experiencing homelessness, including domestic violence victims, youth, singles,
and families. That number has skyrocketed since the pandemic and the conversion of numerous parkway drive motels. Still, the supply has barely kept pace with demand. Phil SKay, an assistant planning director who oversees the city's homelessness and affordable housing efforts, said those eight hundred and forty one beds are currently full and have been consistently full for the past several years.
Throughout the day, beds are freed up at various shelters, resulting from people successfully finding permanent housing, being reunited with family, or entering programs. SKay said in other instances, Beds become available when people choose to leave the shelter and return to the streets, or when people are exited as a result of shelter staff enforcing shelter rules. How many beds become available on a day to day basis on average skaseet so we have about eight.
Hundred and forty one beds.
They're almost entirely full. About five beds a day become available and get.
Filled pretty quickly.
We've got a population of about three thousand, and again, the estimates vary, but let's let's take a conservative estimate. We've got about three thousand homeless people at emergency shelters operated by Fresno County. It's a similar story, except there are fewer beds available. The current total is one hundred and twenty six according to figures provided by county officials, and those are at capacity as well.
So keep that in mind.
War was ASKI wrights the next time a public official tosses out a misleading statistic showing six point two percent of more than four thousand individuals contacted this year by the city's Homelessness Assistant Response Team, quote accept services. It services is not the same thing a place to sleep out of the elements in harm's way. More often than not,
services means speaking with a Paverrello House outreach team. So basically this is kinda I'm not saying I'm completely changing my mind here because I think some kind of intervention is warranted and I don't think the solution of leave these people on the sidewalks is good. But honestly, this is kind of expanding my horizons a little bit and making me think about this a little more intently. So look, as a constitutional question, I agree, probably an ordinance like
this is not cruel and unusual punishment. I'm guessing that that's not really what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when the eighth of Amendment was adopted. Nonetheless, I think the question of that there is still, though the question of political wisdom and political prudence and justice towards these people who are human beings, and I don't
want to lose sight of that. I think there is a tendency among conservatives because homelessness is a kind of liberal coded problem, i e. It's a problem that we
have known for decades. Is most commonly associated with San Francisco and Seattle and very liberal controlled cities like that, there's almost a sense that homeless people that we should There's a kind of antagonism among conservatives towards the homeless in a way that I'm not always comfortable with, even just as a as a Christian and as someone who has frankly had my business massively disrupted by homeless people.
Constantly.
Where my building is for Right to Life Essentral, California, we constantly have homeless people loitering there, leaving garbage there, leaving syringes there. We had a homeless guy break in light a fire in the bathroom caused like twenty six thousand dollars worth of damage. Thank god we had insurance. So I'm not I'm not saying that all the homeless are saints by any stretch. I'm not unaware of the real problems that homeless persons cause for businesses, but they
are human beings, and it's kind of this thing. I'll talk about this in the next segment. I think sometimes modern day Christians have this idea of the poor of our time being like at fault for being.
I'll discuss that later.
I think though we have to and maybe the way the city Council is approaching this is sort of saying, look like we have the means, the capacity. There's more hotels that are going to be available, maybe there's more housing available. We have all the Proposition one funding coming in.
I know the Catholic bishops are trying to say, look, if you're going to have if we're going to create more mental health beds things like that via Proposition one, which was just past I think in the twenty I think just last year, no, just in the last primary election, if we're going to have all these homeless beds, then if we're going to have all these beds for mental health treatment, then this is something that should be utilized
for the sake of the homeless. I guess we do really need to grapple with this question of is yes, it's probably not a violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, But is what we're doing actually fair?
Is what we're doing actually.
Just I guess I'm not sure what one hundred percent what the right answer to that is. When we return, though, I want to address two things. One how this problem got gets manufactured in the first place by the left, and two sort of the maybe a little bit of Christianity inside baseball, A little bit of sort of what a Christian approach to this should be. That's next on
the John Girardi Show. A couple of thoughts about the homeless ordinance of the City of Fresno, passed with Merrick Worzowski's column in The Bee A little bit opening my eyes to really how little homeless shelter space we have relative to the number of homeless. You know, we have about eight hundred and forty one beds, all of which are kind of already capacity. You've got about three thousand
homeless people. So if we're going to or charge people with misdemeanors for homeless encampments, how is that going to work?
Exactly? Now?
A couple of things to think about it. One is, do some of these some of these people are committing crimes, vandalism, crimes, drug crimes, et cetera, to such an extent that maybe this is just some This is an appropriate way of punishing or addressing them. But you are not charging them with drugs or with this or with that. You're charging them with camping. And is that fair? I don't think it's unconstitutional. I don't think it violates the Eighth Amendment
prohibition on Cruel and Unusual punishment. But is this wise? Is this fair? Is this an appropriate response? I think the core problem here is we have no good solutions. We have no good solutions because these problems of homelessness are We're forced into this situation because of stupid policies by the left, the left obsessed. Why is it that it's always liberal leaning jurisdictions that have these huge problems with homelessness, and they just don't have these problems as
much in conservative jurisdictions. Well, in conservative jurisdictions, they just let people build massively. They let people build lots and lots and lots of housing. They don't make it difficult. It's ironic that the places with the most nimbiism, not in my backyardism, are the places where are in the most liberal jurisdictions, the places where it's hardest to build new housing, whether it's low income housing, apartment housing, housing specifically for the homeless.
All that stuff. It's always in liberal states.
And it's liberal states like California that have processes like SEQUA, the California Environmental Quality Act that basically allows anybody to step in and file a lawsuit to stop some building project on the spurious basis of an environmental harm that it might cause. So everything costs way more. I mean, we've seen these stories about different California jurisdictions where it costs one million dollars per unit for a quote low income housing unit, like the absurd cost to build things.
Of course, we're going to have all these homeless people. Of Course we're not going to be able to build enough low income housing, assisted living housing like or not assisted living housing, but you know Section eight kind of housing. Of course, we're not going to be able to build enough of this stuff. We're forced into this because of
liberal California policies. And then our solutions are either do we use the mechanism of criminal law enforcement to get people off the streets, which, by the way, I'm not convinced that putting someone in jail is more punitive or worse than leaving them on the street. Frankly, that the jail is air conditioned during the summer and heated in the winter. Now, Warzewski's pointing out that the jail probably doesn't have enough room to take all these people either.
The president of County Jail System doesn't necessarily have the space to keep all these people either. But I guess I'm just flum mixed. What else are we supposed to do? If it's we are locked in Fresno.
This is the problem.
We're trying to have a citywide solution for something that's really a statewide problem, and this band aid approach of arresting homeless people it shouldn't be what we have to do, but unfortunately, I think it's there's kind of no other option. I understand Warzowski's critique here. I'm sympathetic to it, but I don't know that there's a better solution out there, and it does lead me to this. I want to again, this is not a critique for every conservative. It's a
critique of some conservatives. Yes, homelessness is kind of this liberal coded problem. We have homelessness in California because of liberal policies statewide. It's liberal cities that this stuff originated in. Now it's spreading all over California. We still, though, have to have this approach, especially for any of us on the right who are Christians of radical care and concern for every single human life, every single human being, every
single human person. I think the work of entities like the Fresno Mission and others like it exemplifies this Christian attitude that we absolutely positively have to take that. You know, even I'll go to this extent. The guy who broke into Right to life of Central California last November. Some guy broke in to right to life of Central California last November. He stole a bunch of copper piping under
the sink of our bathroom. He flooded our building. He caused about twenty six thousand dollars worth of damage with thankfully our insurance covered. They covered vandalism. He lit a small fire under the bathroom sink. Thankfully, thank god it was into the fire. So this guy's trying to steal copper probably means he's a drug addict.
Even that person.
Deserves a measure of human dignity and care and concern for where he winds up.
I don't wish ill to that person.
Maybe he needs to go to jail, probably because of the drug issues, plus you know, the vandalism stuff. Maybe he does genuinely need He probably genuinely needs to go to jail. But I don't just because homeless people do bad things. In many respects, it doesn't mean they go
outside the parameters of Christian charity. I do think sometimes Christians have this sense that when Christ's talking about love for the poor, concern for the poor, when he's talking about that in the Bible, I think sometimes Christians have this sense of like, well, those people weren't poor because of their laziness or because of their lack of virtue. They were poor back then just because everyone was poor back then. Eh No, everyone lacks virtue to some extent,
everyone sins to some extent. And Christ wasn't just talking about poor people who were virtuous that we need to
have care and love and concern for them. In fact, he specifically talked about poor people who weren't virtuous and the need to have love and care and concern for them, such as the prodigal Sun. So the fact that someone is not virtuous, that they are using drugs, that they are this, they are that that does not mean we get to exclude them from the Christian attitude of radical love and care and concern for every single human life.
And so I think it does mean.
Yes, my inclination is that this homelessness ordinance passed by the city is the best of all bad solutions. But we still really need to examine our consciences and at a macro level and a micro level and grapple with well, what is the best and fairest outcome for how to approach the problem of these people who are sleeping outside. What is the best way of approaching it? And maybe you know I would I'm inclined to trust the judgment of all seven council members plus the mayor. I'm inclined
to trust their judgment. But there is this problem that you know, we're going to offer them services. There just aren't many beds. There really just aren't many beds available, and I'm not sure what's the best solution for this.
When we return the Catholics for Kamala campaign that's next on the John Girardi Show, there's a bunch of different Zoom meetups that are happening where it's basically people get on a live stream and talk about how wonderful Kamala Harris is and then get people to donate money to her campaign. There have been a bunch of nauseating examples of this which all of a sudden became racially segregated because first there were like, a Black women for Kamala Harris.
But then they're they're they're emerged a white women for Kamala Harris zoom call, you know, live stream fundraiser thing, and then a white dudes for Kamala Harris zoom call fundraiser thing, and and these became about, these exercises in liberal coded ways of speaking about you know, privilege, and oh.
You white people need to use our privilege.
To listen to black voices, and you know, blah blah blah blah blah, give them money. I guess it's not the first time that Democrats engaged in all white gatherings talking about black people. Democrats were really big on that in the South the KKK anyway. So the most revolting of these that seems to be coming up on Tuesday, August sixth is a Catholics for Kamala Harris call Catholics for Harris.
Now.
Agent Squires are intrepid producer of the John Girardi Show, loves it when I talk about inside Catholic.
Baseball, So buckle up.
This is about the dumbest thing I've ever seen, but it it is reflective of this steady, steady trend of the Democrat Party and its relationship with Catholics. It's precisely how absurd this is that I just want to highlight and certain kinds of old, older liberal arguments about ways to appeal to Catholics that are just completely out the door at this point and renders this so absurd. So let me take you back to when I was in college. All right, So I started at Notre Dame in the
fall of two thousand and six. So I was in college during the two thousand and eight presidential campaign, the high water mark for millennial liberals, two thousand and eight Obama. For millennial liberals, it's like Camelot. It's like basically the way that boomer liberal politicians like Bill Clinton and John Kerrey, the way that they reminisce about the John F.
Kennedy days, and.
A lot of young liberals kind of found their political identity in Kennedy.
Kennedy was like the hero. Oh, he was the icon.
He was this inspiration for this whole generation of younger liberal, younger liberals who would go on to the very prominent roles in American public life, as you know, future members of the House, future senators. The Kennedy sort of the nineteen sixty Kennedy sort of campaign team. A lot of
them would go on to bigger and better things. It was this real moment of youthful excitement, and two thousand and eight Obama was like that in many ways for millennial liberals, only much more cloying and stupid and annoying because it was all just a big I think the enthusiasm for Obama was in so many ways media manufactured. I think there was a lot of sizzle and not a lot of steak there. But Obama was genuinely inspiring for all these young millennial liberals and all these guys
my age. It was particularly obnoxious. Liberal guys in particular my age would wear button up dress shirts and khakis and be very earnest and try to imitate Obama. Act like Obama, think like Obama. They loved Barack Obama so much they all wanted to be Barack Obama. And basically it was one of the most annoying. That sort of demographic was some of the most annoying people in all some of the most annoying.
People I've ever encountered in politics.
It was that kind of subset of earnest millennial Guy.
Obama supporters anyway.
Now, on top of that, as I was at a Catholic university, I was also encountering this massive movement of like Catholics for Obama, and all of these notreed ame kids who had Republican parents, many of them had pro life parents, who were all sort of talking themselves into some sense that voting for Barack Obama was actually something that was a more Catholic thing to do than voting for John McCain, that actually Obama was better on Catholic issues,
that actually, basically they wanted to be part of the zeitgeist of two thousand and eight. They wanted to be cool, they wanted to be sophisticated. So all these young Republican children were rebelling against their parents by voting for Barack Obama and trying some way to find some way to sort of rationalize it. And a lot of the arguments being made was that well, Barack Obama cares for the poor so much more than John McCain and his support for the poor, his support for.
Obamacares support for this, and that better social welfare conditions will actually lead to fewer abortions, and that Obama he doesn't have us diity to Catholics. He's all of these cloying, annoying liberal rationalizations that you know, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. Obama was aggressively pro abortion, he just was.
Nothing's going to change that. As soon as he gets into office. He starts massive federal funding for embryo destructive stem cell research. He does this, he does that, He does all these executive orders for increasing abortion blah.
Blah blah blah blah.
His administration would be the one that winds up loosening restrictions on the abortion pill, massively increasing its accessibility. All this stuff happens, and over the course of the Obama administration it sort of becomes clear like this guy's not really.
Doing anything meaningfully to advance the.
Life issue, not at all. He's actively hostile to it. Here he is suing nuns. His administration going after communities of Catholic nuns. Why because in their employer based health insurance plans, they don't want to cover abortion or contraception because they're nuns.
They're Catholic nuns. So here is his.
Administration actively persecuting this group for this and all those two thousand and eight Obama people. They either had to embarrass it in an embarrassed fashion, admit that they were wrong, or they just abandoned a lot of those Catholic convictions and just came on went on to become ordinary humdrum
obnoxious liberals. The Catholics for Biden thing thus became more embarrassing, more embarrassing than athletics for Obama had been, because we had the track record of Obama, which Biden had enthusiastically supported the whole time, only it was worse now now Biden flip flopped on the position that he and Obama had actually maintained of supporting the High Amendment. Biden, over the course of one week in twenty nineteen, shifted a position he had held for forty plus years prior and
said he now opposed the High Amendment. The High Amendment, which is this rider that gets attached to federal spending bills every year since nineteen seventy six, and it basically says no direct federal funding for abortion. Biden had supported it for years, decades, and all of a sudden in twenty nineteen, when he realized he needed to win the
Democratic nomination. He completely pitched it out and said, yeah, he supports federal funding for abortion, and the Biden administration has been a massively aggressive entity pushing for legal abortion every which way.
They can.
Decry his whole you know, his now defunct campaign was focused for twenty twenty four on restoring Roe v.
Wade.
Well, now we've got Kamala Harris, and it's even more embarrassing. Why Because let's go back in history. Senator Kamala Harris was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is charged with vetting nominees.
For federal judge ships.
She was objecting to three different Catholic judges on the basis of their membership in the Knights of Columbus. All right, So, for those who don't know, Knights of Columbus is kind of like a Catholic fraternal order, kind of like Freemasons, but Catholic without like Freemasons, but without the weird socio political beliefs in conspiracy, some of which it's kind of conspiracy theories, some of which is not is weird anyway,
It's basically and a Catholic fraternal men's organization. They provide life insurance and they basically, it's a group of men who provide various kinds of charitable support for the efforts of the Catholic Church in.
A lot of different ways. I'm a member of the Knights of Columbus.
Tons of Catholic men are members of the Knights of Columbus, and what the Knights of Columbus believe in is nothing different from what the Catholic Church believes in.
If you object to someone.
Being a member of the Knights of Columbus, you are in effect just saying I object to you on the grounds that you are Catholic. Harris opposed this for a number of Knights of columb for a number of federal judges, I think three different federal judges, was trying to object to them on what is purely religious grounds, the fact that they were members of the Knights of Columbus. Harris was trying as California Attorney General to force pro life pregnancy centers to post on the wall of the waiting
room where women could go to get abortions. Actively supported and co sponsored this bill that was passed by the state legislature AB. Seven to seventy five that was so egregious that the Supreme Court struck it down as violating the First Amendment rights of pro life pregnancy centers. Harris when she learned of the David Dilyden videos about Planned Parenthood affiliates and other abortion providers selling the body parts
of aborted children for profit. She got evidence of that with the undercover videos that David Delyden released.
What did she do?
Did she go after abortion providers or the middlemen companies for profiting off the sale of fetal tissue derived from aborted fetuses, which is a crime both under California and federal law. No, she aggressively investigated and charged David de Leiden with a bunch of crimes. You know, the guy who was the whistleblower who showed evidence of this illegal conduct. Catholics for Kamala Harris is about as insane. You know,
this is an exaggeration, so exaggeration. It's Jews for Hamas, it's as insane as I don't know, Republicans for Democrats.
It's it's dogs for cats. It's it's completely preposterous.
Few politicians in American public life have ever positioned themselves in a more anti Catholic position than Harris. When we return the merciful return of football. Next on The John Girardi Show. Thank God football is coming back. I gotta say, folks, the Olympics ain't cutting it for me. Basketball wasn't cutting it. Baseball just doesn't cut it. I've missed football ever since February, ever since the Super Bowl wound up and my forty nine Ers lost. I just need football back. I want
college football back. I want my Saturdays. I want Notre Dame Football to be back on the air so that they can agonize and torture me again and make my children cry. I want NFL football back on Sunday. I'm I'm tired of the Olympics. Simon Biles is great, I'm tired of seeing her. I'm tired of swimming. I'm just bored of all sports, in all television and all entertainment. I just want football back, and thank god football will be returning this month. We had a preseason NFL game
last night. Notre Dame football is starting during the month of August. Thank God Almighty football is back. That will do it for The John Girardi Show. See next time on Power Talk