We see that congressional Republicans’ constipation has flared up again. It’s a chronic, though voluntary, distress. Joe Biden (GAMER LAWYER), Merrick Garland (GAMER LAWYER), and Alejandro Mayorkas (GAMER LAWYER) are begging to be impeached, yet Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other bunged-up House Republicans refuse to extrude
Let’s set aside the sinister Merrick Garland and the plodding, lying apparatchik Alejandro Mayorkas. They can be impeached another day. Joe Biden needs to be impeached, ASAP. One needn’t qualify that Biden is, “perhaps, the most crooked president in history,” because, hands down, he’s the biggest, dumbest scoundrel to occupy the Oval Office. Bill Clinton (GAMER LAWYER) isn’t dumb; he’s wily, but runs a close second in the scoundrel department, as does his semi-estranged wife, the nefarious Hillary (GAMER LAWYER). As Peter Schweizer explained, Bill and Hill were slicker stashing the cash.
Impeach Biden, Make Democrats Sweat
We see that congressional Republicans’ constipation has flared up again. It’s a chronic, though voluntary, distress. Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and Alejandro Mayorkas are begging to be impeached, yet Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other bunged-up House Republicans refuse to extrude. It’s time to -- well, you know what -- or get off the flippin’ pot. True justice -- unfashionable among most “progressives” -- demands action. And politics -- a dirty word to dainty Republicans -- also demands action.
Let’s set aside the sinister Merrick Garland and the plodding, lying apparatchik Alejandro Mayorkas. They can be impeached another day. Joe Biden needs to be impeached, ASAP. One needn’t qualify that Biden is, “perhaps, the most crooked president in history,” because, hands down, he’s the biggest, dumbest scoundrel to occupy the Oval Office. Bill Clinton isn’t dumb; he’s wily, but runs a close second in the scoundrel department, as does his semi-estranged wife, the nefarious Hillary. As Peter Schweizer explained, Bill and Hill were slicker stashing the cash.
Joe is like a psychopathic crook, practically flaunting his crimes. For decades, he’s exhibited his compulsive lying. It knocked him out of the 1988 Democrat presidential nominating contest. But being an inveterate liar isn’t a disqualifier in politics. It’s only doing it stupidly in ways that harm comrades that busts anyone.
So, a bad mark only waylaid Joe briefly. D.C. gave Joe a second chance.
Barack Obama (GAMER LAWYER), the nation’s black George Washington, picked Joe to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. Some wags have suggested that Barack picked Joe because Joe made Barack look good by comparison. But it’s more like a birds of a feather thing. Obama is corrupt in his way. Mark Levin made this keen observation about Barack a few years ago.
Of course, Joe famously bragged about strongarming Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko to sack prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma Holdings, which precocious Hunter Biden was a principal. Joe was Barack’s veep when the strongarming occurred.
Jim Jordan and House Republicans are compiling a bookful of evidence linking Joe to influence-peddling, pay-to-play, and whatever other schemes involving Ukraine, China, Russia, and Timbuktu, for all we know. Hunter was merely the doped-up, sexed-out bagman.
Jordan and the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has taken testimony from Devon Archer, Hunter’s onetime business partner and pal. Tucker Carlson interviewed Archer for his “Tucker on Twitter” podcast. The beans are being spilled. Then there are the IRS and FBI whistleblowers. Hunter Biden is the gateway to getting Joe. The conspiracy to get Hunter off the hook to protect Joe isn’t some fluoridated water conspiracy jive. It’s vividly real.
McCarthy has done a lot of bloviating about crooked, ol’ Joe. It amounts to nothing.
CNN gives an insight into McCarthy’s reluctance to lower the boom, July 25:
The House speaker has previously resisted right-wing calls to impeach Biden over concerns that doing so could imperil the party’s slim majority in the House, especially because such a pursuit would go nowhere in a Democratic-led Senate.
House GOP caucus conservatives are pushing for Biden’s impeachment -- or at least some of them are pushing for an inquiry to begin. The real head 
scratcher is that House Freedom Caucus members have the leverage to force McCarthy into an impeachment inquiry leading to an impeachment. The Republican majority is razor-thin in the House. HFC can grind McCarthy’s agenda to a halt.
But they may share McCarthy’s reluctance. Republicans holding vulnerable seats could lose in 2024 thanks to an impeachment. Moreover, Republicans want to flip House seats in blue states. Justice for Biden likely takes second place to retaining the House GOP majority. That’s how garden variety pols calculate.
Yet it’s a gamble that needs to be taken. It needs to be shown that a president with an abundance of evidence piling up against him is held accountable for his actions. Not only is the GOP’s America First base demanding justice, the nation needs to see that Republicans are striving to do justice and are working to eliminate double standards.
Elites game the system with impunity and get off the hook for their crimes. Crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried recently had campaign finance charges dropped. Reported MarketWatch, “Bankman-Fried donated $46.5 million to the Democrats in 2022, making him the party’s second-largest donor behind George Soros that year.”
Bankman-Fried claims he gave a lot to Republicans to cover his bases. Maybe he did. But it was Biden DoJ prosecutors who moved to drop the contribution charges against Bankman-Fried. The appeal was made to Clinton appointed judge Lewis Kaplan, who, in the last few days, dismissed Trump’s counter-defamation suit against E. Jean Carroll. Could it be that the uniparty doesn’t want any of Bankman-Fried’s money rocks lifted to see what’s underneath?
Biden is dirty in both petty and big ways. Not only has he lined his pockets as the kingpin of his family’s influence-peddling operation, he’s weaponized the government to destroy his chief rival, Donald Trump. The federal indictments, led by DoJ hatchet man Jack Smith, were, are, and always will be persecutions, ginned up to take the heat off Biden, who appears slimier with each passing day, and to deny Trump the presidency.
Trump would have won a legitimate election in 2020. As we know, the Democrat-led multipronged dark campaign just barely denied him reelection. Biden winning in a squeaker was too nerve-wracking, though, for Silicon Valley doyens, NYC money manipulators, and creaking, dirty Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
Democrats and their establishment backers don’t want any close calls in 2024. Trump is to be ruined well before those phony mail-in ballots are bundled on pallets and trucked to Democrat-controlled polling places.
Justice and politics demand that Biden be impeached. With the most consequential presidential election looming, House Republicans have an obligation to take the fight to Democrats. A longish impeachment inquiry followed by an impeachment are in order. No sham charges against blathering, ol’ Joe. No stretching the law like taffy to make charges appear semi-plausible. Just fact-based, documented charges of criminal conduct while Biden occupied the second highest office in the land.
Biden won’t be removed from office, of course. There aren’t 67 votes in the Senate to do so. And deteriorating Mitch McConnell, like every other establishment Republican, opposes impeaching Biden, anyway, claiming impeachment needs to be “rare.” One supposes that a vice president selling his office to the Chinese and Russians doesn’t qualify as rare. And one supposes that President Joe isn’t compromised now. Then again, McConnell and the uniparty probably don’t want Biden rocks lifted because theirs may be next.
Let’s add an article of impeachment to Joe’s list of dirty deeds. The U.S.-Mexican border has been obliterated to serve the Democrats’ political and ideological interests. Flooding the country with seven-plus million illegals isn’t a blunder or a result of gross incompetence. It’s part of Democrats’ scheme to transform America into an unrecognizable, vast Third World barrio. Slums and dystopic cities are Democrats’ prowling grounds.
An article directed at Joe’s debauching of the border is likely to win plaudits among independents and some Democrat rank-and-file voters. Regardless, national security and the welfare of the nation compel Republicans to address Joe’s border ploy in an impeachment.
Ultimately, McCarthy and his ilk may discover that a thorough impeachment inquiry and a well-planned and smartly executed prosecution of Joe will be seen favorably by voters, most importantly independents. Plenty of Hispanics have had enough of Joe’s antics, too. Illegals are ruining their communities.
And a shrewdly done impeachment may help Trump return to the presidency, even in the teeth of the election shenanigans to come. RINOs loathe that prospect as much as Democrats. But conservatives must insist. Trump deserves a break. So does America.
J. Robert Smith can be found regularly at Gab @JRobertSmith. He also blogs occasionally at Flyover. He’s recently returned to Twitter. His Twitter handle is @JRobertSmith1
Image: Ted Eytan
President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief is opening a new loophole for millions of foreigners who say they are “stateless.” AND WHO TOLD THEM TO MAKE THIS CLAIM? THE CUBAN?
RELATED — Gaetz Grills DHS Chief Mayorkas: Illegal Aliens Getting “Disney FastPass into the Country”
House Judiciary GOP / YouTube
Joe Biden’s Deputies Create Border Loophole for Millions of ‘Stateless’ Migrants
President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief is opening a new loophole for millions of foreigners who say they are “stateless.”
“All over the world, people who are stateless live with fear and uncertainty … With this historic step, stateless individuals will be given the opportunity to apply for [U.S.] immigration protections and benefits,” said Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Mayorkas’s statement said that there are “approximately 218,000 people residing in the United States who are potentially at risk of statelessness”
But the Department of State reported, “At the end of 2021, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees … counted 4.3 million stateless persons worldwide but estimated that the actual number may be over 10 million due to underreporting.”
“Every one of these actions that they do with what they believe are the ‘best of intentions’ inevitably end up having the worst of results,” countered Andrew Arthur, a former immigration justice who is now with the Center for Immigration Studies. “The devil is gonna be in the details about how they … define people as stateless,” Arthur told Breitbart News.
Biden has already imported at least six million migrants for economic purposes in less than three years. That economic policy has helped investors by inflating real estate prices and reducing Americans’ wages.
Biden’s huge inflow includes roughly two million legal migrants, plus 3.5 million illegal and quasi-legal migrants allowed through loopholes in the southern border, plus roughly 1.6 million unreported “gotaways” who sneaked over the border, plus hundreds of thousands of migrants who have refused to go home when their legal visas expire, plus at least two million temporary visa workers.
That massive inflow adds up to three migrants for every four Americans who turn 18 during the same period.
RELATED: Migrants Waiting for Entry to Roosevelt Hotel
emorris“Congress has provided guidelines in Section 241(b) of the Immigration Nationality Act for dealing with individuals who a country won’t take. It doesn’t mean they get to stay here,” Arthur said, referring to the small number of actually stateless people who enter the country.
“In the case of most stateless people — [such as] Palestinians — Jordan will generally take them …. [But] there are always going to be people who don’t have birthright citizenship in the country in which they were born, and there’s always going to be an issue with respect to you know, sending them back to those countries. But that’s a diplomatic issue. It doesn’t mean that you grant them [legal] status in the United States. If they’re removable, they’re removable, and they should be removed to a country that will take them,” he added.
Arthur continued, saying Congress and voters should not trust Biden’s deputies. “[Mayorkas] refuses to implement the laws that Congress has already written with respect to enforcement of the border and the detention of illegal inadmissible aliens. Why would we trust him on this? It’s easier, better and safer for [Americans when the agency] … executes the laws that Congress has written rather than creating brand new categories of individuals who are allowed to enter and remain in the United States above and beyond what Congress has already specified.”
Mayorkas is a pro-migration zealot who has said his border management is “all about achieving equity, which is really the core founding principle of our country.” Mayorkas’s demand for equity implies that foreign citizens have the same moral right as Americans to live in the United States, regardless of public opposition.
RELATED — Gaetz Grills DHS Chief Mayorkas: Illegal Aliens Getting “Disney FastPass into the Country”
House Judiciary GOP / YouTube“We cannot have the rights and the needs of individuals who are seeing humanitarian relief in the United States be exploited for political purposes,” he told ABC News in January.
In February, Mayorkas said Congress’s laws are less important than his equity priorities. “Our goal is to achieve operational control of the border … [with pro-migration] policies that really advance the security of the border and do not come at the cost of the values of our country,” he said.
Also, White House officials view nearly all migrants as useful workers, consumers, and renters, regardless of their economic and civic impact on Americans. “We need workers that we just don’t have enough of,” a White House official said in March. “So it is in our interest to bring people in.”
These arguments justify an agency welcome for stateless migrants — whether they add up to thousands or millions of people.
This official welcome for legal and illegal migrants also allows foreign governments to create — or even sell — a “stateless” status to citizens who want to live in the United States.
Already, border guards and journalists frequently find valid identification documents that have been discarded by economic migrants as they cross into the United States.
WATCH — AMERICA THE LANDFILL: Exclusive Video Shows Heaps of Trash Strewn Across Southern Border by Migrants
John RourkeAlso, the administration’s new welcome for stateless people will help dictatorships such as China, Cuba, or Venezuela send their unwanted people — such as convicted criminals and potential rebels — to live in the United States.
The state department admitted that foreign governments could convert their citizens into apparently stateless people who could be eligible for U.S. residency:
A stateless person is someone who, under national laws, does not enjoy citizenship — the legal bond between a government and an individual — in any country. While some people are de jure, or legally stateless persons (meaning they are not recognized as citizens under the laws of any state), many people are de facto, or effectively stateless persons (meaning they are not recognized as citizens by any state even if they have a claim to citizenship under the laws of one or more states).
…
The following are some common causes of statelessness:
- Lack of birth registration and birth certificate
- Birth to stateless parents
- Political change and transfer of territory, which may alter the nationality status of citizens of the former state(s)
- Administrative oversights, procedural problems, conflicts of law between two countries, or destruction of official records
- Alteration of nationality during marriage or the dissolution of marriage between couples from different countries
- Targeted discrimination against minorities
Biden’s deputies “will work to explore ways to reduce barriers to legally available immigration relief and benefits faced by stateless persons,” the state department said.
ut and paste youtube links
DOCUMENTARY
RFK Jr.'s full press conference on border policy and documentary.
Q&A: Border Security & Documentary
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Border Control Is Love, Not Hate
Americans must control their borders for humanitarian reasons, says Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Democrat who is challenging President Joe Biden for the 2024 nomination.
“The reason for strong border control is not xenophobia, bigotry, or hate,” Kennedy tweeted on August 7. “The reason is humanitarian conscience … Ruthless criminal cartels have woven drugs, immigration, and human trafficking together into a multibillion-dollar business,” he added.
Kennedy is trying to restore the Democrat party’s former skepticism about migration, which largely ended when President Barack Obama signaled his support for illegal migration in 2012.
Obama’s signal prompted status-seeking progressive voters to discard their claimed support for working-class Americans, and to instead vociferously support mass illegal migration as a “humanitarian” cause. In time, they portrayed the public’s demand for border control as “hate” or “xenophobia.”
That elitist and condescending view remains a minority because the public is alarmed by the civic and economic cost of Biden’s mass migration.
Under President Joe Biden, and with Obama’s quiet backing, Democratic progressives have imported more than five million illegals — along with millions of legal immigrants and visa workers.
The huge inflow of migrants has subsidized coastal investors, imported clients for government agencies, weakened the political power of middle-class America, made many millions of Americans dependent on the government, and may keep the Democrat party in power for decades.
The massive flood has displaced millions of younger and older Americans, cut wages, pushed up housing prices, enriched coastal investors, impoverished heartland states, and helped expand drug deaths in the United States.
Biden’s loose border policies have diverted investment from the migrants’ home countries, fueled cartel networks, subsidized foreign dictatorships, and created a nationwide archipelago of U.S. workplaces where migrant adults and teenagers work in terrible conditions to pay off their debts to the cartels.
Biden’s migration has also killed thousands of migrants:
The couple [Pedro Luis Torrealba, and his wife said they] started the roadless crossing on the border between Colombia and Panama — the deadly Darién Gap — with more than 60 other migrants, Torrealba said outside the parish house on Thursday night. Only 22 completed the trek across the 60 miles of jungle and steep mountains, he said. Some fell from cliffs, others were swept away by flood waters.
But Kennedy has recognized the damage and unpopularity of Biden’s migration:
Extraction Migration
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites and the establishment to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
In many speeches, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country” Mayorkas claims.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
The couple [Pedro Luis Torrealba, and his wife said they] started the roadless crossing on the border between Colombia and Panama — the deadly Darién Gap — with more than 60 other migrants, Torrealba said outside the parish house on Thursday night. Only 22 completed the trek across the 60 miles of jungle and steep mountains, he said. Some fell from cliffs, others were swept away by flood waters.
Immigration Experts Claim Biden Admin Abusing the Law to Release Illegals into US
Immigration experts say that the Biden administration is skirting the immigration laws that are on the books in order to release illegal immigrants into the country.
Recently, the Heritage Foundation hosted a panel event called, “Catch, Released, and Then What?” where three different immigration experts discussed how the Biden administration handling of the border crisis is impacting the country in a negative way.
The speakers explained how the Biden Administration is abusing every loophole in the immigration system to release illegals into the country.
“When they release them they release them under two authorities, parole... which is only supposed to be used in the case of somebody who needs emergency medical treatment or is a material witness in a criminal case in the United States - but the Biden administration has paroled 1.4 million people on ca se by case basis completely outside of those parameters” said Andrew Arthur, who is a Resident Fellow in Law and Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies and was a Former Immigration Judge.
“The other way they are releasing them is under section 236a of the INA (Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952), which is the general arrest authority and release authority in federal law with respect to immigration. That only applies in the case of somebody who is arrested on a warrant - its not going to surprise you, those border patrol agents aren’t, you know, there with warrants, you asking, 'hey Simon I got your arrest warrant here.' They are completely abusing that arrest warrant authority and then releasing those people on their own recognizance” he added.
Another panelist, Tomas Homan, former Acting Director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, said that the Biden administration is purposely not detaining illegal immigrants at the border.
“So nearly 9 out of 10 who claim asylum never get relief from U.S courts because they don’t qualify or they don’t show up, so then they get an order of removal."
"If you're in ICE detention and you get an order of removal you get removed 99% percent of the time but if you’re not in detention, like a family group and you get an order of removal - you leave 6% of the time. So they know what they're doing by not detaining people in an ICE bed” he said.
Homan also says that there needs to be more congressional oversight hearings regarding "Alternatives to Detention” (ATD) and the nongovernmental organizations that are working at the border.
“They need to have oversight hearings on what's going on with detention on what's going on with ATD, what’s going on with all these sole sourced contracts of the NGOs. How are all of these billions of dollars going to these NGOs that are transporting illegal aliens to the United States?”
NGOs have played a massive role in transporting migrants across the border, Including Catholic Charities and George Soros organizations that receive billions of dollars from the US government. This has led to a crisis of illegal aliens being packed in hotels across the United States.
New Yorkers to Spend $12 Billion on Illegal Immigration — Triple the Cost Previously Projected
New York City taxpayers may spend $12 billion on waves of border crossers and illegal aliens arriving in the city daily, triple the cost previously projected by Mayor Eric Adams (D).
On Wednesday, Adams announced that nearly 100,000 border crossers and illegal aliens have arrived in New York City since the spring of last year — about 18 times the population of Saratoga, New York.
Close to 60,000 of those migrants remain living off city taxpayers.
The cost over the next three years, Adams said, will hit $12 billion for New Yorkers, who are already some of the most tax-burdened Americans in the United States. To house, feed, and care for migrants, New Yorkers will spend $3.6 billion this fiscal year, $4.7 billion in Fiscal Year 2024, and $6.1 billion in Fiscal Year 2025.
New York City Mayor’s Office
“Since last year, nearly 100,000 asylum seekers have arrived in our city asking for shelter, and we are past our breaking point,” Adams said in a statement:
New York City has been left to pick up the pieces of a broken immigration system — one that is projected to cost our city $12 billion over the course of three fiscal years without policy changes and further support from the state and federal governments. Our compassion may be limitless, but our resources are not. This is the budgetary reality we are facing if we don’t get the additional support we need. [Emphasis added]
Previously, Adams’ office had projected illegal immigration to New York City would cost taxpayers about $4.2 billion, as the city spends at least $8 million every day to house, feed, and care for migrants.
Adams noted the situation outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, which the city has transformed into a luxury migrant camp. In recent days, border crossers and illegal aliens — primarily from Burkina Faso — slept on the sidewalks outside the hotel.
Police officers take security measures outside the Roosevelt Hotel as asylum seekers set up camp, waiting for placement inside the shelter, after the Manhattan relief center is at full capacity in New York City, New York, on August 2, 2023. (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Migrants wait outside the Roosevelt Hotel, hoping for a place to stay on August 2, 2023, in New York City, New York. (Leonardo Munoz/VIEWpress)
Hundreds of migrants sleep in line early on August 1, 2023, for placement at the Roosevelt Hotel intake center in New York City, New York. (TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
Police officers take security measures outside the Roosevelt Hotel as asylum seekers set up camp, waiting for placement inside the shelter, after the Manhattan relief center is at full capacity in New York City, New York, on August 2, 2023. (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
WATCH: Migrants Waiting for Entry to Roosevelt Hotel
emorrisWhile Adams pleads with President Joe Biden for the federal government to effectively bail New York City out over the illegal immigration surge, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) recently said she is “livid” with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Biden for approving roughly $105 million to go to the city that was meant for border communities.
“The fact that a yeoman’s amount of this money went to New York City, in my opinion, is wrong because they are not a border state, and they are not facing the kind of pressure that we are facing here,” Sinema said. “So when I hear from other parts of the country say, ‘Oh, it’s hard. Our shelters are overwhelmed’ — yeah, come live a day in the life of Yuma, Somerton, or San Luis. Just one day.”
To deal with the number of migrants flooding onto New York City sidewalks, Adams’ office will soon open a mega-shelter on Randall’s Island, which will see over 10,000 hours of services and recreation time meant for New Yorkers canceled.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
The Migrant Crisis Is Hochul’s to Solve
New York’s governor can help clarify whether a seemingly boundless provision for shelter has any limits.
Over the full year that New York City has struggled to house an overwhelming number of recent border-crossers—now at 57,200 migrants in city shelters, more than double the pre-Biden shelter population—Mayor Eric Adams still hasn’t questioned the principal factor attracting migrants here: Gotham’s decades-old agreement that everyone in the city has a right to shelter. Last week, though, a state judge provided a new motive on the part of a much broader constituency (beyond just city residents) to question this supposedly ironclad right: a reminder that the right to shelter, ambiguous as it is, is a state responsibility. Governor Kathy Hochul should view this new risk threatening state residents and taxpayers as an opportunity to question the right to shelter itself.
Last Friday, after images of adults camped outside of Midtown’s Roosevelt Hotel were beamed around the world, the Legal Aid Society (the advocacy group that defends the right to shelter) and city officials stood before a judge to determine how New York can meet its purported obligations. The conference proceedings weren’t made public, but in the telling of Legal Aid Society attorney Josh Goldfein, State Supreme Court judge Erika Edwards gave the city a safety valve of sorts: the state. Edwards told city officials to outline how the state could help—not just by providing money, but by providing physical locations, including private hotels and housing outside of New York City. The judge will consider the request, and the state’s response, on August 16.
Edwards’s directive points up how strange and convoluted New York’s right to shelter is—and how, unchallenged, it poses hidden liabilities for New Yorkers well beyond city limits. The right to shelter arises from a 1979 lawsuit brought by the Coalition for the Homeless that sought to guarantee shelter for homeless men. The Coalition’s lawyers asserted that the state constitution provided such a right, through the its declaration that the “aid, care and support of the needy are public concerns and shall be provided by the state and by such of its subdivisions.” That same year, the state supreme court agreed.
But the state’s highest court, the court of appeals—not the supreme court, despite its name—never got a chance to rule. Instead, in 1981, the city and state entered into a consent decree, under which the city agreed to “provide shelter and board to each homeless man [who meets] the need standard to qualify for the home relief program established in New York State” or to any man needing “temporary shelter” because of “physical, mental or social dysfunction.”
The right to shelter, then, has never been confirmed by the state’s highest court. If it were a right, it would be enumerated as such under the state constitution. In the original lawsuit, the governor of New York, Hugh Carey, was a named defendant, as well as the city’s mayor, Ed Koch. In the 1981 settlement, neither the state nor the city acknowledged the right to shelter: the settlement explicitly says that the city would provide shelter to adult men “without final adjudication or any issue of fact or law therein, and without . . . admission by any party . . . with respect to any issue.”
At the time, these distinctions between state and city responsibility didn’t matter much. After its 1975 municipal-debt default, New York City was itself under state receivership, the city budget guaranteed by a state-appointed board. It was thus Albany, not the city, that agreed to spend city tax resources on homeless shelter. The 1981 agreement also states that “the commissioner of the New York State Department of Social Services agrees to reimburse the New York City Human Resources Agency for the operation of a shelter facility or shelter facilities referred to in this judgment,” paying half the cost, while acknowledging, somewhat contradictorily, that “nothing in this judgment can or does obligate the legislature of the State of New York to appropriate funds.”
The liability seemed small and wasn’t contrary to the then-mayor’s policy goals. At the time, the city and state spent about $11.3 million annually ($40 million in today’s dollars) on bare-bones shelter; the new burden imposed by the settlement seemed so small that the agreement references specific “Bowery Lodging Houses” by name. Koch, moreover, wanted “dysfunctional” men off of the public streets; the same year, he sought state approval to hold homeless adults for 72 hours “for purposes of simply giving them a bath and medical attention and doing what is necessary to put them into short-term reasonable physical condition without their consent.”
Forty-two years ago, when they agreed to the right-to-shelter regime for troubled New York street vagrants, Koch and Carey could never have contemplated that it would cover an indefinite number of people, men, women and children, and from around the world, no less—people who had not even spent one night in New York City before becoming eligible for private shelter. Over the ensuing four decades, though, subsequent court cases expanded the meaning of “dysfunctional” adult men to cover, essentially, everyone. The city began renting whole apartments and tourist- and business-quality hotel rooms rather than relying on the communal shelters and indigent-serving rooming houses named in the 1981 agreement. State funding did not keep pace. In fiscal year 2019, of the nearly $2.1 billion spent on homeless services, only $180 million came from the state; the remainder came from Washington ($700 million) and the city itself ($1.2 billion).
Now the migrant crisis has overwhelmed a system not built for it. The city is spending $4.1 billion on shelter this year, with just $600 million of that figure coming from Washington and $700 million from the state. The city is housing migrants in nearly 200 emergency shelters, mostly hotels, including mid-scale tourist hotels all over core Manhattan that would otherwise be contributing to the city’s economy and tax base.
Still, Mayor Adams won’t acknowledge that the city cannot guarantee shelter to all newcomers. Instead, he has taken two half-measures, still being adjudicated in court. First, the city has asked the court to modify the shelter agreement so that “the obligations to provide shelter to both homeless adults and to adult families”—people without children—“shall be stayed when the city of New York … lacks the resources and capacity to establish and maintain sufficient shelter sites.” Second, the city has asked adult migrants to reapply for shelter after 60 days.
Neither of these steps addresses the issue. On the first: Who decides when the city “lacks the resources”—the court? Theoretically, New York could slash every other aspect of its city budget, from fire protection to public pools, and turn over every one of its estimated 125,000 hotel rooms to migrants; it could also raise property taxes to pay for new costs. On the second, asking people to reapply for shelter after 60 days does nothing, when, after the 60 days are up, they can still prove, as they likely can, that they have nowhere else in America to go. They will simply become eligible for a new shelter placement every 60 days.
The only way to address the problem is to reconsider the right to shelter itself—not at the city level, but at the state level. One way or the other, the state’s top court should decide: Does the state, under the state constitution, have an obligation to provide shelter to the entire world, or doesn’t it? Does every single one of the state’s “subdivisions,” from Sag Harbor to Scarsdale, bear this same obligation? And will lawmakers from around the state agree with the court’s eventual interpretation? If not, they could propose a constitutional amendment to clarify the constitution’s language on the “needy.” New York’s founding fathers, in their wisdom, created transparent political and constitutional avenues through which to decide big questions; we need not depend on a four-decade-old midlevel court ruling to set our future course.
Governor Hochul should raise this issue herself, and soon, though her legal team would likely counsel against it. Why take the chance of enshrining a constitutional right that remains ambiguous, and risk more state spending on such an expanded right?
If Hochul doesn’t confront the problem, though, state residents and taxpayers likely will end up paying for a de facto right to shelter anyway, with “city” shelter residents dispersed throughout the state. Judge Edwards’s directive was a warning that she understands New York State’s implied constitutional obligation here. New York State taxpayers and residents soon will spend untold billions on a phantom right conjured up four decades ago under circumstances that don’t apply to today’s reality. It’s up to the governor to ask the state’s highest court, its lawmakers, and, potentially, its voters what they believe is the state’s explicit constitutional obligation to the “needy.”
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