What does a small, solidly Republican city in Oregon have in common with California’s largest liberal enclaves? All breathed a sigh of relief this year thanks to the far-right U.S. Supreme Court.

The court’s conservative bloc ruled in favor of the city of Grants Pass, Ore., in June, overturning a key lower court ruling on homelessness and clearing the way for local governments to crack down on sleeping in public spaces regardless of the availability of housing or shelter. California’s response to the ruling has become a vivid reminder of not just the intractability of the homelessness epidemic but also the tension between national liberal politics and local policy in Democratic-dominated states and cities.

Some 186,000 people across California lack consistent shelter. Roughly 84% of the state’s voters believe homelessness is a “very serious” problem, a Quinnipiac University poll found, and Democrats and Republicans were in similarly broad agreement on that assessment, at 81% and 85%, respectively. In that light, it’s not surprising that California officials have wasted no time since Grants Pass in implementing their preferred “solution” to the homelessness problem.

From San Diego to San Francisco, state and local workers began disassembling makeshift shelters and camps and displacing the homeless people living in them. Within days, entire blocks were remade across the state. Residents rallied to social media platforms such as Reddit and Nextdoor to exchange strategies for getting homeless encampments removed from their own neighborhoods.

Other California residents have taken the Supreme Court’s ruling and Democratic officials’ exuberant co-sign as further evidence of the nation’s growing disdain for society’s most marginalized. Reports spread of homeless people being ejected from campsites with little or no warning, their pets taken away and medications lost, among other indignities.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups have condemned the Grants Pass ruling. The chief executive of the National Alliance to End Homelessness said it set a “dangerous precedent.” But the precedent set by California Democrats has arguably been far more dangerous.

During the initial waves of the Golden State’s housing crisis, in the late 1970s, Democratic politicians were reluctant to be seen as overtly antagonistic to the state’s homeless people, many of them veterans of the nation’s wars in Vietnam and Korea. But as the homeless population has grown and diversified, officials have faced deepening NIMBY sentiment not just in California’s well-heeled liberal cities but also in Democratic-leaning working-class communities that increasingly experience the highest rates of homelessness and related problems such as loitering and blight. As a result, anti-homeless policies have become more politically appealing despite being painfully at odds with inclusivity and other virtues Democrats signal on the national stage.

Addressing the housing crisis has been a quintessential and enduring social justice cause for Democrats, encompassing themes that tend to unify the party, including health, economic and racial equity. According to one survey, 82% of homeless adults in California reported having experienced a serious mental health condition, and 65% had used illicit drugs at some point. The state’s Black people are disproportionately affected by homelessness: Despite making up only about 5% of California’s total population, they represent roughly 25% of its homeless people. Such statistics helped liberals frame homelessness as a product of Republican policies weakening social services and promoting unchecked capitalism.

But that view has lost support as homelessness has become more dramatic and visible over the last decade. In some of California’s liberal enclaves, homeless encampments have become full-blown tent cities. Scenes of squalor, drug use and petty crime have spawned a subculture of gonzo-style documentary videos racking up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. San Francisco and Los Angeles have the most prominent crises, inviting scrutiny of the latter city’s readiness to host the 2028 Olympics.

Democrats’ conundrum is whether authorities should roust, fine and imprison people residing in public spaces in the interest of answering the broader community’s quality-of-life concerns. Critics have argued that such criminalization is a cruel distraction and that more affordable housing is the only way to meaningfully address the crisis.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and his predecessor, Jerry Brown, devoted billions of dollars to homelessness prevention and affordable housing even as the homeless population generally continued to grow. Newsom was quick to seize on the conservative Supreme Court’s permission to put punishment ahead of housing, warning cities that if they don’t remove encampments, they risk losing state funding. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who just lost a reelection bid partly because of concerns about homelessness, likewise promised to be “very aggressive” in removing encampments. Never mind that those displaced by the state’s homeless sweeps often end up occupying another nearby space and returning at a later date.

So how did we get here? California’s ruling Democrats have tried to have it all ways, largely cultivating and tolerating deeply bureaucratic housing development standards while amplifying a booming tech industry populated by employees willing to pay top dollar for homes, dramatically boosting prices. And although Newsom and others have heralded emergency housing and other measures to answer the crisis, the total capacity is far short of the unhoused population. That’s partly because new facilities are often rebuffed by cities such as the L.A. suburb of Norwalk, which recently enacted a moratorium on homeless shelters.

Reducing and preventing homelessness, whatever the underlying motivations, is one of the few civic concerns that bind the political parties together in an age of stark polarization. Beyond the obvious moral merits of the cause, it could provide a road map to arrive at bipartisan solutions for other challenges facing the state and country. Unfortunately, the consensus on homelessness is coalescing around a prescription with little chance of long-term success.

Jerel Ezell is an assistant professor of community health sciences at UC Berkeley.

President Biden on Thanksgiving said he was thankful that the transition of power to a second Trump administration has gone smoothly, while urging the incoming commander-in-chief to “rethink” threats to impose steep tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods. 

“I hope that [President-elect Trump] rethinks it. I think it’s a counterproductive thing to do,” Biden told reporters Thursday on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, where he was spending the holiday with family. “We’re surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Oceans and two allies — Mexico and Canada. The last thing we need to do is begin to screw up those relationships. I think that we got them in a good place.”

Earlier this week, Trump vowed to impose 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada in an effort to get both nations to do more to stop the flow of illegal immigrants and illicit drugs into the U.S. Trump spoke with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo on Wednesday, and both apparently came to an understanding, he said. 

CHINA FREES US PASTOR AFTER NEARLY 20 YEARS OF WRONGFUL DETAINMENT

“She has agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “We also talked about what can be done to stop the massive drug inflow into the United States, and also, U.S. consumption of these drugs. It was a very productive conversation!”

Trump also threatened to impose an additional 10% tariff on China. Biden said Chinese President Xi Jinping “doesn’t want to make a mistake.”

“I am not saying he is our best buddy, but he understands what’s at stake,” he said. 

DONALD TRUMP CALLS ON THE NEW YORK TIMES TO APOLOGIZE FOR ‘GETTING YEARS OF TRUMP COVERAGE WRONG’

President Biden talks to the media during a visit to a Nantucket fire station on Thanksgiving in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on Thursday. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

President Biden also said Thursday that illegal border crossings have been “down considerably” since Trump’s first term in office. Trump heavily campaigned on the border crisis that exploded after Biden took office. 

The president also said he was pleased with the cease-fire deal between Israel and Lebanon and that he was “very, very happy” about China releasing three Americans who were “wrongfully detained” for several years. 

Regarding the transition from his presidency to a second Trump administration, Biden said he wants the process to occur without any hiccups.  

President Biden talks to the media in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on Thursday. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

“I want to make sure it goes smoothly. And all the talk about what he is going to do and not do, I think that maybe it is a little bit of internal reckoning on his part,” he said. 

A coping mechanism I’ve adopted since the election of Donald Trump, a man more deserving of prison than the presidency, is to look for reasons for even the slightest optimism about the nation’s governance over the next four years. To that end, this Thanksgiving I’m grateful for the Republican “Grim Reaper,” Mitch McConnell.

Really.

Yes, I’m saying I’m thankful for the sour senator from Kentucky who’s built a turkey of a legacy: Fighting for years, up to a conservative Supreme Court, to successfully decapitate limits on campaign contributions from corporations and special interests. Stuffing that court and lower benches with far-right jurists. Finally, engineering Trump’s Senate acquittal after the House impeached him for inciting an insurrection that trashed the Capitol McConnell professes to revere.

It’s because of that last McConnell “achievement” that we face Trump 2.0. Had the Senate convicted Trump in February 2021, it probably would have followed with a vote to bar him from running for office again, as the Senate has for impeached and convicted judges.

So here we are, and McConnell too.

At 82, the longest-serving party leader in Senate history is voluntarily surrendering his crown to mentee Sen. John Thune of South Dakota. He will serve the last two years of his seventh and perhaps final term among the rank and file of the Republican majority. It’s McConnell’s just deserts to take a demotion as Trump returns to the summit: For all of McConnell’s past services to the once and future president, since Jan. 6 the two men have loathed each other more than I loathe marshmallows on sweet potatoes.

Familiar as he is with power, McConnell is well aware of who holds it now. Still, he won’t be without clout in Trump’s Washington. He won’t retreat to the backbenches or bend the knee. He even relishes the schoolyard nickname Trump gave him — “Old Crow” — doling out bottles of the Kentucky bourbon with his mug on the label.

McConnell may be stooped with age, but he’s suggesting publicly and privately that he’ll rise to the occasion as leader of a Republican resistance in the Senate, providing cover to others, should Trump overreach. The president-elect already has done so with some grotesque Cabinet choices, preceded by his anticonstitutional demand that senators forfeit their “advice and consent” power and instead be rubber stamps. McConnell’s nearly immediate response amounted to “No way.”

If Trump, as president, carries through on his threat to illegally impound funds that Congress approves, expect McConnell to cry foul, and even back a court challenge. Most of all, look for McConnell — who will chair the defense spending subcommittee — to stand for continued U.S. leadership in the world, especially in support of Ukraine and NATO. That posture will surely ruffle the feathers of an “America First” president enamored of dictators and disdainful of allies.

“Opposition to Ukraine is about as much nonsense as [saying] Biden wasn’t legitimately elected,” McConnell says in a bite at Trump in a new biography, “The Price of Power.”

I’m not naive. McConnell will go along with many Trump actions, including serving up a bounty of unaffordable new tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations, urging Americans to gorge on fossil fuels and, again, stuffing the courts with right-wing ideologues.

Yet recall the ancient proverb: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

As ruthless and rule-bending as McConnell has been on judicial confirmations and more, I’m betting he’ll respect institutional and constitutional lines that Trump scornfully crosses, and recruit a few other Republican senators to help hold those lines. A few Republicans are all that’s needed when the party’s majority is a narrow 53 to 47; Trump can lose just four votes if Democrats are united in opposition. I count up to a dozen Republicans who could take turns to buck Trump occasionally, which would dilute the political pain of Trump’s wrath.

On Trump’s nominations, for instance. Ex-con Stephen K. Bannon, among other MAGA militants, blamed McConnell (“You gotta give the devil its due”) for whipping up opposition that forced the unsavory former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida off the menu as Trump’s nominee for attorney general. Publicly, too, McConnell was no chicken, as he countered Trump’s call to let nominees slide through as recess appointments.

“Each of these nominees needs to come before the Senate and go through the process and be vetted,” McConnell said two weeks ago. The institutionalist in him knows that, under the Constitution, the Senate’s power to confirm nominees is equal to a president’s in naming them.

Among those he could help defeat are Trump’s worst picks: Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the candidates to head intelligence, defense and health, respectively. A polio survivor, McConnell surely chokes on Kennedy’s anti-vax rhetoric. Likewise for Gabbard’s and Hegseth’s echoes of Trump’s skepticism and Vladimir Putin’s talking points on Ukraine.

McConnell has little to lose. He’ll be liberated in the new Congress, he told his biographer, Michael Tackett, no longer required as party leader to attend to the appetites of moderate and MAGA Republicans alike. He’s not expected to seek reelection in 2026. Sure, he’s unpopular nationally, in both parties. But inside the Senate, most Republicans respect and even like him. His outsized standing there will parallel that of former House Speaker and GOAT Nancy Pelosi, whom he praised last month: “I think Pelosi has done a pretty good job as a former speaker, still being able to express herself and have an audience.”

Similarly, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina predicted of McConnell, “When he speaks, people will listen.”

Forget the turkey. I’m bringing the popcorn. And rooting for the Old Crow.

@jackiekcalmes