Andrew Yang Is Wrong About Prostitution

Entrepreneur and 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang said Sunday that “we should consider decriminalizing sex work on the part of the seller,” as this would be “helpful in combating human trafficking.” Presumably, Yang is talking about prostitution—the form of sex work that is illegal in the U.S. even when all parties involved are consenting adults.

Sex workers, human rights organizations, and criminal justice reformers around the world have been fighting to decriminalize prostitution in places where it remains illegal or where restrictions on legal prostitution are so intense that most sex workers end up criminalized anyway. These activists argue—with both a lot of data and a lot of personal experiences on their side—that relegating prostitution to the black market only puts the people involved in more danger and allows more abuses to be perpetrated against them. The only way to truly protect sex workers and cut down on coercive, forced, or underage prostitution (a.k.a. “sex trafficking”) is “rights, not rescue,” as one popular rallying cry goes.

Lately, a coalition of old-school moral crusaders (includings both the Christian right and certain retrograde feminists) has taken to co-opting the language of the sex worker rights movement to push their anti-sex work agenda. This means many of them say they are for prostitution “decriminalization” while still pushing to keep prostitution between consenting adults as a crime.

They get away with this linguistic malpractice by saying that they would decriminalize the act of offering paid sex as long as it is still illegal to purchase such services.

Obviously, this is not decriminalization within any normal meaning of the word.

Yang’s preferred model would still mean devoting law enforcement resources to catching people attempting to pay for sex—and that would mean monitoring and conducting stings on sex workers. Sex workers would still be unable to advertise openly, to band together for safer working conditions, or to screen clients in an efficient manner, among other things that could actually “be helpful in combating human trafficking” and sexual violence.

Yes, sex workers would, under select circumstances, be able to avoid arrest and jail. But their business would remain in the black market, nullifying almost any practical benefits of decriminalization.

This bad idea has taken root in centrist political circles as calls for decriminalizing prostitution grow louder and sex worker rights becomes more of a mainstream issue. Endorsing this asymmetric criminalization model—which has gone through a slew of rebrandings and is known variously as the Swedish Model, the Nordic Model, the Equality Model, and End Demand—lets politicians, particularly Democrats, pay lip service to sex worker concerns while still appeasing those convinced that the U.S. is in the midst of a “human trafficking epidemic.”

When she was running for president, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) repeatedly said she was for decriminalization while still talking about the need to arrest “johns” (that is, prostitutes’ customers). Now Yang is taking up this banner.

Proponents of partial criminalization tend to frame it as a feminist and sex-worker-friendly solution. But consider that a large majority of sex workers are women and their customers men, a breakdown that grows even more pronounced in police and political discourse on prostitution, where “sellers” and “buyers” are basically always gendered as female and male, respectively. That gives you a frame in which men and women can participate in the same consensual sexual exchange, with the men criminalized for their participation and the women not. This so-called “Equality Model” considers adult women’s sexual consent as it does that of children: invalid.

Adults are rightfully barred from sexual activity with minors because we recognize that a child’s consent to sex is not meaningful. (The child, of course, is not criminalized in this scenario.) Do we really want to apply the same standard to grown women? To consider them less than fully adult, lacking the full mental capacity to meaningfully consent?

Sex workers on Twitter have been telling Yang this.

“You are wrong in every way that it’s possible to be wrong,” tweeted the Seattle dominatrix Mistress Matisse. “Sexworkers want rights, not rescue.”

“NO Andrew, you should not consider this,” said another dom, Mistress Scarlet. “Sex workers do NOT want the Nordic/Swedish model. We do NOT want our clients arrested. Listen to US!!! We want full decriminalization of all adult consensual sex work!!” 

“You should consult with sex workers because the language here is all wrong. We want FULL decrim, not just for the seller, but the buyer too,” wrote the writer, activist, and porn performer Sydney Leathers. “There’s no situation where criminalizing clients is good for sex workers (& we’re not all victims!)”

The comments like this go on and on.

Let’s hope that Yang—who has built a reputation for outside-the-swamp thinking—will actually listen to what sex workers and their allies are telling him right now. Yang is right that “we should consider decriminalizing sex work,” but not  only “on the part of the seller.” We should decriminalize sex work across on the part of all parties involved so long as everyone is a consenting adult. Only by doing that do we have any chance of helping sex sellers who fall outside that category.

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Indian Prime Minister Modi’s Useful Idiots in America Should Now Condemn Him

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is using an iron fist to smash protests over his latest effort to erode the citizenship rights of Indian Muslims. He, and many of the state governments that his party controls, have suspended the internet in many cities, dispatched paramilitary forces to storm Muslim colleges and beat up students, and imposed a ban on protests, including in Bangalore, where police roughed up and arrested one of India’s most renowned historians, Ramachandra Guha. The death toll of the protesters has now reached 25.

Modi is out of control. Even China’s authoritarian rulers have shown more restraint in dealing with the Hong Kong protesters.

It is high time that Modi’s admirers in the West—politicians, business leaders, and Hollywood celebrities who fawned over him—admit that they made a profound mistake. They embraced him despite clear warnings that his high-minded talk about turning India into an economic and technological powerhouse masked a sinister Hindu nationalist agenda.

He is not a hero of progress and development but a blood-and-soil nativist arguably more dangerous than any in the West.

Let us remember what we once knew but seem to have forgotten: Modi cut his political teeth in the RSS, the militant wing of a party obsessed with avenging historic slights—real and imagined—that Hindus endured under Muslim rule centuries ago. One of the RSS’s members assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, whom some Hindu nationalists regard as a Muslim “appeaser.” Modi himself has a long history of anti-Muslim animus. In 1992, he rode a chariot in the Hindu procession that marched to the iconic Babri mosque and razed it. His feelings morphed into actual bloodletting in 2002, when he was the chief minister of the state of Gujarat. Hindu thugs, some connected with his party, went on a rampage and slaughtered 1,000 Muslim men, women, and children as the state police stood by.

Modi expressed not an iota of remorse for the events in Gujarat when he ran for the prime minister’s office in 2012, even comparing the murdered Muslims to “puppies” run over by a careless driver.

Yet after he became prime minister, the world gave him the benefit of the doubt. The man who had been banned from many Western countries, including America, because of his role in the Gujarat pogrom became an international sensation.

A campaign-style extravaganza that Modi held in Madison Square Garden to celebrate his victory was attended not only by 18,000 gushing Indian Americans but also 40 U.S congressmen. Hugh Jackman introduced him, and he applauded heartily when Modi recited Sanskrit shlokas or verses calling for world peace.

President Barack Obama went beyond ordinary diplomatic protocol in welcoming Modi during that visit. He hosted a White House dinner for Modi and invited him to stroll to the Martin Luther King memorial with him. A year later, when Obama went with first lady Michelle to India for a state visit, he commended Modi’s “legendary work ethic” and his fashion sense, even joking about wearing a kurta shirt to imitate Modi’s sartorial style.

The silencing effect that Obama’s chumminess had on Modi’s critics cannot be overstated. If the first black American president who fully understood the struggle for minority rights could endorse Modi, they reasoned, then Modi naysayers were just paranoid hysterics whose hatred was blinding them to his manifold virtues.

President Donald Trump, who isn’t shy about hobnobbing with odious leaders, has unsurprisingly taken things to a whole new level in a naked bid for the Indian American vote. At the #HowdyModi rally held in Houston this summer to celebrate Modi’s re-election, Trump warmed up the crowd for Modi, calling him “his friend” and “a great man and a great leader.” A whole throng of Texas leaders from both parties, including Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson, stood behind Modi on stage like a hallelujah chorus.

Even more disheartening has been the reaction of U.S. industry leaders. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg got the ball rolling five years ago when he enthusiastically served up Modi agitprop, holding a townhall event for him at his company’s headquarters. Zuckerberg asked Modi such pointed questions as how much he loved his mother and how he planned to use his mastery of social media to transform India. Two weeks after this lovefest, India experienced the first in what was to become an epidemic of beef lynchings under Modi. Hindu cow vigilantes stormed a Muslim family’s home in Dadri, a village not far from Modi’s home in New Delhi, and pulled the old patriarch from his bed and bludgeoned him to death. Modi the transformative leader’s response? Days of silence.

Zuckerberg was unfazed. He reiterated during Modi’s #HowdyModi visit that he “deeply appreciates PM Modi’s commitment to Digital India.” This was one month after Modi shut down the internet in Kashmir and imposed central rule on this Muslim-dominated state, arresting its leaders and scrapping its constitutionally guaranteed autonomy. That shutdown is now in its fourth month, earning Modi, the vaunted digital leader, the great distinction of engineering the longest internet shutdown in a democracy.

That still hasn’t deterred Zuckerberg’s fellow tech luminaries from piling encomiums on Modi.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates bestowed his foundation’s prestigious “Global Goalkeeper Award” on Modi this September for his “Swaatch (Clean) India” campaign and for expanding access to toilets in the country. This elicited howls of protest from human rights groups. Muslim artists Riz Ahmed and Jameela Jamil pulled out of the awards ceremony. But Gates defended the award, calling Modi “brave” for tackling the issue of toilets.

Then there is Bridgewater Associates co-founder Ray Dalio, who opined last month, after India’s economic growth hit a 10-year low and unemployment a 45-year high, that “Prime Minister Modi is one of the best, if not the best, leaders in the world.” And Qualcomm Chairman Paul Jacobs proclaimed that Modi’s leadership is “really moving in the right direction.” And Unilever CEO Paul Polman declared that he was “very confident about the Modi government.”

The effect that such endorsements have in emboldening Modi and undermining the internal points of resistance to him is incalculable. Try criticizing Modi to his supporters, and they’ll instantly throw all his international awards and accolades in your face. But whatever the excuse of these leaders for issuing such deluded statements in the past, there can’t be any now that Modi is taking the gloves off. Just because a fanatic has changed his tune doesn’t mean he has changes his mind.

The least these leaders can do now is condemn Modi’s campaign of persecution. It has been painful for many of us who believe in India’s pluralism and democracy to watch Modi transform himself from an international pariah to an international star with the help of Western elites. He may be unstoppable at this stage. But he is also a profoundly vain man, a publicity hound who craves international attention and respectability. So their condemnation now may well make a difference. Who knows how far he is prepared to go to advance his Hindu nationalist project?

The protesters in India are putting their lives on the line to stick up for their constitution and the nation’s minorities. It is their fight and they are fighting it. But it is not too much to ask that Modi’s useful idiots in the West acknowledge their mistake.

A version of this column appeared in The Week.

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Trump’s GOP Critics Are Dropping Like Flies

We don’t normally associate Republican lawmakers with former Mexican leaders. But similar to the way many Latin American ex-presidentes suddenly discover an interest in legalizing marijuana once safely out of office, GOP members of Congress have an uncanny way of finding reasons to oppose Donald Trump right around the time they announce retirement.

Rep. Francis Rooney (R–Fla.) on October 19 became the 21st Republican member of the 116th Congress—compared to just seven Democrats at the time and nine as of press time—to announce that he will not seek that which politicians otherwise live for: re-election. The move came precisely one day after the southwest Floridian became the first current member of the House Republican caucus to declare openness to impeaching the president over the question of whether he made delivery of authorized aid money to Ukraine contingent on the newly elected president there announcing a possible investigation into 2020 Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden.     

“It’s painful to me to see this kind of amateur diplomacy, riding roughshod over our State Department apparatus,” Rooney, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The New York Times. “I want to get the facts and do the right thing, because I’ll be looking at my children a lot longer than I’m looking to anybody in this building.”

Ten days later, Rep. Greg Walden (R–Ore.) became the 22nd Republican to announce retirement. The first Republican congressman to back an impeachment inquiry, self-described libertarian Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.), became a non-Republican within two months of that announcement, and at the end of October he was the only non-Democratic member of the House to back an impeachment investigation. Meanwhile, the growing number of premature retirees have been among the loudest in expressing alarm at the murky Ukraine-related behavior first made public by a CIA whistle-blower.

“There is a lot in the whistleblower complaint that is concerning,” Rep. Will Hurd (R–Texas), a former rising GOP star, tweeted September 26, seven weeks after announcing his own non-re-election. “We need to fully investigate all of the allegations addressed in the letter.”

It’s not just on substance that self-liberated Republicans dissent from a president who is often more popular among their constituents. They also tend to object much more bluntly than their remaining colleagues to Trump’s style, such as his statement that four House Democratic women of color should “go back” to their home countries, even though three of them were born in the United States.

“We’re here for a purpose—and it’s not this petty, childish bullshit,” Rep. Paul Mitchell (R–Mich.), prompted by the “go back” episode, told The Washington Post six weeks after his own surprise decision not to run again.

In one sense, the spike in Republican self-deportations—44 and counting in the House alone since Trump’s inauguration, compared to 25 Democrats during Barack Obama’s entire first term—is a boon to Trump, since it helps him shape the party more in his idiosyncratic image. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.), the former vice chair of the president’s transition team, is a good deal more Trumpy than the man she replaced in the upper chamber, frequent presidential critic Bob Corker.

But retiring Republicans in swing districts and states also have a tendency to be replaced by Democrats, as happened in Arizona after Sen. Jeff Flake left Capitol Hill. And that might be the vulnerability most likely to sink this presidency. Trump’s fate seems likely to be in the hands of the Senate, presuming the Democrat-run House approves articles of impeachment. Support for the president in the 53-member Senate GOP caucus has been wide but not deep, with Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) in particular criticizing Trump’s Ukraine gambits. And another three Republican senators will not be seeking re-election in 2020, freeing them up to speak openly if they choose.

Anyone who has bet on GOP lawmakers to meaningfully oppose the president has already lost a lot of money. And there is one anti-impeachment argument that may persuade even the most ardent anti-Trump Republicans: Removing a president in an election year seems much less politically wise than letting voters decide for themselves how his first term should be rewarded.

Republican senators may be damned either way. As of press time, public support for impeachment and disapproval of Trump’s presidency were reaching all-time highs. Sometimes the safest place to be in a firefight is far away from the front lines.

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Brickbat: Ain’t That a Kick

Chinese state TV pulled a scheduled broadcast of a Premier League soccer match between Arsenal and Manchester City after Arsenal midfielder Mesut Ozil tweeted criticism of China’s treatment of its Uighur Muslim minority and the silence of Muslims outside China. “Qurans are burned, mosques were closed down, Islamic theological schools, madrasas were banned, religious scholars were killed one by one. Despite all this, Muslims stay quiet,” he wrote.

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When Is an Officer Impeached? IV

Now that President Donald Trump has gotten wind of the fact that he might not yet have been impeached, we should make some things abundantly clear.

At a Turning Point USA event in Florida, the president noted, “In fact, there’s no impeachment. Their own lawyer said there’s no impeachment. What are we doing here?” The president is taking note of an op-ed by Noah Feldman, one of the Democratic expert witnesses at the House Judiciary impeachment hearings, who argued that the president is not technically impeached until the articles of impeachment are exhibited in the Senate.

The Republican expert witness, Jonathan Turley, has now argued that Feldman is wrong. Laurence Tribe was among those advising the House Democrats to postpone delivering the articles of impeachment to the Senate, but insists that the House has nonetheless already impeached the president.

I’ve weighed in here, here, and here.

As I pointed out early on, this debate has no practical consequence for Donald Trump and the operation of the current federal impeachment process.

The American public believes that the president has already been impeached.

The House of Representatives believes that the president has already been impeached. The current House rules specify that “The respondent in an impeachment proceeding is impeached by the adoption of the House of articles of impeachment.” The House resolution adopting the articles of impeachment against the president states that the president “is impeached” and directs that the articles of impeachment “be exhibited to the United States Senate.”

This current House is acting in a manner that is consistent with how the House has impeached officers since the early twentieth century, though it is a departure from how the House impeached officers for more than a century after the founding.

Feldman argued that the exhibition of the articles of impeachment to the Senate is an essential procedural component for realizing the House’s constitutional power to impeach. On this, he is almost certainly wrong.

In its early impeachments, the House authorized a member to go to the Senate and “impeach” an officer and then waited, sometimes for many weeks, before actually drafting and exhibiting the articles of impeachment in the Senate. The House and Senate thought the officer was impeached when the allegation was leveled at the bar of the Senate, not when the details of the charges were exhibited to the Senate. But neither Tribe nor Turley give much reason to think that the “power of impeachment” is best construed as simply passing a resolution of impeachment, nor do they grapple with the ample evidence that that was not how an “impeachment” was generally construed before the early twentieth century.

If you think that the the “power of impeachment” vested in the House is underspecified regarding the forms that the House has to follow in order to execute an impeachment or that it vests in the House a discretionary authority to specify the forms of an impeachment, then the current House rules are decisive. At least one state court has adopted this view of how the impeachment process works in American constitutions. The process of impeachment might be a matter of constitutional construction, and the longstanding federal construction is that an impeachment occurs at the moment the House votes to adopt an impeachment resolution.

If you think that the “power of impeachment” is fixed regarding the process of impeachment by the original public meaning of the term “impeachment,” then the current House rules are probably wrong as a matter of constitutional interpretation. At least one state court has adopted this view of how the impeachment process works in American constitutions and pointed to the evidence that what it means to impeach someone had a fairly determinate meaning under the U.S. Constitution.

Even if the House is behaving inappropriately in regard to the correct constitutional interpretation of the “power of impeachment” vested in the House by the U.S. Constitution, absolutely nothing turns on it.

Under current Senate rules, the Senate will not begin a trial until the articles of impeachment have been exhibited, regardless of whether or not an officer had actually been impeached prior to the House announcing that fact to the Senate. There are no legal or constitutional consequences for the president from having been “impeached,” except that he might eventually be subjected to a Senate trial. The House has not yet done what it needs to do to trigger a Senate impeachment trial.

If the House is doing it wrong, there are no consequences to the error. If the House is doing it wrong, there is no venue with the authority to correct the House. By the time of any Senate trial, the House’s error (if it is an error) will have been “corrected” by the exhibition of the articles of impeachment. If the House never formally communicates the impeachment to the Senate, then there will be no trial and scholars can have epic footnote battles over whether Trump was ever actually impeached.

If this were an impeachment in a state with a constitution that suspended Trump from office until he such a time that is acquitted in a Senate trial and empowered Mike Pence to take on the duties of acting president at the moment of Trump’s impeachment, then this question might matter—and it is quite possible that Trump, and not Pence, should currently be exercising the powers of his office. But Trump is not an officer under such a state constitution. He is an officer under the federal Constitution, and the federal Constitution creates one, and only one, consequence of an impeachment—the authorization of the Senate to conduct a trial to determine whether an officer is to be removed.

I was among those who were skeptical about Feldman’s argument when I first saw it, but it was a serious argument that turns out to have been partly true.

Moreover, I continue to believe that actions of the Speaker Nancy Pelosi in taking no steps to communicate the president’s impeachment to the Senate provides the House and the Democrats with no additional leverage over how exactly the Senate conducts the trial and tends to undermine the Democrats’ claim that the president’s immediate impeachment and removal is essential to the public safety. Given that the articles of impeachment have already been adopted and are ready to transmit, withholding those articles from the Senate tends to the paint the entire impeachment process as a partisan political stunt—which is unfortunate.

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Tiny Homes for Austin’s Homeless

Charlie Click was homeless and living in his car in Austin, Texas, when a stranger in a white truck offered him a sandwich and a fresh pair of socks. When he was in his late 50s, Click had lost his home and most of his possessions after a yearslong spiral that included four prison terms and two cancer diagnoses. The ordeal had left Click alone and dependent on pills and alcohol to cope, but the stranger’s kindness started a chain of events that would reverse the course of his life.

The Good Samaritan had been dispatched by Mobile Loaves & Fishes, a faith-based charity that delivers food to needy Austin residents. The organization had also constructed a village nearby for homeless people. Urged on by the socks-and-food-delivering stranger, Click applied for residency and was accepted. He drove the vehicle where he had been sleeping to Community First! Village, a neighborhood with neat rows of micro-homes and R.V.s situated on the outskirts of town, northeast of central Austin. Freshly paved roads and tree-covered walking paths passed by wooden porch swings, a community center, and gardens bursting with produce. There was a barbershop, an art studio, a chapel, and an outdoor movie theater. Click moved into a single-room cottage with canvas walls, essentially a glorified tent—”the cheapest thing going,” he says—and found work on-site. After years of wandering, he was home.

“I’m in a place where I can not only be secure, but I can be secure until I die,” Click recalls thinking. “I can’t describe when that feeling hit me—’wow, I don’t have to go anywhere.'”

Set on a 51-acre parcel of land eight miles from the Texas State Capitol, Community First! Village opened its doors in late 2015 and has become one of the nation’s most renowned private programs for alleviating homelessness. The property houses more than 180 formerly homeless people in a tightknit neighborhood. Each residence has a porch facing a public space that encourages interaction with neighbors, a crucial design feature for a vulnerable population recovering from years of isolation.

Monthly rents range from $225 for a micro-home to $430 for a family-sized R.V. The streets have names like “Peaceful Path,” “Goodness Way,” and “Grace & Mercy Trail.” Residents support themselves financially by working in maintenance, cleaning, landscaping, gardening, animal husbandry, auto mechanics, woodworking, blacksmithing, and hospitality for visitors who rent some of the tiny homes through Airbnb. To keep rents down, the least expensive units come without bathrooms or kitchens, so residents use shared bathhouses and open-air cooking pavilions that are dispersed less than a minute’s walk from each doorstep. Founder Alan Graham calls it “an R.V. park on steroids.”

Graham, a 63-year-old former real estate developer, co-founded Mobile Loaves & Fishes with friends from his church in 1998. The ministry began as the truck delivery program and branched out into housing years later. The secret to the village’s success, he says, is providing more than a roof and a bed. It’s a matter of absorbing homeless people into a community where they can find support, mentors, friendships, and reliable paid work.

A “housing first” philosophy of homeless care doesn’t go far enough to fix the problem, Graham says. “Housing will never solve homelessness. But community will.”

To encourage a sense of community, public spaces abound: The Alamo Drafthouse sponsored a 500-seat outdoor amphitheater where movies are projected from an Airstream trailer. Residents tend organic gardens and harvest eggs from chickens. Volunteer groups from Austin serve meals regularly at long, covered communal tables. Community members have access to a health clinic, counseling, drug and alcohol rehabilitation services, and hospice care. An on-site columbarium with ashes of deceased neighbors serves as a reminder that they are welcome to stay for life. Around 50 volunteers who have never been homeless, referred to as “missional” residents, live in the community full time and provide support to vulnerable residents struggling with the transition to permanent housing. They lead Bible studies, host cookouts, and pay regular visits to sick or isolated neighbors.

“We call our community a 250-bedroom, $18 million mansion,” Graham says. “We all live in the same house. Your bedroom happens to be your 200 square feet over there.”

Graham lives on site with his wife in a 399-square-foot tiny house. He wears the same uniform almost every day: a long-sleeved Columbia fisherman’s button-down with the Mobile Loaves & Fishes logo above one breast pocket and the word Goodness over the other. A silver crucifix hangs prominently over his chest. He wears glasses and a Papa Hemingway–style white beard across his face, which is almost always shielded—indoors and out—beneath a ball cap that also bears the group’s emblem.

A native of southeast Texas, Graham speaks with a kindly drawl. He’s devoutly Catholic but cusses when it’s necessary and exudes a calming air of approachability. Despite a former life as a developer in one of America’s hottest real estate markets, he has slept outside on Austin’s streets more than 250 times to gain a better understanding of the homeless plight.

From Charity Food Truck to Community Village

In the late 1990s, Graham and four parishioners from St. John Neumann Catholic Church bought a used pickup truck from which to pass out meals and supplies to homeless people. They faced a steep learning curve. All of the founders were white and wealthy; they knew little about the lives of the people they were trying to serve. “We were clueless,” Graham wrote in Welcome Homeless, a memoir about his life.

The group needed someone who knew what it was like to live on the streets without family, food, and hope. They found their man in Houston Flake, a homeless and illiterate man who took Graham into an urban forest in South Austin—a wooded green space where many of the city’s homeless choose to live, a community of cardboard box shelters and tents. “I was a traveler in a foreign land,” Graham wrote in his book. Flake introduced Graham to a woman named Marge, a former junkie who had spent time in prison and now lived in the woods. After Flake wrapped her in a bear hug and kissed her, Graham felt reluctant to even shake her hand. “Where had that hand been?” he recalled wondering.

If he really wanted to help homeless people, Graham realized, he would need to be willing to touch them.

It wasn’t long after the launch of the charity food truck that Austin’s homeless people began to recognize it on the streets. The ministry expanded into a full-time nonprofit, which today dispatches 12 pickup trucks that roam Austin’s streets 365 days a year. Since 1998, the trucks have served more than 5.5 million meals. As he built relationships with the homeless people who visited the truck, Graham also began raising money to shelter them in R.V.s throughout the city.

Over time, Graham developed an understanding of his homeless neighbors’ needs. Even well-intentioned public efforts to provide housing and shelter, he concluded, were systematically ill-equipped to deal with the deep personal challenges that lead to chronic homelessness.

“Government cannot mitigate this problem,” says Graham, who describes his political views as “conservative, but probably more libertarian.” Americans, he says, “are abdicating this responsibility to city hall, the state government, Washington, D.C. That is unfair. They don’t have the money, they don’t have the ability, they don’t have the understanding of why this is happening. Government housing is a transaction. The government builds or supports the creation of housing, but there’s no community involved in the life of those developments.”

Homelessness Rising

Today, Austin is a boomtown, with well-funded tech companies clamoring to plant their flags there. Drawn by Austin’s warm weather, a thriving music scene, and the state’s lack of personal income tax, well-paid college graduates and families have poured into the area. Festivals like Austin City Limits and South by Southwest draw thousands of visitors each year, marking the city as a cultural hub. For three years in a row, U.S. News & World Report has named Austin the best place in America to live.

The rapid growth and popularity, however, have drastically increased the cost of living. The Austin Board of Realtors reported that the city’s median home price reached $410,000 in July, compared to the national median price of $280,800. Despite recent efforts to ease building restrictions, Austin’s zoning rules limit high-density housing and restrict building heights in some areas of the city, which reduces the number of units available and, naturally, drives up the cost of living.

From 2018 to 2019, Austin’s homeless population rose from 2,147 to 2,255—a 5 percent increase—according to an annual count conducted by the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, an Austin-based nonprofit. Nationwide data collected by the Department of Housing and Urban Development show a 2 percent increase in homelessness over a similar time period.

Lawmakers in Austin have taken notice. In August, the city appointed a “homelessness czar” to oversee programs and initiatives to reduce the number of people sleeping on the streets. In June, after hours of debate at city hall, the City Council voted to overturn a law banning urban camping, making it legal for people to pitch tents in most public areas as long as they don’t block traffic or cause a hazard.

Locals who oppose the new rule fear it could leave Austin looking like San Francisco, whose highly visible homeless population has surged by 30 percent in the last two years. “We have to act decisively and deliberately and in a big way now,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler said after a July trip to West Coast cities facing the worst of the homelessness crisis. “Because if we don’t, this is a challenge that will spiral out of control.”

NIMBY Uproar

Years before, Graham saw this coming. While the mobile food truck served an important role in alleviating the symptoms of homelessness, it could go only so far to address its root causes. He had an idea: Instead of just providing food and shelter, what if he could build an entire neighborhood for people who were chronically homeless? More than a house for one person or family; a community for hundreds, together.

After decades working in Austin real estate—negotiating deals, securing permits, navigating the city’s zoning rules, and gaining approval from the right bureaucrats—Graham knew the system well and had relationships with Austin power brokers. Building an R.V. park would be nothing compared to the projects he had already seen through hundreds of times. How hard could it be?

In 2006, Graham drew up a detailed plan for a community that he intended to build on undeveloped land owned by the city. The first stages of planning showed promise. He presented the idea to Austin’s then-mayor, Will Wynn, who was sympathetic and supportive—his own grandfather had been a homeless alcoholic. Graham had another powerful champion in Mike Martinez, a City Council member, who helped him find 17 acres in East Austin for the first phase of building. In spring 2008, the Council voted unanimously to grant Graham’s nonprofit a long-term lease.

Graham’s excitement at the project’s rapid momentum lasted only until the first neighborhood meeting that summer, where he presented the idea to the public. It was a disaster. More than 50 neighborhood residents came to stop the plan.

The Austin Chronicle reported that Graham and his allies were “under siege.” Before the meeting began, a man angrily confronted Graham, and when Martinez tried to step in, the man called him a “filthy pig.” Graham says he watched another person spit on Martinez.

“It just flat turned into Armageddon,” Graham says. “It was awful. The police were called.”

A long line of speakers rolled out the typical NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) tropes, warning that Graham’s project would bring in drug addicts, rapists, and murderers—or, worse, lower property values. People attacked Graham personally, unveiling tax documents with his family’s home address.

“The comments were vicious,” Graham says. “It’s NIMBYism at its highest level. It’s an infection and an indictment on our culture.”

At the meeting, some asked why Graham wasn’t building the mobile-home park next to his house in Westlake, one of the city’s wealthiest enclaves. (At the time, Graham and his wife were using their spare bedrooms to shelter homeless people until the R.V. park could be built.) At least one person affiliated with Graham’s project acknowledged that this critique hit home.

“I don’t know if I would want a homeless community in my neighborhood, I really don’t,” Bruce Agness, a member of the Community First board who also lives in Westlake, says. “I get that, even though I co-founded this thing.”

At the end of the meeting, the neighborhood voted unanimously, 52–0, in opposition.

The intensity of the meeting spooked Martinez, whose seat on the City Council could have been jeopardized if he didn’t change course. He called a press conference the following day and announced that the project would be postponed.

Graham and his team were deflated by the response. The exhausting process convinced Graham that he could not work within the city government apparatus if he wanted to succeed. Austin had too many regulations, too many rules, too many restrictions, and too many NIMBYs. “I think government ought to get out of our way and let the people do what we can do,” Graham says. But in order for the government to get out of his way, Graham needed to get out of the government’s way. And he found a clause in Texas land law that would allow him to do just that.

Outside City Limits

Having exhausted his political capital and most options for viable land within Austin’s city limits, Graham determined that he could no longer wait on the city’s political process. Four years had passed since he had the idea for a mobile home park, and, having been run out of every neighborhood where he proposed a site, he had little to show for his work. He devised a plan to build in a place where city council members and zealous NIMBYs couldn’t stop him.

Unlike most urban areas, unincorporated Texas land isn’t bound by strict zoning rules. The region surrounding Austin is a frontier-like place when it comes to architectural experimentation, and if Graham could find a tract of land beyond city limits, he could do virtually whatever he wished.

“When that revelation hit me, it was ‘Katie, bar the door,'” Graham says. “We’re gonna get this done, and there’s nothing that NIMBYs can do to stop us.”

With a private blessing from Lee Leffingwell, the new mayor, Graham found and raised money to buy an available tract less than 10 miles from downtown. Austin transitions from urban to rural quickly, allowing access to a vast homeless population that’s concentrated downtown. When Graham and his team visited, they found “a crummy, crap-filled piece of land” full of weeds and three tons of trash and debris. Over several weeks, volunteer crews hauled away more than a thousand used tires and filled 20 dumpster trucks with garbage. They even discovered two stolen cars among the weeds.

“It was just what we needed,” Graham recalls. They broke ground and started building. The first residents moved into their tiny homes in 2015. Graham’s dream had become reality.

Not Lonely Anymore

A day in the village is not unlike any small neighborhood. But here, residents live much of their lives in the open. On any given afternoon, the air fills with noise of conversations from porch to porch, the occasional clang from the blacksmith workshop, or the grind of a power tool in the community garage. When you’re outside, it’s almost impossible to be alone—and that’s the point. Unlike in modern suburbs, where so much of life is hidden behind closed doors and privacy fences, problems in this neighborhood never remain hidden for long, which allows the community to respond quickly.

“Most people in the United States today live in these hermetically sealed single-family sarcophaguses that we call the American dream, in these isolated subdivisions,” Graham notes. “You don’t know your neighbors. You don’t know if they’re battling addictions. You don’t know if they’re wanting to put a shotgun in their mouth and pull the trigger with their big toe. In our community, we know everything.”

Life in the village, Graham says, is “absolutely peaceful, with a side salad of tension.”

No one claims that Community First! is a utopia. Disputes do break out. One of Graham’s own neighbors tried to sue him twice—once for $20 and the other time for $5—over small tenant issues that were later settled privately. (Graham and the man today remain neighbors and friends.)

“Every now and then there’s a fight,” Graham says. “People yelling and screaming at each other sometimes. Some of that is fueled by mental health issues going back to traumatic childhood backgrounds.” Community leaders work with offenders by practicing restorative justice, an approach to conflict resolution that involves reconciliation and repairing the harm caused, but they call the police when needed.

Since the first residents moved in, crimes have occurred, but mostly of the petty variety: a stolen debit card here, a missing bicycle there. There have been no reports of rape, murder, or serious violence, Graham says. Guns are not allowed. When one resident held up a neighbor with a knife, he was caught, charged, and convicted. He did not return.

In cases of attempted crime on the property, it’s almost impossible to get away with anything here anyway: Security cameras record the property’s open areas, and life is so public that few misdeeds go unnoticed.

Applicants are screened before being accepted for residency, with prerequisites that they have been homeless for at least a year in the Austin area and that they undergo a background check. A history of substance abuse does not disqualify someone, nor does a criminal record like Click’s. But people convicted of murder, kidnapping, or sex-related crimes are not admitted. Those who continue to struggle with addiction are provided with access to rehab options, counseling, support groups, and relationships with missional residents to help them along.

Faith was a driving force in the founding and remains a sustaining one within the community, although participation in services is not required for residents. Most of the missional residents come from Christian backgrounds, and there’s a chapel on site for worship and contemplative prayer. Church groups visit and volunteer time or serve meals.

“We’re driven by God,” says Agness, the board member. “A lot of people gloss over that.”

For some residents, the transition from a life on the streets to a warm bed is difficult. “It takes some people three or four or five months to get used to having a place to go to where they can close the door and not worry about somebody coming in and taking their belongings,” Agness says. “For some people, it takes two or three months before they’ll sleep on the bed. They sleep on the floor.”

Residents who have lived for years in isolation also can take time growing accustomed to being in close proximity to others. Click, for instance, holed himself up for months before beginning to engage with his neighbors. Others are known to go out of their way to avoid seeing other residents en route to meals or the bathhouses. 

“Some guys are such introverts that they get off the bus, walk along the property line, jump the fence, and go into their tiny house. They don’t want to see anybody,” says Nancy Miller, a missional resident who has lived in the village since 2015. “And that’s cool. They don’t have to be like us and want to hang out with everybody.”

With homelessness rates increasing, the village is growing. Construction crews broke ground in October 2018 to expand the enterprise, bringing the population to about 500 people, with 20 percent of the units for missional residents. Once everyone is moved in, which the organization expects will occur around three years from now, the ministry will house one-fourth of Austin’s chronically homeless population, defined as those without a home for more than a year.

About 15,000 people volunteer at Community First! every year. The organization hosts a quarterly symposium to share strategies for replicating the village’s success that draws representatives from local governments and nonprofits across the nation. Mobile Loaves & Fishes has helped spawn food truck ministries in other cities around the country, including New Orleans, Nashville, and San Antonio.

In 2019, Click’s life took another turn for the better. He met a woman, Tracy, who also lives in the Community First! Village. They had a May wedding in the neighborhood’s Unity Hall, and he traded his bachelor’s canvas home for a family-sized place up the hill, on Grace & Mercy Trail.

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When Is an Officer Impeached? III

OK, just one more post—probably.

The U.S. Constitution gives to the House of Representatives the “sole Power of Impeachment.” But what exactly is this power to impeach and how and when is it exercised? In particular, is the “power of impeachment” the power to go into the Senate, level an accusation, and demand a trial? Or, is the “power of impeachment” the power to pass a resolution declaring that someone has committed high crimes and misdemeanors?

For over a hundred years, the U.S. House presumed the correct answer was the first one and oriented its practice to that. It drafted resolutions authorizing a member to go to the Senate and impeach someone. Since the early twentieth century, the House has behaved as if the second answer is correct, passing resolutions declaring officers to have been impeached. It did not matter much how the House impeached someone because the Senate did not start an impeachment trial until the House exhibited articles of impeachment in the Senate chamber and nothing turns on when an officer is impeached.

The states are different because some state constitutions direct that an impeached officer is suspended pending trial. In that context, it matters when exactly an officer is impeached. Even so, states have not wrestled with this problem very much either. One exception was a Florida court during Reconstruction, which pointed to English and congressional practice as indicating that impeachment occurred when the House leveled an accusation in the Senate. As it noted, the early American constitutional treatise writer William Rawle had emphasized that impeachment is “a known definite term” inherited from England and meant “bring[ing] the charge before the other branch.” The early congressional practice reflected the proper understanding of the power to impeach as it was incorporated into the American constitutions.

But wait, there’s more. In 1923, the Oklahoma supreme court was asked to weigh in on when the acting governor assumed the duties of an impeached governor. The court concluded that the governor was impeached “when articles of impeachment are duly filed with the Senate and duly accepted and filed by the Senate.”

The Florida court had pointed to English and American practice as providing the proper definition that Florida institutions were bound to follow. The Oklahoma court, by contrast, pointed in part to the legislature’s own constitutional authority to define the term.

While the Constitution does not attempt to define the terms “impeachment,” nor the extent of its meaning, nor expressly authorize the Legislature to define its meaning, yet it nowhere prohibits the Legislature from defining the term and the extent of its meaning; hence, having given the Legislature exclusive jurisdiction in impeachment matters, and not having limited the Legislature in defining the term, it was a valid exercise of legislative authority for the Legislature to define what is meant by the term “impeachment” as used in the Constitution.

The legislature itself had said in a statute that impeachment “is the prosecution,” and the courts were bound by that interpretation. The court also offered a textualist rationale that to impeach means “to charge (a public officer), before a competent tribunal.” The legislature’s definition of impeachment was at least consistent with the weight of authority, according to the state court.

An interesting wrinkle here is that the Oklahoma court seems to suggest that, in the absence of a more specific definition in the constitutional text, the legislature itself had the authority to give concrete meaning to the term. The legislature had chosen to adopt the same understanding that seemed to be regnant in Congress and the states until the early twentieth century—impeachment occurred when the accusation was presented to the upper chamber. But the court seems to have left the door open to the legislature to adopt a different understanding of the meaning of “impeachment,” as Congress seemed to do starting with the impeachment of Judge Robert Archbald in 1912.

All of which raises the interesting question of whether “impeachment” has a fixed meaning as a matter of originalist constitutional interpretation or whether we are in the “construction zone.”

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