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Page Number: 37.0

32 

CITY OF GRANTS PASS v. JOHNSON 

Opinion of the Court 

the  law  Robinson  faced  was  an  anomaly,  punishing  mere 
status.  The dissent does not dispute that Robinson’s deci-
sion  to  address  that  law  under  the  rubric  of  the  Eighth 
Amendment is itself hard to square with the Amendment’s
text and this Court’s other precedents interpreting it.  And 
the dissent all but ignores Robinson’s own insistence that a 
different result would have obtained in that case if the law 
there had proscribed an act rather than status alone.

Tellingly, too, the dissent barely mentions Justice Mar-
shall’s opinion in Powell.  There, reasoning exactly as we do
today, Justice Marshall refused to extend Robinson to ac-
tions  undertaken,  “in  some  sense,  ‘involuntar[ily].’ ”    392 
U. S., at 533.  Rather than confront any of this, the dissent 
brusquely  calls  Powell  a  “strawman”  and  seeks  to  distin-
guish it on the inscrutable ground that Grants Pass penal-
izes “status[-defining]” (rather than “involuntary”) conduct. 
Post, at 23.  But whatever that might mean, it is no answer 
to the reasoning Justice Marshall offered, to its obvious rel-
evance  here,  or  to  the  fact  this  Court  has  since  endorsed 
Justice Marshall’s reasoning as correct in cases like Kahler 
and  Jones,  cases  that  go  undiscussed  in  the  dissent.    See 
n. 6, supra.  The only extraordinary result we might reach
in this case is one that would defy Powell, ignore the histor-
ical reach of the Eighth Amendment, and transform Robin-
son’s narrow holding addressing a peculiar law punishing 
status alone into a new rule that would bar the enforcement 
of  laws  that  are,  as  the  dissent  puts  it,  “ ‘pervasive’ ” 
throughout the country.  Post, at 15; Part I–A, supra. 

To be sure, the dissent seeks to portray the new rule it
advocates as a modest, “limited,” and “narrow” one address-
ing only those who wish to fulfill a “biological necessity” and 
“keep  warm  outside  with  a  blanket”  when  they  have  no 
other “adequate” place “to go.”  Post, at 1, 5, 10, 21, 24.  But 
that reply blinks the difficult questions that necessarily fol-
low  and  the  Ninth  Circuit  has  been  forced  to  confront: 
What does it mean to be “involuntarily” homeless with “no